A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [244]
Battered: Food (chicken, for example) dipped into batter before it’s fried. Some old-time southern cooks also consider dredging to be “battering.”
Batty cakes: A corruption of “batter cakes.” These are old-fashioned pancakes or griddle cakes made with stone-ground cornmeal. Sometimes they are served for lunch or supper with butter; more often they show up at the breakfast table with butter plus sweet sorghum, honey, or molasses.
Beaten biscuits: “I can still hear the pounding of that dough out-of-doors atop an old tree trunk,” Craig Claiborne writes of his Mississippi childhood in Craig Claiborne’s Southern Cooking (1987). “That dough” was beaten biscuit dough and according to Claiborne, “it was beaten at least 200 times” until very stiff and white. Only then was it rolled thin, cut into small circles, and baked until the color of parchment. Unfortunately, beaten biscuits are seldom if ever made at home anymore; they’re too labor intensive. In the old days, southern families had a faithful cook with a strong arm. Or failing that, a beaten biscuit machine: a marble slab with a double roller through which the dough was cranked again and again until it blistered. I remember beaten biscuits being a supermarket staple when I was growing up in Raleigh. They came twelve to a carton, and, I believe, they were manufactured someplace in Maryland. Accustomed to flaky buttermilk biscuits, I never liked beaten biscuits—too tough. Besides, they were always served cold. To my southern friends, however, they were the daintiest, most delicious biscuits in all creation, especially when split and filled with slivers of Smithfield ham as thin as onion skin.
Beignet: Pronounced ben-YAY, this is the New Orleans equivalent of a doughnut. Holeless and square instead of round, these pillows of deep-fried dough served with lavish dustings of confectioners’ sugar have been a staple at the city’s French Market for nearly 200 years. Some food historians believe that Ursuline nuns, arriving from France early in the eighteenth century, brought the recipe for beignets with them. Others credit the Cajuns for introducing beignets to Louisiana. The traditional accompaniment? Steaming mugs of café au lait, the dark Louisiana coffee with chicory mellowed with hot milk.
Biloxi bacon: Mullet, so nicknamed along the Gulf Coast because this “trash fish” supports the masses in summer while, as one local wit put it, the Yankees (or “snowbirds” seeking summer) sustain them in winter.
Boudin: A popular Louisiana sausage that may contain cooked rice as well as pork shoulder, pork liver, onions, and assorted spices. Made the traditional way, the mixture is stuffed into natural hog casings. In Cajun Country, boudins are made at boucheries or hog-butcherings. And sometimes grilled and served there, too.
Bouilli: Beef brisket. Creole cooks simmer it into soup, hash it for breakfast, and sometimes serve it as the main course of a family meal.
Burr artichoke: The true artichoke; what we know as the French or globe artichoke.
Busters: Crabs just beginning to molt. Cajuns, who consider busters a supreme delicacy, lift off the hard cara-paces, leaving barely developed “soft shells” underneath.
Butter beans: Baby limas.
Café brûlot: Lightly sweetened dark New Orleans coffee aromatic of orange zest and cinnamon. Laced with brandy and flamed in a brûlot bowl, the coffee is served in demitasses.
Cajun cooking: The spicy cuisine developed by the Acadians (French deported from Nova Scotia) who settled around the Atchafalaya Swamp and bayous west of New Orleans nearly 250 years ago. Crawfish and shrimp predominate in Cajun recipes as do peppery sausages, smoky hams and bacons, and tomatoes right off the vine. But onion, garlic, and green bell pepper, a good Cajun cook once told me, are “The Holy Trinity of Cajun cooking.”
Calamondins: The tiny, tart fruits of citrus trees that have become popular house plants. Sometimes