August 5, 2009

“Thank God, who made the garden grow,
Who took upon himself to know
That we loved vegetables so.
I served his plan with rake and hoe,
And mother, boiling, baking, slow
To her favorite tune of Old Black Joe,
Predestined many an age ago.
Pearly corn still on the cob,
My teeth are aching for that job.
Tomatoes, one would fill a dish,
Potatoes, mealy as one could wish.
Cornfield beans and cucumbers,
And yellow yams for sweeteners.
Pickles between for stepping-stones,
And plenty of cornmeal bread in pones.”
— John Crowe Ransom, Poems About God (1919)

June 6, 2009

Before the revolution in cooking technology that occurred in the latter years of the nineteenth century, the Southern kitchen wasn’t a particularly pleasant place to be.
From the founding of Jamestown until the middle of the nineteenth centuries, cooking for plantation and backcountry cabin was done on the open hearth. Site-made brick was the material of choice for fireplaces, hearths and chimneys, but it was extremely labor intensive to make and expensive, so its use was mostly restricted to the wealthy. In most Southern homes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fireplaces and chimneys were fashioned from locally procured stone. If stone was scarce, the chimney above the roofline of the cabin was often made of wattle and daub, which was essentially sticks held together with clay. While the stone hearths could withstand the high cooking temperatures, a layer of thick plaster usually protected the brick hearths.

The goal of all homeowners was to have the kitchen separate from the main house to cut down on noise, odors, smoke and the ever-present danger of the main house burning down if a kitchen fire got out of hand. As soon as they could afford the time to do so, settlers built another room onto their cabins, separated by ten feet or more from the original structure. The old house became the kitchen, and the newer structure with a smaller and less dangerous fireplace became the living quarters.

Plantations, which had large numbers of mouths to feed, almost always had separate cookhouses, usually wood frame buildings with brick or stone floors. The interior walls were usually wood plank rather than plaster, and whitewashed regularly to keep them clean from the accumulation of soot from the large hearths.

The hearths in these cookhouses were huge, sometimes ten feet wide and four feet deep. Andirons set six feet apart held the large supply of oak and hickory logs needed to stoke the fire. The fires were kept going all day and the coals were banked at night to make starting the next day’s fire easier. The heat from these fireplaces was horrendous, especially in the stifling summers of the Carolinas and Georgia. An oven for baking was usually built into the side of the fireplace on larger farms and plantations, while in the backcountry, ashcakes and hoecakes were baked in the coals.

These brick ovens were the height of luxury for those on the receiving end of the goodies they produced, but made the cook’s life even more difficult. Patricia Brady Schmit, in her introduction to Nelly Custis Lewis’s Housekeeping Book (1982) wrote: “The oven involved a great deal of labor to use and generated terrific heat in the kitchen, even beyond that of the usual roasting fire in the hearth. Therefore the oven was heated only once a week, and all major baking was done at that time. A strong fire was built on the floor of the oven very early in the morning and stoked so that it burned fiercely: the oven door was left ajar to provide oxygen for the fire.”

After the fire had burned down to coals, they were raked out and discarded; the oven, having retained the heat from the roaring fire, was now ready to use. Pans of bread dough, cakes, cookies and other items to be baked were placed in the oven in descending order by the amount of time they needed to bake; items that needed a short amount of time at high heat went in first. As the oven gradually lost its heat, items such as cakes that required longer baking times at lower temperatures took their place in the oven until all the baking for the week was done.

The fireplaces of plantations were often state of the art, as Joe Gray Taylor pointed out in Eating, Drinking and Visiting in the South (1982): “On a built-in ledge lay the back bar, sometimes as much as six feet from the fireplace floor. Hooks of various lengths hung from the back bar, designed so that pots and kettles could hang at various distances from the fire. Trivets of various heights sat on the floor so that food could be placed at exactly the desired distance from the coals.”

Plantation kitchens often boasted several sizes of iron or brass pots, iron spits turned by wall mounted clockwork mechanisms for roasting meats, and long handled skillets (called spiders) equipped with legs and lids for placing coals under and over them.

