A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [234]
2. Meanwhile, place the sugar, vinegar, and water in a large, heavy nonreactive kettle. Tie the cloves, allspice, cinnamon, and lemon and orange zests in cheesecloth and drop into the kettle. Set over moderate heat and bring to a boil.
3. Ease the figs into the kettle, adjust the heat so that the pickling syrup barely bubbles, then simmer uncovered for about 25 minutes or until the figs are translucent. Discard the spice bag.
4. Meanwhile, wash and rinse 5 one-pint preserving jars and their closures and submerge in a large kettle of boiling water.
5. Lift the preserving jars from the boiling water one by one. Using a slotted spoon, pack the figs snugly in the jar, leaving ¼ inch head space at the top. Ladle enough boiling pickling syrup into the jar to cover the figs, again leaving ¼ inch head space. Run a thin-blade spatula around the inside of the jar to release air bubbles; wipe the jar rim with a clean, damp cloth, then screw on the closure. Repeat until all the jars are filled.
6. Process the jars for 10 minutes in a boiling water bath (212° F.). Lift from the water bath; complete the seals, if necessary, by tightening the lids, then cool to room temperature.
7. Date and label each jar, then store on a cool, dark shelf several weeks before opening.
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TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine
1999
Mildred Council writes Mama Dip’s Kitchen because Craig Claiborne liked her country cooking so much he urged her to write a cookbook. Part autobiography (with stories about growing up poor and black in Chatham County, North Carolina, during the Depression and World War Two), it has now sold more than 100,000 copies.
The James Beard Foundation names Jamie Shannon, of Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, Best Chef in the Southeast.
By acquiring the Spice Hunter of San Luis Obispo, California, and its 300-product inventory, the 112-year-old C. F. Sauer spice company of Richmond, Virginia, enters the natural foods and boutique spice markets.
Now merged with A & W restaurants and with more than 1,200 eateries at home and abroad, Long John Silver’s, begun 30 years earlier in Lexington, Kentucky, is America’s largest chain of fast-food fish houses.
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ELIZA LUCAS PINCKNEY (1722–1793) AND HARRIOTT PINCKNEY HORRY (1748–1830) LIKE MOTHER, LIKE DAUGHTER
In 1989, nearly 200 years after her death, Eliza Lucas Pinckney was enshrined in the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame.
Yet few people have any idea who she was or why she was the first woman so honored. Born of English parents in Antigua in 1722, Eliza relocated with her family to the South Carolina Lowcountry as a teenager, a move her father hoped would improve his wife’s fragile health. With her father’s return to Antigua seven years later, young Eliza stayed on to manage his Wappoo Creek Plantation near Charleston and supervise the running of two others. She taught two slave children to read, learned a bit of law, and, more important, experimented with seeds her father sent her from Antigua, among them indigo. Eliza had always loved “the vegetable world extremely.”
Within five years, she not only had reaped a successful crop of indigo but also had developed a technique for making the valuable blue dye the English needed for their military uniforms. With demands for Carolina rice faltering, plantation owners switched to indigo and it made them rich.
At age twenty-two, Eliza married Charles Pinckney, a wealthy widower some years her senior, and she bore four children, three of whom lived: two sons (both statesmen of national stature) and daughter Harriott.
In 1768, Harriott married a prosperous French Huguenot, Daniel Horry, of Hampton Plantation on the lower Santee; within two years she had begun The Receipt Book of Harriott Pinckney Horry, 1770. Published 214 years later as A Colonial Plantation Cookbook by the University of South Carolina Press, it contains twenty-six entries from Eliza’s handwritten receipt book (now at the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston).
When her daughter