Poultry

Poultry is a common item in the food consumption patterns of southerners today, and the regional taste for fried chicken is one that has persisted for many years. Poultry, especially chicken, has served as a regular but supplementary meat to pork, which dominated southern diets during the 1800s and 1900s.

Chicken was most common in the diets of well-to-do farmers and was regarded among the less affluent population as a semiluxury item. It was a popular Sunday dish and was often served to visitors, including the local preacher. Humorous tales about the preacher’s love for chicken abound in both black and white folklore. In addition to fried chicken, among the most popular chicken dishes in the South have been stewed chicken, with the bird slow-cooked until falling apart; chicken pilau or perloo, made with rice and seasoning vegetables (a dish having Mediterranean origins and likely entering the South through Charleston); chicken and dumplings, with the chicken again cooked to pieces and either cornmeal or flour dumplings added at the end; and country captain, a rather exotic dish, with currants, almonds, crisp bacon pieces, rice, and chutney all part of a recipe that is attributed to Savannah for its origins in the South and which has been more common along the Atlantic coast than in the interior.

A glance at cookbooks suggests that southerners have roasted, baked, fried, sautéed, grilled, and barbecued chickens for centuries. Chicken has been a key ingredient in such regional dishes as gumbo, jambalaya, and Brunswick stew. People prize different parts of the chicken, and its neck, liver, heart, feet, and gizzard are all consumed. Cookbooks since the 19th century have also included recipes for wild duck, turkey, and goose, as well as such fowl as blackbird, lark, quail, grouse, guinea fowl, peafowl, pigeon, and other game.

Chickens were kept on practically every farm and often ran loose in the barnyard area. As a result farmers virtually lived with their chicken flock. Chickens could be kept on a minimum of feed and were much more convenient to slaughter and prepare for eating than either pigs or cattle. Predators such as the fox and the hawk were a constant problem for the farmer’s barnyard flock, thus requiring the farmer to keep both his dog and shotgun handy.

Since 1900 the per capita rate of consumption of chicken has increased markedly, outstripping the growth in demand for other meats such as beef and pork. During this period, and especially in recent decades, very important changes have occurred in the production of chickens, and these had an effect on both the economy and culture of the South. A few decades ago the rural population of the South was largely self-sufficient in terms of supplying its chicken and egg needs. Farmers maintained small flocks of chickens for their own use. Often city dwellers’ demand for chickens and eggs was met by farmers who sold excess production to town merchants. This trade furnished butter-and-egg money for farm housewives. Women worked with county extension agents to improve and modernize their production and marketing of eggs and chickens, often setting up roadside stands or selling at special farmers’ markets. Historians credit the profitability of women’s egg and chicken sales with seeing many families through the Depression’s hard times. Today it is rare indeed to find farm families that produce chickens and eggs. In place of this production system have come large-scale, highly specialized mass-production techniques involving the utilization of the latest technological advancements.

This modern era of poultry production dates from the 1930s; its methods had almost totally replaced the previous production techniques by the 1950s. The modern poultry farmer has one or more chicken houses, growing 10,000 to 20,000 birds per house. Ordinarily each batch is grown under contract with large agribusiness firms during a period of 7 to 10 weeks. Market-ready chickens are taken to processing plants for slaughtering, dressing, and packing, and are later transported by refrigerated truck to widely dispersed markets. The poultry industry is characterized by a vertical integration in which an agribusiness firm, either through direct ownership or contract, controls the entire production process. Such firms own processing plants, feed mills, and hatcheries, and contract with farmers to raise the chickens. Because of these arrangements the farmer has little voice in the industry. Some observers label this type of poultry farming a modern version of sharecropping. However, one advantage of this production system to the farmer is that it reduces the capital needed to start poultry farming.

Today a large proportion of southern poultry is produced by farmers who derive only a part of their total income from this source. The chief wage earner may have a full-time industrial or commercial job while the family raises chickens as a supplementary source of income, or chicken farming may be ancillary to other agricultural pursuits. Labor needs of poultry farming are minimal because of the automation of the process. The management of two chicken houses of 10,000 to 20,000 chickens each can usually be accomplished during the evenings and on weekends by family members.

Several of the nation’s main poultry-growing areas are located in the South. Northeast Georgia was one of the first areas to begin large-scale commercial chicken production, with Gainesville serving as a processing plant center and the location for feed mills and hatcheries. Both northeast Georgia and northwest Arkansas began to develop as poultry centers in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They were followed in the 1940s by centers in south central Mississippi and central North Carolina, and in the 1950s by northern Alabama, around Cullman County. Today a trip through these areas provides visible indications of the industry’s impact on the landscape, with the long, narrow chicken houses on farms and the specialized feed trucks and poultry-transport vehicles that operate between feed mills, farms, and processing plants.

