A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [162]
Alabama agronomist George Washington Carver dies. During his years of research at Tuskegee Institute, he developed more than 300 peanut products, among them peanut cheese, peanut chili sauce, peanut mayonnaise, and several different peanut butters.
Douglas Odom and his wife, Louisa, create a secret spice blend for sausage and launch the Tennessee Pride company. Still family-owned but now manufactured in Arkansas as well as the Volunteer State, Tennessee, Pride remains one of the South’s favorite sausages.
1944
Melvin Alexander buys a 93-year-old building in Baltimore’s Fell’s Point, and before long turns the old tavern into a crab house with the help of his in-laws, the Obryckis.
1945
California’s Rosefield Packing Company opens a Skippy Peanut Butter plant in Portsmouth, Virginia.
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KENTUCKY CORN LIGHT BREAD
MAKES ABOUT 8 SERVINGS
“This is the best corn bread I ever put in my mouth,” Lois Watkins of Trigg County, Kentucky, said of this old family recipe some years ago when I flew out to interview her for a Family Circle series I was writing on America’s best country cooks. First steamed and then baked, it is incredibly light—more angel food than corn bread. I use a 2-quart steamed pudding mold to cook it, but an 8-inch tube pan works nearly as well. The trick is to grease the mold or pan well, then dust it with cornmeal. Note: Use only stone-ground cornmeal for this recipe (see Sources, backmatter); the granular supermarket variety won’t work.
2½ cups unsifted stone-ground cornmeal (yellow or white)
2/3 cup sifted all-purpose flour
½ cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups buttermilk
1 large egg, lightly beaten
¼ cup lard or butter, melted
1. Grease a 2-quart steamed pudding mold or 8-inch tube pan well, then dust with cornmeal and tap out the excess. Set the pudding mold or tube pan aside.
2. Combine the cornmeal, flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt in a large mixing bowl and make a well in the center.
3. Whisk the buttermilk, egg, and melted lard in a small bowl or 1-quart measure until creamy; pour into the well in the dry ingredients and beat hard for about 1 minute.
4. Pour the batter into the prepared mold and snap on the lid (or cover the tube pan snugly with foil). Set the mold on a rack over boiling water in a deep kettle (the bottom of the mold should not touch the water), cover the kettle, and steam the bread 35 minutes. Toward the end of steaming, preheat the oven to 375° F.
5. Lift the pudding mold from the kettle and remove the lid. Slide the uncovered mold onto the middle oven shelf and bake the bread for about 35 minutes or until it is lightly browned and begins to pull from the sides of the mold.
6. Remove the mold from the oven and cool in the upright mold on a wire rack for 2 to 3 minutes; this helps keep the bread from cracking as you unmold it.
7. Using a thin-blade spatula, carefully loosen the bread around the edge and central tube, then invert on a heated round plate.
8. Cut into wedges and serve hot with plenty of butter.
MARIA HARRISON’S BATTER BREAD (SPOON BREAD)
MAKES 6 SERVINGS
Maria (pronounced muh-RYE-ah, the southern way) is the mother of my good friend and colleague Maria Harrison Reuge, formerly a Gourmet editor and now the owner, with her French chef husband, Guy, of Mirabelle, a splendid little restaurant on the North Shore of Long Island. I’ve eaten “high on the hog” there, as they’d say down south. When I was heading for Tidewater Virginia to research a food and travel article for Bon Appétit magazine, Maria opened many James River plantation doors for me. She grew up on Coggins Point Farm overlooking the James with her brother Jimmy (now married to Lisa Ruffin of Evelynton Plantation), and this “old southern receipt” is one she remembers her mother making. Batter bread, also called “spoon bread,” is in fact a corn bread soufflé popular