A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [171]
Warner Stamey begins teaching young Wayne Monk the secrets of “Lexington” North Carolina barbecue. Monk eventually buys Lexington Barbecue (originally Lexington Barbecue No. 1) and goes on to become North Carolina’s most admired ’cue meister.
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CALAS (RICE FRITTERS)
MAKES ABOUT 2 DOZEN
To quote American Cooking: Creole and Acadian (a Time-Life Foods of the World cookbook by Peter S. Feibleman), “Before the turn of the century, the cala woman vending ‘Bella cala! Tout chaud!’ (‘Nice cala! Piping hot!’) was a familiar sight along the streets of the French Quarter of New Orleans.” The cala women, the book continues, have disappeared. But not the spicy rice fritters they sold; they’re now a Sunday brunch specialty at several New Orleans restaurants. In a Raleigh News & Observer article, food writer Fred Thompson tells of the calas he enjoyed pre–Hurricane Katrina at the Big Easy’s Old Coffee Pot Restaurant. When asked about calas, his waitress replied, “Oh, sweetie, you have now hit on sumpin’ mighty good, real eating. Rice like you never had ’fore now. Better than beignets. This is the original black people’s food.” Sunday, it turns out, was the cooks’ day off in New Orleans, so to earn a little extra money, they’d make calas, take to the streets, and sell them.
2/3 cup sifted cake flour (preferably a silky southern flour like White Lily or Martha White)
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
¾ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg or ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs lightly beaten with 1½ teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups cooked long-grain rice, at room temperature (measure lightly packed)
Vegetable oil for deep-fat frying (2 to 2½ quarts)
Confectioners’ (10X) sugar (for dusting)
1. Whisk the flour, granulated sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt together in a large bowl. Add the egg mixture and whisk just until combined; fold in the rice. Do not overbeat or your calas will be tough. Cover loosely and let stand at room temperature for 20 minutes.
2. Meanwhile, pour the oil into a deep-fat fryer or large kettle at least 4 inches deep, insert a deep-fat thermometer, and set over high heat until the oil reaches 350° F.
3. Working with about a third of the cala mixture at a time, drop from a rounded tablespoon (or better yet a No. 24 spring-loaded ice cream scoop) into the hot oil, spacing the calas well apart. Fry for 3 to 4 minutes, turning as needed until evenly browned and keeping the oil as near to 350° F. as possible. Lift to paper toweling to drain.
4. Dust the calas with confectioners’ sugar and serve warm for Sunday breakfast or brunch with drizzlings of cane syrup or maple syrup.
Desserts and Confections
Southerners have always been sweet on desserts. Is it because, prerefrigeration, some desserts were so loaded with sugar they wouldn’t spoil at room temperature? Or because sugarcane was (and still is) grown in the Deep South? I suspect a bit of both.
Then, too, there’s the sweet-tooth English heritage of the original Virginia and Carolina colonists. Early southern cookbooks are freighted with rich English creams, plum puddings, fruitcakes, and cheese cakes—not cheesecakes in the New York sense, but cheese-less “curds” as in the achingly sweet lemon curd (“cheese”) that goes into lemon chess pie. As a culinary term the word chess, some suggest, may be a corruption of “cheese.”
As the colonists came to appreciate New World foods and observed how simply local tribes prepared them, they began to improvise. Take sweet potatoes. Although they had been known in England as far back as the fifteenth century, few sweet potato recipes appear in English cookbooks. Nor do I find any mention of them in Food in England (1954), Dorothy Hartley’s comprehensive survey of English cookery that begins with the Bronze Age. In early southern recipe books, however, sweet potato