The emergence of chicken production in these areas largely reflects changing conditions of traditional subsistence farming. Many of these regions were from the beginning of settlement poor farm areas. They were populated by low-income farm families who had lost a previous source of farm revenue—cotton in northeast Georgia, northern Alabama, and south central Mississippi; tobacco in North Carolina; and fruit in northwest Arkansas. A new source of farm income such as chicken raising was welcomed enthusiastically by these farmers. Local entrepreneurs and agricultural officials were largely instrumental in establishing this industry. J. D. Jewell, for instance, played an important role in establishing production in northeast Georgia. He owned a small feed store in Gainesville in the 1930s and encouraged neighboring farmers to grow chickens, affording him a market outlet for feed and other supplies. Because cash with which to buy baby chicks and feed was seriously limited among farmers, Jewell supplied his customers with credit until their chickens were marketed. However, when the chickens reached the proper age and size for marketing, the farmer had no way to get them to market. Jewell provided transportation to haul the live chickens to urban markets. Later his company became one of the major vertical integrators in northeast Georgia, and he became nationally recognized as an industry leader.

Today southern poultry raisers dominate national chicken production, which all together produced over half of the 8.5 million chickens raised in the nation in 2002. The five leading states are Arkansas, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and Mississippi. Four of the five most profitable chicken companies began in the South: Tyson Foods in Springdale, Ark.; Gold Kist, a farm-cooperative business in Atlanta; Holly Farms in Wilkesboro, N.C.; and Perdue Farms Inc., in Salisbury, Md. Tyson Foods acquired Holly Farms in 1989, acquired diversified food production companies in the 1990s, and solidified its position as the world’s largest poultry producer by merging with Hudson Foods in 1998. Critics have pointed to issues of pollution and inhumane treatment of poultry in this leading agribusiness. Chicken has become the fastest-growing part of the fast-food business, profiting such southern companies as Kentucky Fried Chicken, Church’s Fried Chicken, Popeyes, and Bojangles.

J. DENNIS LORD

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Karen Davis, Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry (1996); J. Fraser Hart, Annals of the Association of American Geographers (December 1980); Sam Bowers Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840–1860 (1972); Lu Ann Jones, Mama Learned Us to Work: Farm Women in the New South (2002); Edward Karpoff, Agricultural Situation (March 1959); N. R. Kleinfield, New York Times (9 December 1984); J. Dennis Lord, “Regional Marketing Patterns and Locational Advantages in the United States Broiler Industry” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Georgia, 1970), Southeastern Geographer (April 1971); Irene A. Moke, Journal of Geography (October 1967); National Agricultural Center, National Poultry Museum, www.poultryscience.org/psapub/pmuseum.html; Malden C. Nesheim, Poultry Production (1979).

 

Religion and Food

The connection between food and religion runs deep in the southern Bible Belt. Eating has been an incentive for and aspect of going to church for many a southerner. Religious foodways have had a big hand in preserving and signaling change in southern cuisine. In the fellowship of church meals, many southerners feel strong connections to elements that sustain a southern as well as evangelical Christian worldview: the sacredness of family, the providence of God, and the holiness of place. Religious ways of understanding and using food also extend outside religious institutions to express the sacredness of southern culture.

Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of southern food and religion is the practice of “dinner on the grounds” after worship. Sharing a potluck meal spread under the trees of the churchyard may have had practical origins in the evangelical camp meetings of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Distances traveled to camp meetings might be almost as long as the sermons; worshippers were encouraged to bring provisions to share. When evangelicals (Methodist, Baptists, and others) established churches, eating “camp meeting style” persisted. After the Civil War, it proliferated and is still observed by many churches today. It is often called by the old name, although the “ground” is now more likely to be the church basement fellowship hall. The popularization of another name, “covered dish supper,” parallels other changes: the evening main meal and the ubiquity of casseroles made with convenience products.

The blessing at a dinner on the grounds, 1940 (Russell Lee, photographer, Library of Congress [LC-USF33-012784-M1], Washington, D.C.)

Practical adaptations keep the church dinner feasible, but the feeling the food evokes ensures its endurance. The church dinner is a type of ritual, a practice that follows the sacred model of a community’s myths or sacred stories. Rituals help to connect the truths of myths to human experience on a basic level through meanings attached to symbols. Food is highly symbolic, and food rituals exist in most religions. They tend to have similar functions, although a tradition might emphasize some functions over others. The dominant evangelical Protestantism of the South is no exception.

Dinner on the grounds, for example, is a type of feast that celebrates the idea of divine blessing on a particular land and people, especially when the foods reflect the bounty of the land. Feasts usually involve sacrifice, the ritual slaughter of an animal that invokes the divine. Overtones of sacrifice remain in church suppers, where game and barbecue are the main dishes.

Ritual meals reaffirm the boundaries of community, as often by the absence of forbidden foods as the presence of special dishes. The teaming of evangelical Protestantism with alcohol prohibitions is such a boundary marker. (It has not gone uncontested in southern Protestantism, however. For example, bourbon whiskey is often attributed to Kentucky Baptist preacher Elijah Craig.) While other traditions might employ alcoholic beverages to connote the sacred (wine in the Catholic Mass), southern Protestantism’s prodigious use of sugar in church meals, from gallons of sweet tea to desserts by the dozens, reflects the special status of these meals as well as the sweet tooth of southern cuisine.

