A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [164]
5. As the hush puppies brown, lift to paper toweling with a slotted spoon. Also skim any small bits from the oil, and continue frying the hush puppies until all are done.
6. Serve hot with fried fish or shellfish, fried chicken, or pork barbecue.
Lucia insisted that they have a regular hour for breakfast just like they did for other meals…a regular breakfast made for other regular habits.
—FLANNERY O’CONNOR, THE CROP
* * *
SARAH RUTLEDGE (1782–1855)
She wasn’t the first South Carolina lady to write a cookbook. Eliza Lucas Pinckney and her daughter Harriott Pinckney Horry beat her to it with handwritten collections of family receipts and home remedies (both published posthumously in the twentieth century).
But Sarah, in 1847, was the first to publish a major cookbook—“for charitable purposes,” Anna Wells Rutledge writes in her introduction to the 1979 facsimile of The Carolina Housewife (University of South Carolina Press). Reluctant to claim authorship, Sarah identified herself only as “A Lady of Charleston.” Altogether proper back then, when, according to local etiquette, a lady’s name appeared in print only three times: at birth, marriage, and death.
That tradition persisted well into the twentieth century. When I was a junior editor at The Ladies’ Home Journal in the early 1960s, we wanted to feature Charleston’s exclusive St. Cecilia Ball. Not a chance.
Like Pinckney and Horry, Sarah Rutledge belonged to the planter aristocracy; her father, Edward Rutledge, signed the Declaration of Independence; so, too, her mother’s brother Arthur Middleton. She would have known and socialized with Harriott Pinckney Horry, whose brother Thomas Pinckney took young Sarah to England to be educated along with his own children.
There are more than 550 recipes in The Carolina Housewife, twenty-one of them from The Receipt Book of Harriott Pinckney Horry, 1770, according to historian Richard J. Hooker, who edited the facsimile edition of that book (University of South Carolina Press, 1984). “At least three of those,” Hooker points out in his introduction to the Horry book, “were ones that Harriott had taken” from her own mother. He is quick to add, however, that some of Horry’s receipts “were so changed in wording [by Rutledge] as to suggest that they might have come indirectly…”
It was common practice for relatives and friends to share favorite recipes just as they do today. Those that Sarah Rutledge gives us are decidedly Lowcountry. There are, for example, some twenty recipes for rice bread in The Carolina Housewife, even more for corn and hominy breads. Soups abound, in particular those featuring such local staples as rice, okra, benne seeds, ground-nuts (peanuts), turtle, terrapin, oysters, shrimp, and crab. There are pilaus galore, too, including that Lowcountry rice and black-eyed pea classic called Hoppin’ John.
To quote directly from Sarah Rutledge’s preface: “The one [cookbook] now offered is (as it professes to be) a selection from the family receipt books of friends and acquaintances, who have kindly placed their manuscripts at the disposal of the editor.”
* * *
AUNT BERTIE’S CRISPY CORNMEAL PANCAKES
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
My niece Kim has been bragging about these light-as-air “corn breads” for years and urged me to include them in this book. They come from her mother’s side of the family (my brother was Kim’s dad). I never met Aunt Bertie (who died at 79) but like her many sisters, she was a good southern cook. I recently drove down to Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, where Kim shares a barn-red bungalow with her older sister, Linda, to watch her make Aunt Bertie’s cornmeal pancakes; I’d never tasted them. Like Aunt Bertie, Kim’s a “by guess