Martha McCulloch-Williams remembered the equipment found in the plantation kitchen of her youth in Dishes & Beverages of the Old South (1913): “The pots themselves, of cast iron, with close-fitting tops, ran from two to ten gallons in capacity, had rounded bottoms with three pertly outstanding legs, and ears either side for the iron pot-hooks, which varied in size even as did the pots themselves. Additionally there were…spiders, skillets, a couple of tea-kettles, a stew kettle, a broiler with a long spider-legged trivet to rest on, a hoe-baker, a biscuit-baker, and waffle-irons with legs like tongs. Each piece of hollow ware had its lid, with eye on top for lifting off with the hooks. Live coals, spread on hearth and lids, did the cooking.” There were also long metal dripping pans that were placed underneath meat as it was roasted to catch drippings for gravy; root vegetables such as potatoes, carrots and parsnips were often put in these pans to simmer in the meat juices.
Other tools of the plantation cook’s trade included long-handled shovels for banking coals and shoveling them under Dutch ovens and pots, pokers and bellows for tending the fire and long-handled tongs, spoons and skillets. Iron hooks of various lengths called trammels were used to suspend pots from the back bar at different heights above the fire to regulate cooking temperature.

May 1, 2009

In honor of the Kentucky Derby, which posts at 6 pm tomorrow, a few words about mint (and other) juleps.

There is no alcoholic drink more readily identified with the moonlight-and-magnolias image of the Old South than the mint julep.

The julep has its roots in the English practice of infusing alcohol with fruit, fruit juices, cucumbers or other cooling ingredients in the summertime.

Although there are many recipes for this drink, in its purest  (and earliest) form, it consists of sugar, bourbon, mint leaves and ice. This passage from William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (1941) is the only recipe you’ll ever need to make a good mint julep:

“Certainly her juleps had nothing in common with those hybrid concoctions one buys in bars the world over under that name. It would have been sacrilege to add lemon, or a slice of orange or of pineapple, or one of those wretched maraschino cherries.
First, you needed excellent bourbon whiskey; rye or scotch would not do at all. Then you put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampened it with water.

Next, very quickly––and here was the trick in the procedure––you crushed your ice, actually powdered it, preferably in a towel with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remained dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside of the glass, you crammed the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand.

Last you filled the glass, which apparently had no room left for anything else, with bourbon, the older the better, and grated a bit of nutmeg on the top. The glass immediately frosted and you settled back in your chair for half an hour of sedate cumulative bliss. Although you stirred the sugar at the bottom, it never all melted, therefore at the end of the half hour there was left a delicious mess of ice and mint and whiskey which a small boy was allowed to consume with calm rapture.”

‘Nuff said.

Corinthian Julep

“Mrs. Harris says, ‘Give her a Corinthian julep if she wants one and by the time I get in the house she won’t know whether I’m wearing a sunbonnet or a crown.’”

Thus wrote ten-year-old Virginia Cary Hudson in O Ye Jigs & Juleps (1900) about this potent Southern libation. The drink draws its name from Paul’s letter to the provincial churches in First Corinthians, Chapter13.
The drink is made in the same manner as a regular mint julep, but with three jiggers of bourbon, one each for Faith, Hope, and Charity.

Yield: 1 serving

• 4 sprigs fresh mint leaves
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 3 jiggers (about 1/2 cup) bourbon whiskey

In a silver julep cup or a 12-ounce Collins glass, crush mint leaves and sugar with a spoon. Fill with cracked ice and whiskey. Stir, without touching the outside of the cup, until the outside frosts. Garnish with mint sprig and serve with a short straw.

February 27, 2009

HOME DINNER FOR WINTER.

Oysters on Half Shell.

Turtle Soup.

Boiled Fish and Creamed Potatoes.
Fillet of Beef and Mushrooms. French Peas. Macaroni.

Lettuce Salad. Crackers and Cheese.

Cardinal Richelieu Pudding. Fruit. Coffee.

Serve Claret and Appolinaris.

