A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [221]
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TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine
1990
New Orleans chef Susan Spicer launches her Bayona restaurant near the French Quarter and introduces dishes that are part Creole, part Cajun, but mostly global.
The Vidalia onion is named Georgia’s official “state vegetable.”
The $15 million World of Coca-Cola museum opens in Atlanta. Today, more than 3,000 tourists trek through each day to learn the story of Coke, or, as Mark Pendergrast, author of For God, Country and Coca-Cola, puts it, “the myth of Coca-Cola.”
1991
The James Beard Foundation names Emeril Lagasse, chef-proprietor of Emeril’s in New Orleans, “Best Chef in the Southeast.”
1992
Franklin Garland finds the first black Périgord truffle on the acre he’d planted 12 years earlier with spore-inoculated filbert and oak seedlings on his farm near Hillsborough, North Carolina. It weighed more than two ounces.
The James Beard Foundation names Patrick O’Connell of the Inn at Little Washington in Washington, Virginia, Best Chef in the Mid-Atlantic and Mark Militello, chef-proprietor of Mark’s Place in North Miami Beach, Best Chef in the Southeast.
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BENNE SEEDS
What others call sesame seeds, Southerners call benne, especially those living in the Georgia–South Carolina Lowcountry.
An African staple and symbol of good luck, benne (from the Bantu for “sesame”) arrived in the South in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries along with slaves from West Africa, who were offloaded and sold in the ports of Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans.
Many plantation owners encouraged slaves to grow their own food, generally allotting an acre to each family. Thus began the introduction of African foods to the southern table. “Above all,” Karen Hess writes in Chapter One of The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection, (1992), “[slaves] grew greens, but presumably they also raised such African favorites as okra, sorghum, black-eye peas, eggplant, and benne seed…”
Africa, culinary historian Alan Davidson believes, is where benne seeds originated. “Wild species, with one exception, are African,” he writes in The Oxford Companion to Food, “but there is a ‘second source of diversity’ in India, where sesame was introduced in very early times.”
The Greek classicists were writing of sesame oils as early as the fifth century BC and an even older Egyptian clay tablet lists it in the inventory of King Nebuchadnezzar’s palace.
The Lowcountry sultriness proved perfect for growing benne, an annual plant sometimes as tall as six feet. It flowers, then bears pods of a hundred seeds or more. When ripe, these split at the gentlest touch, showering seeds in every direction—a fact not lost on Scheherazade, who, in spinning tales for One Thousand and One Nights, gave Ali Baba the magical command “Open, Sesame” to enter the den of the Forty Thieves.
In the Lowcountry today, benne are more popular than ever. In addition to the ever-popular benne wafers and cookies, fudges and brittles, innovative young chefs are frying benne-crusted shrimp and chicken, heightening the flavor of greens with toasted sesame oil, and updating such African originals as benne soups, breads, and pilaus. Delicious!
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BENNE WAFERS
MAKES ABOUT 6 DOZEN
I’ve always been partial to benne wafers, an easy drop cookie with a delicate caramel flavor. Note: To toast sesame seeds, spread in an ungreased pie pan and set on the middle shelf of a 275° F. oven for 8 to 10 minutes, stirring once or twice. Watch closely; benne burn easily.
½ cup (1 stick) butter, at room temperature
½ cup granulated sugar
½ cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1½ teaspoons vanilla extract
1 large egg
1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup lightly toasted sesame seeds (see Note at left)
1. Preheat the oven to 350° F. Spritz two or three baking sheets with nonstick cooking spray and set aside.
2. Cream the butter, two sugars, and vanilla in a large