For evangelical Protestants, however, the primary religious functions of church meals follow their theological understanding of Christ’s Last Supper. This is reflected in the parallel meanings of a term they use for the ritual meal in worship, communion, and the term they use to describe what a church meal is, fellowship. Both emphasize the community of believers. Partaking in activities such as church dinners reinforces the bond of community and belonging to the church family. The covered dish supper laid out for everyone to help themselves to food taken from the same pots and eaten at communal tables symbolically relates to the supper at which Christ and his disciples shared common dishes. This points to another function of church meals: commemoration. Christ told his disciples to continue to eat together, “in remembrance of me.” Southern Protestants do this ritually in Communion and in their fellowship meals.

Remembrance and community are reinforced and extended on multiple levels through a variety of foodways that connect church to the rest of life. Church eating can symbolize the bond of community that goes back to early Christians and continues in the local congregation at present. It can remind churchgoers of community here and beyond. Particularly at homecoming celebrations, which center around a dinner on the ground, the idea of ancestral community is reinforced. People who no longer live in the community might return home for the occasion; it might take place in sight of not only the church building but also the church graveyard. A sense of the community’s ancestry is evoked by foods associated with tradition. Cultural myths and food traditions overlap with church rituals—church food is southern food. Churches are among the remaining places where some traditional dishes appear with any regularity. The connections reinforce the holiness associated with both the church and culture of a special people and place.

The two-way flow between church and family is often expressed in food. A big Sunday dinner around grandma’s table is sacred for many southerners, even if experienced more often in nostalgia than in reality. Churches express their family character in foodways that extend into homes. Especially during family transitions or crises, churches nourish bodies and souls alike. Church members take dishes to the homes of grieving families during mourning. After the funeral, a meal might be prepared by church members in the home or fellowship hall. The earliest evangelicals often substituted church family for kin, but the holiness of family for evangelicals today serves as a model for church community. Church meals are now frequently referred to as “family night suppers,” reflecting as much an orientation to families and children as the idea of church as family.

The traditional role of nurturer of home and church assigned to women is foundational for this connection and central to foodways in southern churches. While churchmen may preside over cookouts, church eating has been largely the domain of women. Foodways both reinforce the gender hierarchy and subvert it. While the responsibility for church meals means more labor for women, it also provides opportunities for creative expression. Early church dinners might have been “make do” affairs and still might be depending on supply, money, and time. But even in tough times, church dinners have provided opportunities to celebrate as best one could through special fare. They gave cooks so inclined (or socially pressured) the chance to show off with dishes they might not make for home meals, providing a means for status and recognition. Church foodways also gave leadership and ministerial opportunities to women who were (and often still are) otherwise denied them. Through food events, women have raised money for church causes; enticed men into church participation; fed the hungry, sick, celebrating, and grieving; and acted as “ritual specialists” when they could not preside at the Communion table or preach “the bread of life” from the pulpit.

Churchwomen’s cookbooks have been important sources of fund-raising for their communities. They also preserve a “herstory” of southern Protestantism and a means by which traditions are passed down. While the introduction to the cookbook of the Second Presbyterian Church of Spartanburg, S.C., gives a history of male leadership, the rest of the book documents women’s activity in recipes and anecdotes. Cookbooks can be personal expressions of devotion as well as community legacies. Mrs. Rose Marie Horne, a south Georgia church cook, dedicated her recipe manuscript to “Jesus Christ, my Strength and Sustainer.” When Mrs. Horne became gravely ill, women in her church financed the publication of her book as a testimony to her and to preserve the recipes that had become a part of the church’s life.

Church cookbooks are important sources for charting preservation, innovation, and devolution in southern foodways as well as women’s history. The New Kentucky Home Cookbook, published by Methodist churchwomen in 1884, is a valuable resource on southern white women who did their own cooking. But there is no better way to taste change and continuity in southern eating than to observe (or better, take part in) church meals themselves. A recent project in the Carolinas reveals that church foodways are still meaningful forms of fellowship, with things both lost and gained over time. One mill village church has only 60 members today; but over 300 “came home” to its recent homecoming celebration. The minister, usurping the women’s duty, to some consternation, planned the menu of traditional foods as well as preached. The church maintains itself in part these days by providing space for an after-school meal program. A Holiness church recently employed a dietician to create lighter versions of traditional foods because of health concerns in the African American community. While covered dish suppers have waned in recent years at a suburban Methodist church, a small group eats every Sunday dinner at a southernthemed chain restaurant near the church. And a Baptist church that has grown to megachurch status employs a professional chef who oversees a number of food events and has introduced a popular feature to its Wednesday evening “family meals”: a chocolate fountain in the center of the dining hall.

The dominant evangelicals are not the first or last groups for which the South has provided hospitable ground for the combination of religion and food. Native Americans had a rich ritual life involving foodways. Early Anglicans and Catholics often ate together in homes after services. Foods of religious sects like the Moravians have become part of southern cuisine. Jews in the pork-loving South have managed to maintain foodways that preserve their identity and also reach out to the broader community. Spartanburgers think of a certain typical American coffee cake as “Jewish” because it is a popular item at the local temple’s bake sale. During the annual Greek Festival, Baptists come after “preaching” to eat at St. Nicholas Orthodox Church. The first introduction for many native southerners to the faiths of the growing number of Hindus and Buddhists in the South is through the foods offered at their festivals. And new groups adopt and adapt the covered dish.

