A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [150]
Two 8½-ounce cans syrup-packed apricot halves, liquid drained and reserved
One 8-ounce can syrup-packed crushed pineapple, liquid drained and reserved
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
One 3-ounce package orange-flavored gelatin
1 teaspoon plain gelatin
¾ cup boiling water
¾ cup heavy cream, softly whipped
2 cups thinly sliced iceberg or romaine lettuce
1. Lightly coat a decorative, nonreactive 6-cup ring mold with nonstick cooking spray and set aside.
2. Mix the reserved apricot and pineapple liquids with the lemon juice and reserve. Pulse the apricots briskly in a food processor until finely chopped and reserve also.
3. Dissolve the two gelatins in the boiling water in a medium-size metal bowl, stirring often to make sure that there are no undissolved lumps in the bottom. Mix in the reserved fruit liquids. Set uncovered in the refrigerator for 45 to 50 minutes, stirring now and then, or until the consistency of unbeaten egg white.
4. Using a hand electric mixer or a whisk, beat the partially congealed gelatin until frothy, then fold in the reserved apricots, crushed pineapple, and whipped cream.
5. Spoon all into the ring mold, smoothing the top. Set uncovered in the refrigerator for about 2 hours, then cover loosely and let stand overnight or until firm.
6. When ready to serve, quickly dip the ring mold into hot water, loosen the salad around the edge and central tube with a small knife or thin-blade spatula, and invert on a large round platter. Wreathe the lettuce around the edge.
7. Cut into wedges and serve.
The fields surrounding the towns and groves were plentifully stored with Corn, Citruels, Pumpkins, Squashes, Beans, Peas, Potatoes, Peaches, Figs, Oranges, etc.
—WILLIAM BARTRAM, TRAVELS OF WILLIAM BARTRAM, ON SEMINOLE CROPS IN FLORIDA, 1773
Breads
In the Colonial South, corn breads gradually gained favor as indeed they did elsewhere about early America. Usually they were thick cornmeal-and-water pastes flattened into rounds (pones) much like those the local tribes made.
According to early eighteenth-century Virginia historian Robert Beverley, pone descends from the Indian word oppone, and in some fine homes it was chosen “over wheat bread.” Often pones were baked on the blades of hoes propped up in front of the fire (hoe cakes) or simply buried in embers (ash cakes).
Yet to settlers accustomed to wheat breads, “any form of bread made with corn instead of wheat was a sad paste of despair,” writes Betty Fussell in The Story of Corn (1992). “Sad” because corn breads, nearly impossible for the inexperienced English colonists to leaven with yeast, remained flat and heavy.
Over time, however, good southern cooks—many of them plantation cooks—learned to add a little wheat flour to their cornmeal batters and to lighten cornmeal pastes with beaten eggs, a technique used to this day for batter bread (spoon bread). The combination of sour milk or buttermilk and soda was another effective leavener, for biscuits as well as for corn breads.
Both North and South can boast of their own regional corn breads, but there are differences: As a rule, Northerners prefer yellow cornmeal, Southerners white. Northerners also tend to sweeten their corn breads while Southerners prefer a salty tang. None of the three corn breads in Mary Randolph’s Virginia House-wife (1824) contains a grain of sugar.
And in the nearly three dozen corn bread recipes in Sarah Rutledge’s Carolina Housewife (1847), I find only three that call for any sweetener: Chicora Corn Bread (1 tablespoon of brown sugar to a quart of milk and “as much cornmeal as will make a thick batter”); Indian Cakes (2 tablespoons molasses to a pint of milk and “meal enough to make a thick batter”), and Corn Muffins (1 tablespoon sugar to “three pints of cornmeal…and a pint of blood-warm water”).
What also distinguishes The Carolina Housewife are its thirty recipes for rice bread,