A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [45]
The job of all Cooperative Extension agents was to help the family at the end of the road help themselves to a better life. That meant making the farm profitable, feeding the family both economically and well, and beautifying one’s self and one’s home.
I soon began to understand what the Cooperative Extension Service (originally the Agricultural Extension Service) was all about. Cooperation was key: between the land-grant colleges and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, between the county agents and the specialists at the land-grant colleges, between the county agents and farm families. And needless to add, between the farm and home agents—not only in their own counties but often in neighboring counties as well.
The extension movement began in 1862 when Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, creating a network of land-grant colleges. Their mission was to teach agriculture and mechanical arts which, by extension, would help farm families increase their income and quality of life.
Only with Woodrow Wilson’s signing of the Smith-Lever Act in 1914, however, did the Agricultural Extension Service officially become the educational arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Soon there were Extension agents in more than forty states, women as well as men. Farm boys and girls rushed to join the 4-H Club, pushing its membership to half a million by the summer of 1918. Today there are upwards of nine million 4-H’ers, along with such celebrated alums as Dolly Parton, Reba McIntyre, and Alan Shepard. Even Roy Rogers had belonged.
Nowhere, I think, has the Extension Service been more valuable than in the South. Devastated by the Civil War, its planter aristocracy had collapsed and its hardscrabble farmers, planting cotton and/or tobacco year after year, were ruining the land.
Then along came a beetle barely bigger than a grain of rice. An interloper from Mexico, the boll weevil began chomping its way across the South at the turn of the twentieth century, and by the 1920s, it had killed King Cotton.
Thanks to the Extension Service, down-and-out farmers began to revitalize their land via crop rotation. Farm agents also taught them the wisdom of diversification. Home agents showed the farmers’ wives and daughters better ways to prepare and preserve food—indeed, how to bring a little glamour into their lives and homes.
My few years with the Cooperative Extension Service taught me many valuable lessons and instilled a profound respect for the South’s “salt-of-the-earth.” I have never lost that respect.
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HAM, OKRA, AND TOMATO SOUP
MAKES 6 SERVINGS
Having grown up in Ohio, my father probably never tasted okra until he moved to Raleigh to teach at North Carolina State College, and it was “yecchhh!” at first bite. As a child, I remember his saying, “When I’m elected president, no farmer will be allowed to grow okra.” He was joking, of course. Still, the only times I ever encountered okra were in school cafeterias, at the homes of friends, and at the old S & W in downtown Raleigh where Daddy took us on special occasions. To be honest, I wasn’t crazy about okra either. But my two thoroughly southern nieces, Linda and Kim, have taught me to appreciate it.
1 small ham hock (about 1 pound)
6 cups (1½ quarts) cold water
2 large whole bay leaves, preferably fresh
2 tablespoons bacon drippings
1 large yellow onion, coarsely chopped
1 cup diced ham (from the hock, plus additional ham if needed to round out the measure)
1 tablespoon sugar
1 pound baby okra, stemmed and moderately finely chopped
One 14.5-ounce can crushed tomatoes, with all liquid
1½ teaspoons salt, or to taste
¼ teaspoon black pepper, or to taste
1. Place the ham hock, water, and bay leaves in a large nonreactive saucepan and bring to a boil over high heat. Adjust the heat so the water barely trembles, cover, and cook until-the meat practically falls from the bone, about 1 hour.
2. Remove