A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [3]
All through grade school and high school I reveled in the southern cooking I was served at the homes of friends; at parties given by Daddy’s colleagues at North Carolina State College; at the S & W Cafeteria, where we went every Christmas Eve; and, yes, in the public school cafeterias. There was no prefabbed food back then, no vending machines coughing up cookies and colas.
Early on I began collecting southern recipes, and my mother was happy for me to try them as long as I “left the kitchen spic and span.” Occasionally I would cook a complete southern dinner, and there were no complaints. My mother, however, remained a strictly midwestern cook except for Country Captain, her dinner party staple; watermelon rind pickles; and two or three other southern recipes friends and neighbors had given her.
Sent north for college, I hurried south after graduation and went to work for the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service, first as an assistant home agent in Iredell County about halfway between Raleigh and the Great Smokies, then nine months later as woman’s editor in the Raleigh office. That job kept me on the road covering 4-H and home demonstration club functions from one end of the state to the other—from “Manteo to Murphy” (ocean to mountains).
Talk about food! There were mountains of it always—at club meetings and picnics, at pig pickin’s and fish fries, at country fairs and cook-offs, many of which I was drafted to judge. In Iredell County, August was picnic month with a home demonstration club feast every night and sometimes two. It was here that I first tasted spectacular batter-fried chicken, pulled pork (barbecue), and biscuits so light they nearly levitated. Here, too, that I became acquainted with Jerusalem artichoke pickles, Japanese fruitcake, and wild persimmon pudding, all of which seemed to be accompanied by a colorful story.
These country women were born cooks and their club picnics were potluck affairs with everyone bringing strut-their-stuff recipes. It didn’t take me long to discover whose fried chicken was the best, whose corn pudding, whose coconut cake.
A few years later I became a New York magazine editor (first at The Ladies’ Home Journal, then at Venture: The Traveler’s World, and finally at Family Circle), and I was often sent south to interview a good home cook or hot new chef and told to bring their best recipes back to be tested and published. My editors, most of them New Yorkers, considered me southern, and I must say that at the time my accent was as thick as sourwood honey.
Later, as a freelance food and travel writer contributing regularly to Bon Appétit, Family Circle, Food & Wine, and Gourmet, I spent even more time down south, researching and writing major features in nearly every state: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia. I was in hog heaven.
I interviewed cooks homespun and haute, I ate in barbecue joints and crab shacks as well as at hallowed regional restaurants. I learned to milk cows and goats, to surf-cast for rockfish and drum, to gather wild persimmons and ramps. I was threatened once by a swarm of honey bees and another time—even scarier—by hundreds of stampeding turkeys.
I toured a herring cannery, catfish and crawfish farms, I slogged through cane fields and rice paddies, and I picked-my-own at peach and pecan orchards. I even went crabbing with a Chesapeake Bay waterman and floated about the Atchafalaya Swamp in a Cajun pirogue (canoe).
There were headier tours, too: at McCormick’s spicy headquarters in Baltimore; the Maker’s Mark Distillery in Loretto, Kentucky; the 200-year-old Winkler Bakery in Old Salem, North Carolina; and the eye-tearing Tabasco