–Mrs. Charles H. Gibson’s Maryland and Virginia Cook Book. Baltimore: John Murphy & Company, 1894.

February 14, 2009

As noted in the earlier post, the diet of slaves varied widely depending on where they lived, the type of plantation they lived on, and even the years they lived. Here are some excerpts from books written by former slaves detailing their diets.

“The food of the slave is this: Every Saturday night they receive two pounds of bacon, and one peck and a half of corn meal, to last the men through the week. The women have one half pound of meat, and one peck of meal, and the children one half peck each. When this is gone, they can have no more till the end of the week. This is very little food for the slaves. They have to beg when they can; when they cannot, they must suffer. They are not allowed to go off the plantation; if they do, and are caught, they are whipped very severely, and what they have begged is taken from them.”
—Peter Randolph, Sketches Of Slave Life: Or,Illustrations
Of The ‘Peculiar Institution.’ Boston: published for the author, 1855.

“Slaves every Monday morning have a certain quantity of Indian corn handed out to them; this they grind with a handmill, and boil or use the meal as they like. The adult slaves have one salt herring allowed for breakfast, during the winter time. The breakfast hour is usually from ten to eleven o’clock. The dinner consists generally of black-eyed peas soup, as it is called. About a quart of peas is boiled in a large pan, and a small piece of meat, just to flavour the soup, is put into the pan. The next day it would be bean soup, and another day it would be Indian meal broth. The dinner hour is about two or three o’clock; the soup being served out to the men and women in bowls; but the children feed like pigs out of troughs, and being supplied sparingly, invariably fight and quarrel with one another over their meals.”
—Francis Fredric, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky; or, Fifty Years of Slavery in the Southern States of America. London: Wertheim, Macintosh, and Hunt, 1863.

“The supply of food given out to the slaves, was one peck of corn a week, or some equivalent, and nothing besides. They must grind their own corn, after the work of the day was performed, at a mill which stood on the plantation. We had to eat our coarse bread without meat, or butter, or milk. Severe labor alone gave us an appetite for our scanty and unpalatable fare. Many of the slaves were so hungry after their excessive toil, that they were compelled to steal food in addition to this allowance.
During the planting and harvest season, we had to work early and late. The men and women were called at three o’clock in the morning, and were worked on the plantation till it was dark at night. After that they must prepare their food for supper and for the breakfast of the next day, and attend to other duties of their own dear homes. Parents would often have to work for their children at home, aftereach day’s protracted toil, till the middle of the night, and then snatch a few hours’ sleep, to get strength for the heavy burdens of the next day. “
—Thomas H. Jones, The Experience Of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was A Slave For Forty-three Years. Boston: Bazin & Chandler, 1862.

“The slaves got their allowance every Monday night of molasses, meat, corn meal, and a kind of flour called “dredgings” or “shorts.” Perhaps this allowance would be gone before the next Monday night, in which case the slaves would steal hogs and chickens. Then would come the whipping-post. Master himself never whipped his slaves; this was left to the overseer.

We children had no supper, and only a little piece of bread or something of the kind in the morning. Our dishes consisted of one wooden bowl, and oyster shells were our spoons. This bowl served for about fifteen children, and often the dogs and the ducks and the peafowl had a dip in it. Sometimes we had buttermilk and bread in our bowl, sometimes greens or bones.”
—Annie L. Burton, Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days. Boston: Ross Publishing Company, 1909.

February 7, 2009

By 1864, inflation had rendered Confederate currency worthless, leading to desperation among Southerners living in cities, who depended on money to buy food. Judith McGuire wrote about wartime food prices in Diary of a Southern Refugee During the War by a Lady of Virginia, “Coffee is $4 per pound, and good tea from $18 to $20; butter ranges from $1.50 to $2 per pound; lard 50 cents; corn $15 per barrel; and wheat $4.50 per bushel.”

There were at least thirteen food riots in the Confederacy during the later years of the war. Jefferson Davis tried to stop a bread riot in Richmond by offering a mob of rampaging housewives money from his own pockets. His money was as worthless as theirs, and the angry mob only dispersed after Davis threatened that hastily assembled troops would open fire if they didn’t go back home.

