FOR SOUTHERNERS, PRACTICALLY EVERY DAY’S A HOLIDAY
Southerners really know how to throw a party, and a holiday is the best excuse of all for one. We bring out our cherished family recipes, sprinkle in some new ideas, and start celebrating.
And we have a delightfully broad definition of “holiday.”
We respect tradition, but we bring our special culinary touches to even the most traditional of holidays, such as Hanukkah, Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving.
But the regular calendar holidays aren’t enough for us. We hold festivals for the sole purpose of celebrating beloved regional foods, such as peaches and seafood. We honor parts of history along with good things to eat, marking the contributions of African Americans, Italians, Greeks, Germans, Jews, and others to the gumbo that is today’s southern culture. If you look at the South through its food, you’ll realize the region has always been more diverse than people think, especially today.
And everyone knows that anything associated with college basketball is a holiday in these parts—don’t even try to argue about that.
The food served at holiday events has both personal and cultural connections. Special dishes carry specific memories for each family, but many also have roots in a common past. You can trace them back like a golden thread that ties families together, no matter how different, in a shared southern history. The Thanksgiving sweet potato casserole is one example. Now it’s on holiday tables from Seattle to St. Augustine, with or without little marshmallows on top, but it most likely got started in the South. This region has long been a prime area for growing sweet potatoes. North Carolina produces more of them than any other state, according to 2011 figures. We had them, so we used them. And, lo, the delectable sweet potato casserole spread across the land as southerners moved to other areas of the United States and cooking magazines popularized the recipes, according to historians at Plimoth Plantation, a living-history museum near the site of the Mayflower’s seventeenth-century landing in Massachusetts. The South can also claim the first officially decreed Thanksgiving, long before the Pilgrims showed up, but more on that later.
Because we love sweets, southerners also expanded Thanksgiving desserts beyond stuffy old New England mincemeat and pumpkin pies. Today, such additions as the sweetly indulgent pecan pie are classics on tables around the country—although at my house, we love apple pie for reasons I’ll explain below. Those are all desserts to be thankful for.
There’s more. How about those glazed spiral-sliced hams that are stars of the show at Easter meals? Their place on that holiday’s table goes back to farming days in the hog-centric South, and I’ll tell you more about that in the pages that follow. So if you’re enjoying a big slice of ham at Easter lunch in Milwaukee, we’ll be glad to claim you, as long as you remember that what we call dinner is what you call lunch.
Also, there are historical reasons for the coconut cake’s honored place on the Christmas dessert table that just make it taste even better.
I discovered fascinating holiday connections between the personal and the cultural while working on this book. When I was a kid in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Christmas was the only time of year my mother purchased a particular dessert from a neighborhood dairy bar. It was called Flaming Snowballs and consisted of balls of hard-frozen vanilla ice cream rolled in coconut with a red candle and a bit of artificial holly in each one. After supper on Christmas Eve, we lit the candles and blew them out fast, before red wax could drip on the coconut—I didn’t want to miss a shred of it. Another more puzzling habit of my mother’s was to have Santa fill my stocking with oranges and tangerines, then perch some small gift on top. I always thought Santa was cheap. My friends got stockings full of toys rather than edibles, and these were not even unusual edibles but food we could get year-round. Later, I found out that the snowballs and the fruit have a shared history as railroads helped spread exotic treats such as coconuts and citrus fruit from southern port cities across the region. However, at that time they were still expensive and rare and reserved for special occasions. For people like my mother, who grew up in a rural North Carolina town at the end of the Great Depression, oranges might be their only Christmas gift and a homemade coconut cake was a once-a-year event. The memories persisted for her, and even as an adult, her favorite Christmas present was a box of navel oranges.
Because the regular-old holidays aren’t sufficient for southerners, we extend the celebrations to honor favorite foods and ethnic heritage. Across the region, you can find festivals in praise of collards, okra, shrimp, strawberries, peaches, shad (a kind of fish), watermelon, biscuits, ramps (wild onions), barbecue (of course), and many more foods. From Lebanese Americans in the Delta to Greek Americans in South Carolina, ethnic food festivals allow visitors to taste the world. And one of the oldest Jewish food festivals in the South, Shalom Y’all, takes place each year in Savannah, Georgia.
In this book, you’ll find the recipes collected by holiday and the holidays grouped by season. I set the seasons by the dates of the equinoxes and solstices when they officially begin.
It’s impossible to include every holiday favorite from every part of the South in one little cookbook like this. My goal is to offer a taste of the variety of celebrations across the region, featuring recipes cherished by real southerners. I hope you’ll see this book as a collection of holiday greeting cards that remind you to enjoy and preserve your own treasured food traditions and help get you acquainted with some new ones. Like I did while writing the book, you might learn a few bits of history you didn’t know.