Connections between religion and food are not exclusive to the South, but they are particularly prominent in southern culture. Friday night fish fries are accompanied by gospel music in some restaurants. Other eateries offer reduced prices to those who bring their church bulletins to the Sunday dinner buffet. Even when religion is not overtly expressed, the sense of holiness about food carries over in cultural symbols. Southern hospitality parallels fellowship. Fried chicken has symbolic power in part because of its association with Sunday dinners and church suppers. Convenience “bucket” versions play on southern heritage through commercial myths such as Colonel Sanders and PoFolks. Sweet tea and cornbread are “sacraments” for southerners: they commemorate and mark identity with the South. Maybe the best example of a foodway that expresses the connection between religious behavior and southern culture is barbecue. The ritual cooking and eating of a hog commemorates a mythic place and time, communal bond, and identity still sacred in the South.

CORRIE E. NORMAN

Greenville, South Carolina

John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1993); Marcie Cohen Ferris, in Southern Jewish History 2 (1998); Jean M. Heriot, Blessed Assurance: Beliefs, Actions, and the Experience of Salvation in a Carolina Baptist Church (1994); Corrie Norman, in Phi Kappa Phi Forum (2002); Wade Clark Roof, in God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture, ed. Eric M. Mazur and Kate McCarthy (2001); Daniel Sack, Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture (2000); Janet Theophano, Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote (2002).

 

Roadside Restaurants

The American roadside restaurant revolution began with the construction of larger factory districts throughout the industrial Northeast. Higher employment concentrations and longer journeys to work brought larger concentrations of potential patrons. Street peddlers purveying ready-to-consume food became more common in urban areas and were joined by horse carts in the 1870s and finally by fixed-location restaurants, most notably diners, along major arterial roads in the 1880s. The diner set the stage for the development of America’s stereotypical roadside restaurant. Few of the thousands of diners scattered across the United States were ever erected in the South, but the only manufacturing company currently producing them is located in Atlanta.

Diners were joined by a new class of “white box” restaurants in the 1920s, most notably the Midwest-based White Castle and White Tower chains. The advantage of the “white box” restaurants was their lower overhead, created by smaller square footage, lower labor demands, and simpler menus. Initially almost always located along streetcar routes within urban areas, these factory-produced units were easily erected and easily moved as traffic patterns changed. White Castle and White Tower located virtually all of their stores in the Industrial Northeast and Midwest, with only a handful in the South. The Krystal chain, however, was created by Rody Davenport of Chattanooga, Tenn., as a conscious copy of White Castle in 1932, and it became a southern icon.

Numerically there were few true roadside restaurants in the South prior to the early 1950s, primarily because of the absence of concentrations of factory jobs and large-scale commuting, a lack of disposable income, and a general antipathy for eating away from home. Drive-ins began appearing in larger southern towns and cities soon after World War II, but in comparison to those in other regions their numbers were small. They were, however, a spawning ground for later regional chains, prominent among them Alex Shoenbaum’s Charleston, W.Va., Parkette Drive-In, begun in 1947, which became Shoney’s in 1953. Other important regional chains from this period include the Krystal clones, Huddle House (Decatur, Ga.) and Waffle House (Avondale Estates, Ga.), as well as the Kettle Restaurants (Houston, Tex.) and Jerry’s (Kentucky).

The numbers, diversity, and locations of roadside restaurants exploded during the 1950s and 1960s. As more Americans found themselves away from home at mealtimes, restaurant dining became commonplace among a larger and larger spectrum of the population. The mobility of the automobile, coupled with the need for a place to park while dining, made suburban locations increasingly attractive, even in small towns. The demand, and then the reality, of the modern roadside restaurant, was born. Fast-food chains are the first of these that come to mind, but actually all kinds of restaurants began appearing at the edges of communities along main roads. Barbecues, cafeterias, chicken shacks, and other locally operated stores saw the opportunity to capture the automobile market outside of the establishment-dominated town center, especially in small and medium-sized cities. While many of the initial stores were franchisee or company outlets of national fast-food chains, tens of thousands were not. Soon it was the old café in downtown that was struggling for survival as the edge-of-town roadside venues began to dominate the restaurant scene.

A “hamburger alley” urban environment was created along the major suburban arterials of virtually every large town in the nation. One might assume that this was the beginning of the end of southern restaurant cuisine. Certainly larger markets have higher percentages of national chain store outlets than smaller ones. All, however, continue to serve a liberal dash of traditional southern fare, though often modified to meet more “national” tastes. A typical such strip might begin with an Applebee’s (national, though founded in Atlanta), then a couple of national sandwich and pizza shops, then a Huddle House and a Sonic (Oklahoma), then a couple of independents, one Chinese and the other serving bagels, followed by two competing chicken fast-food outlets with a barbecue restaurant nestled between them, and so on. The decline of traditional southern fare in the larger roadside restaurant environments has created some backlash, and several chains, most notably Folks (née PoFolks; the two brands now operate separate chains) and Cracker Barrel, have been created to capitalize on this market. An inspection of their customer base reveals that they do not by any means cater exclusively to decrepit southerners. In many ways southern regional culture is being supported today more by incomers than by natives, who often do not comprehend what is being lost. Southern food is one of the most visible areas of this process. Not only are “old timey” ways being supported and reincarnated through fairs and festivals (often organized and supported by the newer residents), but everyday foods are being placed center stage with the patronization of older or creation of newer restaurants featuring traditional southern favorites, though often prepared in ways that your grandmother might have had trouble recognizing as authentic.

