A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [6]
Note: The American Egg Board recently worked out a recipe for a fully cooked meringue made with unpasteurized eggs. I haven’t the space to reprint it here, but you will find the recipe posted on their website://www.aeb.org/Recipes/EggClassics/SOFTPIEMERINGUE.htm.
About Pie Crusts
If you still make your own pastry, good for you. Many people are too busy to do so today and I occasionally plead guilty myself. Some frozen pie crusts are excellent; find a brand that you like and stick with it.
Note: If you use a frozen pie shell, choose a deep-dish one and recrimp the crust to make a high, fluted edge. This will minimize spillovers, which so often happen with pies. Recrimping is easy: Simply move around the edge of the crust making a zigzag pattern by pinching the dough between the thumb of one hand and the index finger and thumb of the other. Takes less than a minute. Also, before you fill the pie shell, set it—still in its flimsy aluminum tin—inside a standard 9-inch pie pan; this is for added support.
To avoid spillovers, I slide the pie onto a heavy-duty rimmed baking sheet, preheated along with the oven to ensure that the bottom crust will be as crisp as possible.
Tip: Also now available at many supermarkets: unroll-and-use pastry circles; look for them near the refrigerated biscuits. I find these especially good for pies larger or smaller than 9 inches—the diameter of most frozen pie shells. These pastry circles are also the ones to use when you’re making a two-crust pie.
Note: If you are using a frozen or other prepared pie crust and a recipe calls for a fully baked pie shell, bake according to package directions.
I grew up eating well—cheese grits,
homemade biscuits smothered in butter,
home-cured ham, red-eye gravy—and that
was just breakfast.
—OPRAH WINFREY
A glass of wine and a bit of mutton are always ready, and such as will be content to partake of them are always welcome.
—George Washington
Appetizers and Snacks
I grew up in a southern college town where teas and open houses were the preferred way to entertain, and, being a “faculty brat,” I was subjected to plenty of them. Whenever my mother was the hostess, my job was to keep the platters brimming with cheese daisies, tea sandwiches, and such.
My mother was big in clubs—the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the State College Woman’s Club, the Book Exchange, the Sewing Circle—and the meetings, it seemed to me, were mostly recipe swaps. The majority of members were southern, so the recipes Mother added to her card files over the years were also southern. I have that card file today, and to riffle through it is to remember not only the recipes but also those good southern cooks who gave them to my mother. Several of them are printed here for the first time.
The only time I remember anything alcoholic being served (except at the Carolina Country Club) was at Christmastime, when bourbon was slipped into eggnog. Most of the South was dry or semidry back then; only in New Orleans, Charleston, and parts of Florida could you buy a mixed drink.
In the North Carolina counties considered “wet,” there were state-run ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control) stores where you could buy the hard stuff. Restaurants, however, were forbidden to serve cocktails until late in the twentieth century. Incredible as it may seem, the receptionist at East Tennessee’s posh Inn at Blackberry Farm told me to “bring my own” if I wanted a cocktail before dinner—in 1997! The county was still dry just ten years ago.
Throughout my childhood, the faithful preached the “evils of drink” except for “whiskey-palians” who—horrors!—drank wine at communion. Not so the more evangelistic denominations who preferred Welch’s grape