A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [176]
2. Sift the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves together onto a large piece of wax paper and set aside.
3. Beat the eggs and sugar in a large electric mixer bowl at moderately high speed until thick and pale yellow. Reduce the mixer speed to low and beat in the persimmon pulp and milk. Add the sifted dry ingredients and mix by hand until well blended. Finally, stir in the melted butter, mixing only enough to combine.
4. Pour the batter into the prepared casserole, spreading to the edge, then set in a baking pan and slide onto the middle oven shelf. Pour hot water into the pan to come halfway up the sides of the casserole.
5. Bake the pudding in the water bath for about 1 hour or until it pulls from the sides of the casserole.
6. Serve warm with a dollop of topping scooped over each portion.
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SUGAR
The story of the Deep South’s sugar industry is bittersweet. Sweet for the planters who became “white gold” millionaires, bitter for slaves forced to work in unconscionable conditions.
The root of it all? A honey-sweet, bamboolike grass native to New Guinea that moved from Old World to New via a lengthy, roundabout journey. According to Alan Davidson in The Oxford Companion to Food, the Greek historian Herodotus knew sugarcane in the fifth century BC, and “in 327 BC Alexander the Great sent some back to Europe from India.” At about the same time (even earlier, some say), Persians were boiling and crystallizing cane sap into a coarse brown sugar much like the jaggery (palm sugar) of India.
Arab traders took sugarcane to Spain early in the eighth century and Moors taught the Spaniards how to crystallize it into sugar some three centuries later. Columbus, food historians agree, carried cuttings from the Canary Islands to Hispaniola on his second voyage there in 1493, though sugarcane didn’t reach Florida for another forty-two years. It was planted in the vicinity of Cape Canaveral (Canaveral is Spanish for “cane field”) but did not thrive.
By the time Florida’s first commercial crop was harvested in 1767 at the New Smyrna Colony, Jesuits had already introduced sugarcane to South Louisiana. That state’s first bumper crop, grown by Etienne de Bore of New Orleans in 1795, yielded 100,000 pounds of sugar.
In Lousiana, as in Florida, sugarcane proved to be a lucrative but unpredictable crop, subject to the whims of nature and susceptible to a variety of diseases. Then, too, wars decimated the fields of cane more than once down the years. Compare, for example, the 264,000 tons of sugar Louisiana produced in 1861 with the post–Civil War total of 5,971 tons. Moreover, the number of sugar plantations had shrunk from 1,200 in 1861 to a mere 175 in 1864. A catastrophic loss.
In the beginning, planters forced local Indian tribes to work the cane fields, and when they fled, slaves were imported from Africa. Indeed the sugar industry has been called “the engine that drove the slave trade.” Sugarcane is one of the most labor-intensive plants on earth. Cuttings must be laid flat in trenches at specific intervals and when ripe, the cane must be cut level to the ground with machetes and crushed under spinning millstones. The runoff is collected and boiled in giant cauldrons. There were accidents every step of the way, many of them fatal.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, sugar refining was being simplified, most of all by New Orleans native Norbert Rillieux, the son of a French planter and a slave mother. After studying engineering in Paris, Rillieux invented a revolutionary new evaporating pan that would shortcut the tedious process of crystallization. It was patented in 1846.
Still, sugar remained a boom-or-bust business—and does to this day. Florida now produces about a fourth of this country’s sugar and Louisiana isn’t far behind at 20 percent. Recent hurricanes have taken their toll in both states and threaten to do so in the future. According to sugar producers, however, there’s an even greater threat: CAFTA (the Central American Free Trade Act), which they insist will “rob” them