RICHARD PILLSBURY

Folly Beach, South Carolina

John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age (2002); Richard Pillsbury, From Boarding House to Bistro: The American Restaurant Then and Now (1990).

 

Social Class and Food

During the early 20th century the South ranked dead last among regions nationally in every conceivable economic category, and when the Great Depression gripped the country in 1929, many southerners grimly joked that they did not notice any difference in their circumstances. In the 1930s President Franklin D. Roosevelt described southern poverty as the most serious economic problem facing America.

At the dawning of the New Deal economic recovery program, the majority of the South’s African American population and about half of its whites subsisted on a hunger diet. “It seems indisputable that the condition of the poor, whether sharecroppers in the black belt, millworkers in the Piedmont, or scratch farmers in Appalachia, began to reach its nadir about 1925,” writes Joe Gray Taylor.

As it had been during much of the South’s past, from the early colonization of Virginia, pork continued to be a mainstay on the region’s tables well into the 20th century, and at the same time a symbol of the inequitable distribution of food products. The phrase “eating high on the hog,” used to describe periods of prosperity, had its converse in the scraps of fatback and gristly ham hocks allocated to slaves for 200 years on the plantations and dispensed to white and black patrons alike at general stores and company commissaries. Pigs have played a central role in southern survival largely because they are one of the most efficient sources of food, as their weight can increase 150-fold in the first eight months of life, and most of the animal is edible.

One of the great paradoxes of the southern table is the fact that African Americans, the southerners subjected to the worst forms of class as well as race discrimination, have made some of the greatest contributions to the region’s cookery. African slaves enriched the diet of the South by introducing products from their homeland such as okra, black-eyed peas, and benne, or sesame, seeds. The kitchen was one of the few places where displaced and enslaved Africans could exercise their creativity, raising common, often even discarded, foods to grandeur. “It is difficult to reconcile the glory of the feast with the ignominy of slavery,” writes John Egerton. Ironies continued after the end of slavery. In the Jim Crow South, from the end of the Civil War into the 1960s, blacks who cooked in restaurant kitchens were not usually allowed to step out front and eat in the dining room. Poverty caused many blacks to be confronted with class deprivation as well as racial oppression. Writer Richard Wright recalls sheer hunger from lack of family resources for food as a child, as well as racial limitations.

The image of the frilly-frocked southern belle, presiding over a table set with silver and porcelain, is a marked contrast to the hard-working lives of so many plantation matrons and especially to the hardscrabble existence of countless southern farm women, who sold eggs to supplement the family income and turned used cotton chicken feed sacks into curtains and clothing. Until recently, the cooking of the aristocratic, planter class was preserved in southern cookbooks, to the exclusion of the marginalized. Most southerners never owned slaves.

Half the poor families in the United States, one-seventh of the white poor and two-thirds of the nonwhite, lived below the Mason-Dixon line as late as 1966. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the meat in the diet of poor southerners in the Appalachian region consisted largely of fatback—very little bacon or ham—and cornbread or flour biscuits, all low in protein and vitamins, resulting in the proliferation of diseases such as pellagra brought on by nutritional deficiencies. By the end of World War II, milling companies had begun to fortify their flour and cornmeal with vitamins, which brought a significant improvement in the health of southerners.

Amid troubles and triumphs, economically disadvantaged southerners of all races have resourcefully combined the lowliest of foodstuffs—the simple fare of field and farm—to create some of America’s most memorable dishes: lard-seasoned soup beans and cornbread flecked with pork cracklings; redeye gravy, a simple combination of grease, water, and perhaps some leftover coffee; and pain perdu, “lost bread” or “French toast,” an ingenious way of using leftover bread as dessert, perked up with precious sugar and spices. Hard times resulted in clever ways to preserve meat, vegetables, and fruit. Country hams, cured with salt and smoke, apples boiled down into apple butter, and green beans strung and dried as “leather britches” all grew out of necessity.

Southerners have pickled watermelon rinds, made wine out of corn cobs, stewed mudbugs, killed spring lettuce with vinegar and bacon grease, and sautéed dandelion greens, thereby creating America’s most diverse indigenous cuisine, appreciated all the more because of the hardships from whence it has come.

FRED W. SAUCEMAN

East Tennessee State University

John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987); Lu Ann Jones, Mama Learned Us to Work: Farm Women in the New South (2002); Joe Gray Taylor, Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South: An Informal History (1982).

 

Soul Food

ORIGINS. Popularized in the 1960s, the term soul food is a political construct, a renaming and reclaiming of the traditional foods of African Americans, the foods of historical privation, by African Americans. Common usage of the term escalated in the late 1960s when soul music was in vogue and Black Power was touted.

