A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [139]
3. Place the crumbs, ¼ cup of the cheese, the onion, parsley, thyme, salt, pepper, and nutmeg in a large bowl and toss well. Mix in the egg and chopped squash.
4. Stuff the crumb mixture into the squash shells, mounding it up in the middle. Dot each stuffed squash with butter, dividing the total amount evenly, then sprinkle with the remaining ¼ cup cheese.
5. Arrange the squash, not touching, in the baking pan, and bake uncovered on the middle oven rack for 25 to 30 minutes or until tipped with brown.
6. Serve at once as an accompaniment to roast pork, turkey, or chicken. Good, too, with baked ham.
BRAISED CYMLINGS
MAKES 4 TO 6 SERVINGS
I first tasted these braised cymlings (Southerners call them “fried”) at the home of a grade school chum and adored them at first bite. Known elsewhere as pattypan squash, cymlings are staging a comeback after years in eclipse. Boutique farmers, moreover, are growing them in a variety of colors—white, yellow, green-and-yellow-striped, as well as the more familiar celadon. I still like them prepared this way and find them the ideal accompaniment for roast pork, turkey, or chicken.
2 ounces salt pork or slab bacon, cut into small dice
8 small young cymlings measuring 3 to 3½ inches across (about 2 ¼ pounds), peeled and cut into sixths
1 small yellow onion, minced
Salt and black pepper, to taste
1. Fry the salt pork slowly in a large, heavy skillet over moderately low heat for 5 to 7 minutes or until most of the fat cooks out and only crisp brown bits remain. Spoon off most of the drippings but leave the bacon in the skillet.
2. Add the cymlings and onion, cover, and cook, turning now and then in the drippings, for 8 to 10 minutes or until tender.
3. Season with salt and pepper and serve.
SCALLOPED TOMATOES
MAKES 4 TO 6 SERVINGS
Back in the 1970s when I began writing a food series for Family Circle magazine called “America’s Great Grass Roots Cooks,” the first person I profiled was a North Carolina farm woman in Rockingham County. From my growing-up years in the Tar Heel State, I knew that I’d find there just the person to kick off the series. And so I did: Mrs. Oscar McCollum, who lived just outside the county seat of Reidsville. Of this dish she said, “This is a real old recipe. One I grew up on. I put up my own tomatoes, so I use them. But you could use store-bought.”
3 cups home-canned or store-bought tomatoes with their liquid
4 tablespoons (½ stick) lightly salted butter
3 cups moderately coarse stale white bread crumbs (not dry crumbs)
3 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
¼ teaspoon ground allspice
1. Preheat the oven to 400° F. Butter a 9 × 9 × 2-inch baking dish and set aside.
2. Heat the tomatoes and butter in a large nonreactive saucepan over moderate heat just until the butter melts. Mix in the crumbs, sugar, salt, and pepper.
3. Turn into the prepared baking dish and sprinkle lightly with the allspice.
4. Bake uncovered on the middle oven shelf for 40 to 45 minutes or until lightly browned. Let stand at room temperature about 5 minutes before serving.
Soft as butter in August.
—OLD NORTH CAROLINA SAYING
His wife, Regina, lived out her life here, much beloved by the Kitchen Gang, of which she was a baking, frying, slicing, dicing bonafide member.
—ANNE RICE, BLACKWOOD FARM
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TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine
1930
Planters of Suffolk, Virginia, introduces peanut cooking oil.
Time magazine profiles Tom Huston of Columbus, Georgia, as “The Farmer Boy Who Became Peanut King.” He had founded Tom’s Foods four years earlier.
The chestnut blight has reduced southern chestnut forests to skeletons, destroying an important source of food.
Warner