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TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine

1863

Said to be the year that a French chef serving Kentucky general Henry Hunt Morgan creates a meaty vegetable stew for his Confederate troops. He calls it “burgoo.” Some food historians disagree and call the story completely apocryphal. (See Kentucky Burgoo, Chapter 3.)

Richmond, Virginia, publisher West & Johnston brings out the Confederate Receipt Book: A Compilation of Over One Hundred Receipts, Adapted to the Times. Among the helpful tips it offers southern women during the Civil War and subsequent Reconstruction are ways to preserve meat without salt and a way to brew acorns into coffee.

Outraged by the soaring price of flour, the women of Richmond, Virginia, stage a “bread riot.” Covering the protest, a local paper calls them “prostitutes, professional thieves, Irish, Yankee hags.”

Virginia is partitioned, its 50 western counties becoming West Virginia. Unlike Virginia, it is pro-Union.

To keep from starving during the prolonged and savage Battle of Vicksburg, the townspeople devour a field of black-eyed peas originally planted as cattle fodder.

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BARBECUED CHICKEN

MAKES 4 SERVINGS

Strictly speaking, this isn’t barbecue. It’s chicken baked under bastings of spicy tomato sauce. Throughout the South, however, it’s called barbecued chicken or oven-barbecued chicken and it’s as delicious as it is easy. As recipes go, this one’s modern—mid to late twentieth century. Note: If the chicken breasts are unusually large, as they so often are these days, halve them crosswise.

One 3-to 3½-pound broiler-fryer, cut up for frying (see Note on Chapter 3)

2 tablespoons butter or vegetable oil

1 small yellow onion, finely chopped

¾ cup tomato ketchup

¼ cup cider vinegar

1 tablespoon firmly packed light brown sugar

¼ to ½ teaspoon hot red pepper sauce (depending on how “hot” you like things)

1. Preheat the oven to 375° F.

2. Arrange the pieces of chicken skin side up on a rack in a large, shallow roasting pan so that they do not touch one another. Slide onto the middle oven shelf and bake uncovered for 30 minutes.

3. Meanwhile, melt the butter in a small, heavy saucepan over moderate heat, add the onion, and sauté for about 5 minutes or until golden. Mix in all remaining ingredients, bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer uncovered for 5 minutes or until the flavors mellow.

4. Remove the chicken from the oven, turn the pieces skin side down, and baste with about half of the hot tomato sauce. Return to the oven and bake for 15 minutes. Turn the pieces skin side up, baste with the remaining sauce, and bake 15 minutes more.

5. Raise the oven temperature to 425° F. and bake the chicken for 10 minutes or until tipped with brown.

6. Serve at once with coleslaw and, if you like, with potato salad as well.

PECAN-CRUSTED OVEN-FRIED CHICKEN

MAKES 6 SERVINGS

Judging from my collection of southern community cookbooks, this recipe seems to have surfaced in the early 1960s because that’s when variations of pecan-crusted chicken began popping up in their pages. I suspect (but can’t prove) that this recipe evolved from one that I helped create back when I was an assistant food editor at The Ladies’ Home Journal in New York. We called it Chicken Imperial and it consisted of a mix of soft white bread crumbs, grated Parmesan, minced parsley, crushed garlic, salt, and pepper that was patted onto butter-dipped chicken. Note: The fastest way to grind the pecans is in a food processor, but to keep them from reducing to paste, alternately churn and pulse until the nuts are about the texture of kosher salt. Forty years ago when pecan-crusted chicken first became popular, cooks would have used commercially grated Parmesan cheese. I find it both sawdusty and salty, so I use only freshly grated Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano now that it’s widely available. I urge you to do the same. Tip: Easier on the purse and better than prepackaged Parmesan: Wisconsin or Argentinian Parmesan. Buy it by the chunk