Chicken and fish rolled in meal or batter and deep fried, greens and cowpeas boiled with pork and served with pot liquor, okra cooked to a low gravy, sweet potatoes baked to a golden brown, and cornbread in many varieties form the basis of a quasi-ethnic cuisine whose roots are, arguably, as African as they are American. Maize and sweet potatoes were taken from America to Africa by Portuguese traders in the 16th century, and peas of the black-eyed type have been eaten in Africa for some 400 years. Even specialized local cuisines with identifiable European roots, such as French cooking in Louisiana, have been greatly influenced by African taste in such things as the heavy use of red pepper and the creation of dishes like gumbo based on ingredients, such as okra, that came from Africa. In fact, the black presence may explain why foods like maize and cowpeas, which can grow anywhere in America and were taken into the American frontiers, remain staple foods only in the South, aside from those areas of the Southwest where they were staple foods of Native Americans. Some scholars see Native American influences in soul food as well.

 

POPULARIZATION.

In March 1970 Vogue published an essay by Gene Baro that took notice of the newest food fad sweeping the land, observing that “the cult of soul food is a form of black self-awareness and, to a lesser degree, of white sympathy for the black drive to self-reliance. It is as if those who ate the beans and greens of necessity in the cabin doorways were brought into communion with those who, not having to, eat those foods voluntarily now as a sacrament.”

Baro was not the first to plumb the deeper meaning of this exotic cuisine. In November 1968 Craig Claiborne, the Mississippi-born New York Times restaurant critic, had written a column praising the chitlins and champagne offered at Red Rooster’s in Harlem, and soon the droves descended, tongues wagging, upturned noses sniffing out the heady scent of long-simmered swine intestines. Esquire had taken notice of the soul food craze eight months earlier. Seventeen magazine ran a feature soon after Claiborne’s article. Time followed in March 1969, McCall’s in September of the same year. Most articles purported to be soul food primers for the trend-conscious white consumer.

Some were condescending. “The big question is why soul food is so popular,” observed an unnamed writer for Time. “It is cheap, simple fare that reflects the tawdry poverty of its origins. Soul food is often fatty, overcooked, and underseasoned. Considering the tastelessness of the cuisine, the soul food fad seems certain to be fairly short-lived. For many Negroes, it is long since over; it ended, in fact, as soon as they could afford better food.” An African American advertising copywriter observed, “White men are too much. Here we are, trying to live the way they do, and what happens? They get themselves beads and shades and go out and dance the boogaloo.”

By 1970 at least 15 soul food cookbooks had been published, including Cooking with Soul by Ethel Brown Hearon, A Pinch of Soul by Pearl Bowser, and the Soul Power Cookbook from the Lane Magazine Company. Most of the books included an explanatory essay of some sort. “Soul food grew in the way that soul music grew—out of necessity, out of the need to express the ‘group soul,’” wrote Bowser. “Originally, of course, the need was to keep alive in spite of the paucity of scraps and the sometimes unsavoriness of the leftovers. Somehow, in transforming such things as animal fodder into rich peanut soup or wild plants into some of our favorite and tastiest vegetable dishes, there grew a pride—a pride in ingenuity and a pride in producing ‘our own thing.’”

Some African Americans dismissed it all as a matter of misplaced sentimentality. “In the sixties, the young people in the cities were missing something they thought was in the South,” said Edna Lewis, the grand doyenne of African American chefs. “They coined the term soul food and nobody challenged it.”

By 1972 soul food was moving upscale as restaurants like Atlanta’s Soul on Top o’ Peachtree opened downtown. But, like the fondue fad of a few years before or the Cajun craze that would dawn some years later, soul food was soon banished to the back of the national cupboard. By October 1973 Soul on Top o’ Peachtree closed. According to an article in the Atlanta Constitution, “Although the restaurant promised to be a fashionable place to purchase barbecue, greens, pig feet, and other ‘soul food’ dishes, the best selling meal in the house had an Italian flavor.” Said proprietor Willie Stafford, “We had a $1.35 special on spaghetti and meatballs. We sure sold a lot of that stuff.”

In Native Son, originally published in 1940, Richard Wright describes a pilgrimage from Chicago’s wealthy white suburbs to the south side of the city where expatriate black southerners had been making their home since the early years of the Great Migration. Along for the ride are the black protagonist, Bigger Thomas, and two young whites, Jan, an earnest, clueless Communist, and his girlfriend, Mary, daughter of Bigger’s employer. “Say Bigger, where can we get a good meal on the South Side?” asks Jan. “We want to go to a real place,” says Mary. “Look Bigger. We want one of those places where colored people eat, not one of those show places,” insists Jan. Bigger ponders this for a moment and then offers, “Well, there’s Ernie’s Kitchen Shack.” And soon they’re barreling down South 47th Street in search of honest-to-goodness, skillet-fried chicken.

NOUVEAU.

In the new millennium, when the term soul affectionately may describe a talented country-western singer or may be employed by a theater company to convey that their hot new show is nurturing, satisfying, and comforting, the label has lost some of its relevance. The African American culinary frontier has expanded so that soul no longer wholly characterizes the cultural and social choices made by people of color in this country.

