• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

A Georgia peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter is elected president of the United States and during his term, Americans embrace grits and collards and all foods southern.

New Orleans–based Popeyes establishes its first franchise and within ten years has 500 fast-food restaurants specializing in spicy Cajun chicken, red beans and rice, po’boys, and other Louisiana classics.

* * *

* * *

ROYAL CROWN COLA

An RC and a MoonPie are to southern eating as Flatt and Scruggs are to southern music.

The beverage half of the duo, whose initials stand for Royal Crown, was created in 1905 by Columbus, Georgia, pharmacist Claud A. Hatcher. A new flavor in his early line of soft drinks, he called it Chero-Cola.

By 1912, ballooning sales forced Hatcher to move his soft drink operation out of his basement into larger quarters. His newly named Chero-Cola Company continued to thrive and soon Hatcher had developed the popular Nehi line of fruit-flavored sodas. Following Hatcher’s death in 1933, the company reorganized and reformulated Chero-Cola. After six months of fine-tuning, it reemerged as Royal Crown.

Although many people considered RC a strictly southern beverage, by 1940 it was sold in forty-seven of the then forty-eight states. By 1954, the company was selling its drinks in cans: a first. Four years later, Royal Crown introduced America’s first diet soft drink, Diet Rite. But back then it was considered a specialty dietary product and was not widely marketed.

With the arrival of the more weight-conscious 1960s, however, RC promoted Diet Rite aggressively coast to coast. The current company owners, Cadbury Schweppes, marked RC’s hundredth birthday in 2005 with contests and prizes.

But you had to provide your own MoonPies.

* * *

KEY LIME PIE

MAKES 6 TO 8 SERVINGS

I’ve eaten Key lime pie all over Florida—in the Keys, whence it comes; in Miami; and up and down the east and west coasts. Some pies have crumb crusts (a post–World War Two innovation, I’m told), others the more classic pastry shells. Some are swirled about with meringue, others with whipped cream. Some are chiffon pies with the meringue folded into the filling, some are even frozen. My own preference is for what my friend Jeanne Voltz calls a “legal” variation: whipped cream spread over a pale ivory filling (not a drop of green food coloring) cradled in a traditional pastry crust. Still, I welcome the innovations dreamed up by another friend, Kim Sunée, food editor of Cottage Living magazine. Instead of slathering meringue or whipped cream over her filling, she skim-coats it with a cup of crème fraîche tempered with two tablespoons of confectioners’ sugar. I find that inspired. As for the crust, Kim favors a graham cracker one but sometimes substitutes finely chopped dry-roasted macadamias for maybe a fifth of the crumbs.

Thought to have originated in Key West in the mid 1850s shortly after Gale Borden introduced sweetened condensed milk, Key lime pie owes its flavor, even its texture, to the tiny, tart yellow Key limes that once proliferated throughout the Keys. They are believed to have been introduced to Indian Key in the mid 1830s by Dr. Henry Perrine, then U.S. consul in Yucatán, who, it’s said, had Mexican limes, as they’re also known, shipped and planted there. Their exceptional acidity “cooks” (thickens) the egg yolks in the filling, something the more familiar green Persian limes are too mellow to do. But as I would soon learn, genuine Key lime juice sometimes fails, too. I squeezed a dozen Key limes for the half cup of juice this recipe requires, stirred it in carefully, then continued stirring for several minutes, but my filling never really set up. So I baked the pie briefly and that solved the problem. I’m aware that that’s not traditional—sacrilegious, some say. But you cannot cut a filling the consistency of mustard. Note: If you are unable to find fresh Key limes, use bottled Key lime juice. Most specialty food shops sell it and you can also order it online (see Sources, backmatter).