The more wealth a family had, the less impact the food shortages had on their daily lives. Mary Boykin Chesnut, a Charleston socialite whose husband James was an advisor to Jefferson Davis, recorded the menu of a “luncheon to ladies only” given by Mrs. Davis in late January, 1864: “Gumbo, ducks and olives, chickens in jelly, oysters, lettuce salad, chocolate cream, jelly cake, claret, champagne, etc., were the good things set before us.”

January 13, 2009

Edna Lewis (1916-2006) was one of the best known and best loved Southern chefs of the 20th century. Born the granddaughter of former slaves in Freetown, Virginia, she was a sucessful chef and author (The Edna Lewis Cookbook (1972), The Taste of Country Cooking (1976) and In Pursuit of Flavor (1988).

Lewis moved to New York City from Virginia during the Depression. She met John Nicholson, an antiques dealer who in 1949 decided to open a restaurant on 58th Street, on the East Side of Manhattan called Café Nicholson. Lewis became the cook, winning over patrons with cheese soufflés and roast chicken. Café Nicholson became an instant success among bohemians and artists. The restaurant was frequented by William Faulkner,  Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Richard Avedon, Marlon Brando, Gloria Vanderbilt and Marlene Dietrich.

Lewis’ books had a profound influence on many Southern chefs, and her life was the subject of an excellent short film, Fried Chicken and Sweet Potato Pie. The film follows her life among sub-alternate cultures such as growing-up in the former-slave community of Freetown to working as a typist for the Communist Party in pre-WWII New York City.

The film features interviews with chefs, writers and scholars about Lewis’ life and legacy, and is an excellent introduction to Southern food.

To see Fried Chicken and Sweet Potato Pie, click here. You’ll be glad you did.

January 12, 2009

The year 1946 brought some pretty exciting changes to the way Southerners ate.

As GIs came back from the war and the Post-war economic boom set in, countless diners, fish camps, barbecue lodges and drive ins began springing up to tempt Southerners with delightful smells, massive menus and cheap eats.

One of the true cultural landmarks of those days was the Beacon Drive In in Spartanburg, South Carolina. More than sixty years later, it’s still a cultural and culinary icon.

The first thing that strikes new visitors to the Beacon is the physical size. In the middle of a huge parking lot sits the second-largest drive in in the United States, just slightly smaller that Atlanta’s famed Varsity.

At one end of the longest stainless-steel counter you’ve probably ever seen in your life stands J.C. Strobel, the Beacon’s counter man. J.C. has worked at the restaurant for over 50 years, shouting out food orders over the buzz of the crowd of hungry customers and the din of the kitchen staff hustling to fill them.

“Caaall it!” he shouts as regulars stream up to the line and first-timers, politely invited to step to the side, wade through the Beacon’s massive menu.

“I need a chili cheese Ah-Plen-TAAAY!” begins another movement in a well-rehearsed culinary ballet choreographed by the Beacon’s sixty employees that, within sixty seconds, will net you one of the best chili cheeseburgers on the planet, buried under an obscene amount of fried onion rings and french fries, the “A-Plenty” part of the chili cheese.

Further down the line, the Beacon’s iced tea is waiting in styrofoam cups filled with crushed ice. Grab one and head for the cash register, then find a chair in the 350-seat dining room for a true taste of the South.

Each week, the Beacon The Beacon goes through:
Three tons of onions
Three tons of potatoes
Four tons of beef, chicken, and seafood
Three thousand pounds of sugar
The Beacon is the largest single seller of iced tea in the United States, making 62,500 gallons of iced tea each year, enough to fill 24 tanker trucks!

After White retired in 1998, brothers-in-law Sam Maw and Steve McManus bought the Beacon, keeping it locally- and family-owned. In 1999, Reidville Road was renamed John B. White, Sr.  Boulevard-a fitting tribute to someone responsible for one of the South’s most beloved culinary experiences.