Of course, the traditional dishes and recipes of old can still be found—slowly cooked and highly seasoned greens, beans, and other fresh vegetables; macaroni and cheese; sweet potatoes in many forms; pork in all its manifestations; chicken; hot bread; sweet tea; cobbler; and so on. But the make-do nature of soul food has been morphing in recent years. In a time of rising middle-class values and improving social conditions, it was perhaps inevitable that a “new” style of southern and soul cooking would emerge—leaner cuts of meat, lighter styles of cooking and seasoning, an emphasis on health and nutrition.

But unlike New Southern Cuisine, with its emphasis upon comparatively exotic ingredients and innovative cooking methods, the Soul Food Revival, as the trend has been called, in a more realistic sense, exemplifies culinary freedom. Contemporary African American cooks are liberated from the association with the survival foods of the slave kitchen. Many restaurants now prefer terms like home-style, southern-style, even Mama’s cooking. Many have moved uptown. At home, dinner often resembles the healthier, more vibrant cooking of African American farm cooks, such as that of cookbook author Edna Lewis.

In her 1988 book In Pursuit of Flavor, Lewis dared to step outside the narrow confines of soul food and redefined the African American woman in the kitchen. She revealed a culinary grace not often associated with the culture, cooking sweet potatoes with lemon, boiling corn in the husk, seasoning with fresh herbs.

Lewis and her peers dismissed the idea that poverty food defined African Americans. They emancipated a generation of new African American cooks. As a consequence, new African American cooking may have lost its “soul” but not its spirit of experimentation and originality.

MARGARET JONES BOLSTERLI

University of Arkansas

TONI TIPTON-MARTIN

Austin, Texas

JOHN T. EDGE

University of Mississippi

Sheila Ferguson, Soul Food: Classic Cuisine from the Deep South (1993); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1976); Jessica B. Harris, The Welcome Table: African American Heritage Cooking (1995); Bob Jeffries, Soul Food Cookbook (1970); Bruce F. Johnston, The Staple Food Economies of Western Tropical Africa (1958); Helen Mendes, The African Heritage Cookbook (1971); National Council of Negro Women, The Black Family Reunion Cookbook: Recipes and Food Memories (1993); Curtis Parker, The Lost Art of Scratch Cooking: Recipes from the Kitchen of Natha Adkins Parker (1997); Carolyn Quick Tillery, The African-American Heritage Cookbook: Traditional Recipes and Fond Remembrances from Alabama’s Renowned Tuskegee Institute (1997); Joyce White, Brown Sugar: Soul Food Desserts from Family and Friends (2003), Soul Food: Recipes and Reflections from African-American Churches (1998); Sylvia Woods, Sylvia’s Family Soul Food Cookbook: From Hemingway, South Carolina, to Harlem (1999), Sylvia’s Soul Food (1992).

 

Aunt Jemima

Although the brand that Aunt Jemima represents has never been based in the South, this controversial spokes-character and cultural icon was originally based on a freed slave named Nancy Green, born in Montgomery County, Ky., in 1834.

In 1889 Chris Rutt and Charles Underwood of St. Joseph, Mo., bought the Pearl Milling Company and developed the first ready-mix pancake flour. After hearing a performer wearing blackface, an apron, and a bandana headband sing a tune called “Old Aunt Jemima” at a vaudeville show, Rutt decided that he had found the perfect name for his and Underwood’s new pancake mix. The following year they suffered financial difficulties and sold their formula to R. T. Davis and the Davis Milling Company. Davis, looking for a unique way to advertise his newly acquired product, discovered the warm and friendly Nancy Green working for a judge in Chicago and decided to bring the character of Aunt Jemima to life. The famous original Aunt Jemima image, painted by A. B. Frost, was based on Green’s likeness.

At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Davis Milling constructed the world’s largest flour barrel, and Nancy Green, as the vaudeville-inspired Aunt Jemima, demonstrated the pancake mix, making and serving thousands of pancakes and selling over 50,000 orders for the mix. Fair organizers were so impressed with Green in her role of Aunt Jemima that they declared her the “Pancake Queen.” For the next several years Davis and Green traveled the country promoting the pancake mix, their imminent arrival in towns often well advertised and highly anticipated. Nancy Green played the role of Aunt Jemima for 30 years, until her death in a car accident in Chicago in 1923.

Aunt Jemima pancake mix advertisement, c. 1950 (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

In 1926 Davis sold his company to Quaker Oats, and in 1933 Quaker decided to bring Aunt Jemima back to life. They hired Anna Robinson, “a large, gregarious woman with the face of an angel,” who traveled the country promoting the character until 1951. Her popularity continually increased, and from the mid-1950s until the late 1960s Disneyland boasted its own Aunt Jemima–themed restaurants. Aylene Lewis portrayed the character at the Aunt Jemima Pancake House from 1955 to 1962 and at the Aunt Jemima Kitchen from 1962 to 1969. Pancakes were no longer just for breakfast.

Over the decades, dozens of women donned Aunt Jemima’s bandana in promoting and demonstrating the pancake mix across the country, but the product’s packaging changed little. Aunt Jemima always wore the bandana and apron, and in person she spoke in dialect, sang songs, and told tales about the Old South. A typical 1920s advertisement portrays Aunt Jemima as a slave woman standing in the doorway of her cabin admiring a tall stack of pancakes. The copy reads, “Doesn’t it make you think of Mark Twain’s boyhood, and of Aunt Jemima, too, in her plantation cabin?” Unsurprisingly, African Americans objected to the stereotype, claiming that it was a glorification of slavery and a painful reminder of the occupational segregation that relegated a large percentage of black women to domestic service. Eventually the name “Aunt Jemima” came to represent something derogatory, akin to a female Uncle Tom.

