A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [55]
Why, then, have so many of these fallen from favor for the home cook? Times change, tastes change. The Civil War killed the planter aristocracy and now the self-sufficient family farm is “going with the wind,” thanks to our increasingly ravenous agro-business. Supermarkets proliferate, driving the mom-and-pop grocery and family butcher out of business; stricter hunting and fishing laws, not to mention better protection of endangered species, make wild game and fish less readily available. Finally, the big food companies have wooed and won home cooks with a staggering array of convenience foods. I find this particularly dismaying down south because Southerners have always taken pride in their distinctly regional cuisine. Old family recipes were cherished and preserved from generation to generation.
So what do southern supermarkets sell today? Sealed-in-plastic hamburger, steaks, and roasts precut half a continent away; packaged poultry parts; canned or frozen seafood. Most southern meat departments, furthermore, are devoted to pork: chops, ribs, roasts, country ham slices as well as big pink packing-house hams, side meat, salt pork, bacon, and fresh-daily local sausages—hot or sagey links, patties, or one-pound blocks. Anything else is a “special order” and good luck with that. Fortunately, farmer’s markets, food co-ops, and specialty groceries are beginning to fill the void in many parts of the South.
The scent of sausage frying spins me back to my childhood. Not to my mother’s kitchen but to, of all places, the local car pool. I was a little girl during World War Two and to save on gas, neighbors took turns driving four or five of us kids to school, one of whom always smelled of freshly fried sausage. We got a good whiff the instant she slipped into the car.
Sausage for breakfast sounded wonderful compared to the oatmeal, orange juice, and rich Jersey milk I downed every morning (along with a tablespoon of mint-flavored cod liver oil).
My midwestern mother never fried sausage or chicken or pork chops or any of the other things Southerners automatically dropped into hot fat. She was a good meat-and-potatoes cook but the meats she chose confounded my southern friends: leg of lamb, breast of veal, rabbit, beef heart and tongue, calf’s liver. There were husky goulashes, pot roasts, even Wiener schnitzel, which I adored because it tasted like fried chicken.
Although Mother occasionally baked a ham, I don’t remember her ever cooking fresh pork. To be honest, I don’t know whether it was rationed during World War Two or not (I was too young to pay much attention). I do remember, however, that roast beef and steaks were strictly rationed and reserved for special occasions. Also that beef heart and tongue, and rabbit required few of the precious “red points” in my mother’s ration book. Perhaps none at all. And with chickens in the backyard, we never ran out of meat or eggs.
For Mother, chicken was something to stuff and roast like turkey, something to stew, fricassee, or bubble into a massive pot of Country Captain (a southern recipe obtained from a friend). Still, chicken never hit the skillet in Mother’s kitchen, much as I begged her to fry it.
For that reason, I loved going home from school with chums; their mothers might be frying chicken for supper and I might be asked to stay.
As for fish, Mother made a mean oyster stew (which I couldn’t eat—I’m allergic to oysters), a fairly classic salmon loaf, and tuna salad. But boiled crabs were my favorite. Using pieces of string tied to safety pins threaded with bacon, my brother and I would catch crabs right in front of our summer cottage on Chesapeake Bay. Mother would drop them into a huge cauldron of sea water bubbling on the old wood stove—just like the local salt who had taught her the Virginia way to cook live-and-kicking blue crabs.
Most of what Mother prepared, however, came out of her Illinois background, her college days at Wellesley, or her early married years in Vienna, where my father had been teaching. Exotic stuff in our devoutly