January 5, 2009

The food provided to plantation slaves varied widely depending on several factors: time period, location, what food the plantation produced, and the owner’s economic situation all came into play.

Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave and abolitionist, wrote in 1845: “The men and women slaves received, as their monthly allowance of food, eight pounds of pork, or its equivalent in fish, and one bushel of corn meal.”

In The Life of Josiah Henson (1849), Henson, who was born a slave in1789 in Charles County, Maryland, wrote: “The principal food of those upon my master’s plantation consisted of corn-meal and salt herrings; to which was added in summer a little buttermilk, and the few vegetables which each might raise for himself and his family, on the little piece of ground which was assigned to him for the purpose, called a truck-patch.”

On coastal plantations, like those in the South Carolina Lowcountry, broken or dirty rice was plentiful and was a staple of the slave diet.

Archeological evidence from excavations of slave cabins at Ashland Plantation in Louisiana shows that in some cases slaves added to their diet by fishing and trapping. The bones of opossums, raccoons, rabbits, wild birds and fish such as freshwater drum, gar, catfish, sunfish, and mackerel have been found at the site.

In Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation, 1619-1864 (1993), James Deetz detailed archeological findings of food remnants from slave cabins at Flowerdew Hundred plantation on the James River near Hopewell, Virginia. Deetz found the foods most often eaten by slaves at Flowerdew Hundred, based on the amounts of identifiable remains, were pork, catfish, various types of birds and fish, sturgeon, chicken, beef and opossum.
Deetz also found evidence that slaves on this plantation also regularly supplemented their diets by trapping and fishing as well as by keeping pigs and maintaining garden plots.

According to Patricia A. Gibbs, a former member of the research staff at Colonial Williamsburg, there is documentary and archaeological evidence that slaves grew a variety of plants in these gardenssuch as lima beans, pole beans, cabbages, collards, corn, cymlings (patty pan squash), onions, peanuts, black-eyed or other field peas, potatoes (both Irish and sweet), and pumpkins.

These garden patches were tended after the slave’s twelve-hour workday was over (often in the dark) and on Sunday, usually a day of rest on most plantations. The vegetables chosen were high-yield, didn’t require much care after planting, and by staggering plantings, would yield successive crops throughout most of the year.

Although slave gardens were apparently fairly common in the eighteenth century, there is less evidence of their being maintained in the nineteenth century; they were rarely mentioned in traveler’s accounts of Southern plantations of the time. Slaves of this period were more likely to be dependant on the food furnished by the plantation owner, with less supplemental vegetables available to them.

No matter what they were furnished or could procure for themselves, the diet of the slave was barely adequate in the best of times, especially considering the large amount of calories they expended. Malnutrition and the diseases it spawns were common among slaves, and the mortality rate was staggering, especially among the young.

December 19, 2008

George Washington was one of the wealthiest and most influential planters in Virginia after he returned to Mount Vernon after his years as president.

He enjoyed the elegant abundance of field and table at his estate, as witnessed by this account of a Christmas dinner at the plantation:

“Christmas Dinner at Mount Vernon: An Onion Soup Call’d the King’s Soup, Oysters on the Half Shell, Broiled Salt Roe Hering, Boiled Rockfish, Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding, Mutton Chops, Roast Suckling Pig, Roast Turkey with Chestnut Stuffing, Round of Cold Boiled Beef with Horse-radish Sauce, Cold Baked Virginia Ham, Lima Beans, Baked Acorn Squash, Baked Celery with Slivered Almonds, Hominy Pudding, Candied Sweet Potatoes, Cantaloupe Pickle, Spiced Peaches in Brandy, Spiced Cranberries, Mincemeat Pie, Apple Pie, Cherry Pie, Chess Tarts, Blancmange, Plums in Wine Jelly, Snowballs, Indian Pudding, Great Cake, Ice Cream, Plum Pudding, Fruits, Nuts, Raisins, Port, Madeira.”
—The American Heritage Cookbook and Illustrated History of American Eating & Drinking,.New York: American Heritage Publishing Co, 1964

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