A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [247]
Creole cuisine: With ties to France, Spain, and the Caribbean as well as to European aristocracy, Creoles developed an elegant cuisine, a fusion of these three cultures plus additional influences from Africans and Native Americans and even from the German and Italian chefs imported to cook for wealthy Creole families. (The Germans, it’s been said, introduced the art of sausage making, although the French were also well versed in charcuterie.) Compared to the gutsy country cooking of the Cajuns, who settled in the bayous some hundred miles west of New Orleans, Creole cooking is more refined, more sophisticated. It’s the cuisine that made New Orleans famous.
Creole mustard: Sharp, spicy mustard made from brown mustard seeds that are steeped in distilled white vinegar, then coarsely ground and heightened with a little horseradish. New Orleans trenchermen like to slather it on their po’ boys, but it’s used in countless recipes, too.
Crick (creek) shrimp: The sweet, tiny shrimp netted in Lowcountry inlets, creeks, and rivers. Dusted with floury cornmeal and deep-fried until crisply golden, they are heaven.
Crowder pea: One of the four major groups of southernpea, so named because the peas (actually beans) are crowded in the pod.
Crybabies: An edible pacifier. These spicy molasses cookies were once used to quiet crying infants and toddlers. In some areas, they still are.
Cush: Equal parts crumbled stale corn bread and biscuits fried in meat drippings with chopped onion. It’s a frugal main dish, but in happier times it may be served in addition to meat.
Cushaw: A large (10-to 12-pound) green-and-white–striped crookneck squash with fibrous golden flesh. Like more familiar varieties of winter squash, cushaws are baked into pies or, sometimes, sugared, spiced, baked, and served as a vegetable. Particularly popular among Creoles and Cajuns, cushaws are believed to have been brought to the Deep South from the West Indies during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Custard marrow: What some Southerners call mirliton.
Diamondback: Not a rattlesnake but an amphibious southern turtle used to make soup.
Dirty rice: Rice cooked with bits of liver or chicken liver. A Louisiana favorite.
Dressing: What Southerners call stuffing, as in turkey stuffing. Of course, “dressing” also means salad dressing.
Dry land cress: See Creecy greens.
Étouffée: A Cajun stew (usually crawfish or shrimp) served over rice with lots of roux-thickened gravy.
Fatback (also known as side meat and sowbelly): Fat trimmed from the back of a hog, usually salt-cured. Fatback containing a streak of lean (“streaky”) is often cooked along with a pot of green beans, collards, or turnip greens.
Field apricots: See Maypops.
Field pea: A synonym for cowpea; its preferred name is southernpea.
Filé powder (also called gumbo filé and sometimes more simply, filé). An aromatic green-gray powder made of dried sassafras leaves—a Choctaw innovation used both to flavor and thicken stews, which Creole and Cajun cooks quickly applied to their gumbos. A Cajun cook I interviewed some years ago was adamant on one point: Filé powder is never used to thicken gumbos containing okra because okra does the job. When I told her that I’d seen many recipes containing both okra and filé powder, she sniffed, “Well, they aren’t authentic!”
Geechees: Lowcountry African Americans, many of whom were isolated for years on the dot-dash string of Sea Islands below Charleston. Their contribution to Lowcountry cooking cannot be overestimated. Also see Gullah.
Goobers: Peanuts.
Green corn: Corn picked before it’s fully ripe. Southerners prize its slightly grassy flavor and like to grate the immature kernels and stir them into corn cakes, fritters, and puddings.
Green peanuts: Freshly dug raw peanuts. Farmer’s markets sell them both in the shell and out. (See Sources, backmatter.)
Grillades: Thin beef or veal steaks cut from the round, quickly browned, then simmered in a spicy tomato sauce and served with grits. A New Orleans breakfast favorite.