A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [2]
It’s also great reading, juicy with a lifetime’s worth of personal reminiscences and Southern lore, all of it smart as a fresh coat of paint and much of it very funny. Jean tells me the book is a labor of love. We’re all the richer for her willingness to share that love.
Introduction
I fell in love with southern cooking at the age of five. And a piece of brown sugar pie was all it took.
I’d just begun first grade at Fred A. Olds Elementary School in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was born, and had chosen that pie over all the other desserts in the school cafeteria. The look of it fascinated me: a barely set filling that was crackly brown on top and the color of comb honey underneath.
That day I ate dessert first, pushing aside my pork chops and collards. I had never tasted anything so luxurious. It was like toffee softened on a sunny windowsill and it salved my budding sweet tooth. From that day on, I ate brown sugar pie as often as possible, sometimes taking two pieces instead of one.
Back then, there were good African American cooks in public school kitchens preparing everything fresh every day: southern fried chicken, smothered pork chops, greens or beans simmered with side meat, banana pudding, and of course that ambrosial brown sugar pie. All of it was new to me—the start of a culinary adventure that continues to this day.
But let me back up a bit. Why, you may wonder, did it take me five years to discover southern cooking if I’d been born in Raleigh? There’s an easy answer.
Both of my parents were Yankees, Midwesterners to be exact; my mother came from Illinois, my father, Ohio. Not even my older brother could claim to be a Tar Heel; he was born in Vienna while my father was teaching there. I am the first person on either side of my family to be born south of the Mason-Dixon line—a distinction I am proud of.
To be honest, I think the fact that my parents weren’t southern is the very reason why I’ve been absorbed with southern food (indeed with all things southern) since the age of five. I also believe that it gives me a different approach to it: I’ve always been more student than insider.
From the very beginning, every bite of something southern—of Sally Lunn, for example, of hush puppies or hoppin’ John—was a new experience for me, something exciting, something special. I loved the funny recipe names and adored hearing the stories behind them (my mother’s pot roast and gooseberry pie were never dished up with anecdotes).
Mother was a good cook—but a midwestern cook. So we ate the Illinois dishes her mother had taught her, along with a few New England recipes she’d picked up while at Wellesley and a few more from her young married years in Austria. I remember roast lamb in particular, a meat none of my southern friends would touch; baked ham (a pink packing-house ham, never Smithfield or country ham); parsnips or rutabaga boiled and mashed like potatoes (she had to order these specially back then); Boston brown bread (never corn bread and rarely biscuits); roasted or fricasseed chicken (never southern fried). I also remember eating beef heart and tongue, even rabbit fricasseed like chicken.
The things my school chums’ mothers cooked always