A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [86]
Before The Virginia Housewife, American women used English cookery books filled with fussy recipes. Mary Randolph was the first to recognize the emerging American cuisine and to publish such simple Virginia classics as broiled shad, turnip greens boiled with bacon, batter bread, and sweet potato pudding.
She believed that the quality of the cooking was more important than the quantity of dishes sent out of the kitchen. “Profusion is not elegance,” she wrote.
The first of Thomas and Ann Cary Randolph’s thirteen children, Mary Randolph was born in 1762 at Ampthill, the Chesterfield County plantation of her maternal grandparents. Though hers was a life of privilege, she learned early on that being mistress of a large plantation meant managing household finances, supervising the servants, and knowing how to preserve food safely (it’s said that Mary Randolph invented the icebox). It also meant mastering the intricacies of food preparation as well as the art of elegant entertaining. No small job.
At the age of eighteen, Mary Randolph married David Meade Randolph, her first cousin once removed, becoming mistress of Presque Isle, a 750-acre plantation in Chesterfield County, Virginia. Presque Isle was an unhealthy place to raise a family, it turned out, because much of it was swampy.
Relocating to Richmond, the Randolphs built a grand red brick house. “Moldavia,” as they called it, soon became the social center of the city’s Federalist power elite, thanks in part to Mary’s gifts as cook and hostess.
In 1802, President Jefferson, at odds with the Federalists, fired Mary’s husband (his own cousin) as U.S. Marshal (a post bestowed by George Washington). Financial reversals followed, and the Randolphs were forced to sell Moldavia and downsize. Undeterred, Mary opened a boardinghouse and soon made her table the talk of the town.
Only after the Randolphs moved to Washington to spend their declining years with their son William Beverley did Mary begin her benchmark cookbook. She declares her mission in the preface: “The difficulties I encountered when I first entered on the duties of a house-keeping life, from the want of books sufficiently clear and concise to impart knowledge to a Tyro, compelled me to study the subject, and by actual experiment to reduce everything in the culinary line, to proper weights and measures.”
Unfortunately, Mary Randolph died four years after her book was published and never lived to see its astounding success.
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MRS. ANDERSON’S THIRTY-TWO-POUND HENS
During World War Two, we kept chickens in the backyard and it was my job to feed them, water them, and gather eggs.
When the hens “went broody” and stopped laying, Mother began to sell them as stewing hens. An old farm woman, who lived down the road, asked me one day about the hens (I couldn’t have been more than eight).
“How much does them hens of your mama’s weigh?” I hadn’t a clue.
They were big birds, every bit as big as my Scottie. Skippy, I knew, weighed thirty-two pounds, so I told the woman, “About thirty-two pounds.”
She called my mother straightaway: “Miz Anderson, I surely would like to buy one of them thirty-two-pound hens!”
My mother roared. “Gracious sakes, Jean! Don’t you know that chickens are mostly feathers?” What my mother’s hens did weigh was ten pounds, a mighty hefty bird in anyone’s coop.
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So dull he couldn’t cut butter with a knife.
—OLD SOUTHERN SAYING
CHICKEN AND DUMPLINGS
MAKES 6 SERVINGS
My Yankee mother’s dumplings were always soft and fluffy—the dumplings she dropped into chicken stew, the dumplings she cooked with garden peas and cream. The reason, of course, was that she made them out of biscuit dough. The first time I ordered chicken and dumplings down south, I was surprised to see that the dumplings were noodle-flat