In 1989, in an attempt to quell cries of racism and calls to discontinue use of their trademark character, the Quaker Oats Company modernized the image of Aunt Jemima from the stereotypical plump and jolly Gone with the Wind mammy character to a slimmer, lighter-skinned woman who wears pearl earrings and has a perm. Nevertheless, today’s made-over Aunt Jemima continues to invite debate and controversy. While some argue that antipathy toward the character is no longer warranted, others continue to consider the character a symbol of racial prejudice and social injustice.

JAMES G. THOMAS JR.

University of Mississippi

Ronnie Crocker, Houston Chronicle (5 April 1996); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (1999); Marilyn Kern-Foxworth, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Rastus: Blacks in Advertising, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (1994); M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (1998); Diane Roberts, The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region (1994).

 

Barbecue, Carolinas

When two Carolinians meet for the first time, typically they exchange three important pieces of information: church attended, basketball team embraced, and kind of barbecue eaten. Religion and sports affiliations may be minor differences, but barbecue styles are schisms. One commonality exists: barbecue is pork. The differences come down to a few essential points: which part of the pig contributed the meat, how finely is the meat chopped, and what barbecue sauce was sprinkled into it as it was chopped.

In eastern North Carolina, in the belt centered around Wilson, barbecue means meat from the whole pig. The slow-cooked meat is chopped fine, almost minced, and dressed with a sauce made from vinegar and red pepper. The flavor is as distinctly eastern Carolina as are tobacco sheds.

In western North Carolina, around Lexington and Shelby, the meat comes from the shoulder. It is chopped more coarsely, almost shredded, then dressed with a sauce made from vinegar, red pepper, and a little tomato, usually from ketchup. In South Carolina, there are pockets, centering around Columbia, that use a mustard-based barbecue sauce, but in most of South Carolina, one will find variations of the same two styles that prevail in North Carolina.

Barbecue in the Carolinas rarely if ever involves sauce on the meat as it cooks. Cooks may use a dry rub, or maybe a simple wet mop dabbed on the meat to keep it from drying out. The meat is the key, slow-cooked to sweet succulence, then dressed simply with dashes of vinegary sauce. Sandwiches are usually topped with coleslaw, often mixed with more barbecue sauce. Plates often come with some form of stew as a side dish, Brunswick stew in North Carolina, barbecue hash in some parts of South Carolina. Hush puppies are often elemental, and the iced tea is sweet.

There has been a lot of migration among these styles, of course. Cities like Charlotte and Raleigh have eastern-and Lexington-style restaurants and devoted fans of each. The 20th century saw Carolinians moving from farms to towns for factory and mill jobs, and their barbecue styles followed.

But why did the eastern and western areas of the state evolve such distinct styles? One finds little conclusive evidence, but theories abound. The eastern part of the state was settled much earlier, so its sauce style may date to a colonial era preference for sour, piquant tastes. In a 1995 issue of Food History News, Clarissa Dillon sites 18th-century letters and other written references from several spots in the South that describe barbecue as a cooked pig basted with wine, lemon juice, and spices—with never a mention of tomatoes. Kay Moss, of the Schiele Museum in Gastonia, N.C., suggests that tomatoes came late to the American diet, after the eastern barbecue style had become established. Moss found an 18th-century recipe from the Stockton family that specified pork, basted only with butter and pepper, but most early versions she has found describe a sauce of wine, lemon juice, sage, red and black pepper, and salt.

For the more modern Lexington-style barbecue, a firm genealogy dates to about 1920. Bob Garner tells the story of how a man named Jess Swicegood opened a barbecue stand in Lexington. A teenager named Warner Stamey took a job helping Swicegood. Stamey later sold barbecue in Shelby and Lexington and eventually opened Stamey’s in Greensboro. Among other claims to fame, Warner Stamey is believed to have been the first person to add hush puppies, a fish camp standard, to the chopped barbecue plate. Stamey trained his brother-in-law, Alston Bridges, who opened a restaurant in Shelby that still bears his name. Another employee was Red Bridges (no relation to Alston but the source of endless confusion in the barbecue world), whose descendants still run Bridges’s Barbecue Lodge in Shelby. And in the 1950s, Stamey employed a young Wayne Monk, who is now the best-known restaurant owner in pit-crazy Lexington, site of the annual Lexington Barbecue Festival.

In the Carolinas the barbecue business is a business. Church barbecues and family reunion pig pickin’s are still held (though nowadays they are often catered), and people do cook barbecue at home in small batches, usually involving a half-shoulder—a Boston butt—cooked in the oven or on a kettle grill. But true barbecue requires hours of slow-cooking over a wood fire, a hot, smoky affair, and most Carolinians leave the work to restaurants. People are as loyal to their favorite places as they are to their college teams, and routes to the beach are chosen based on which restaurant one wants to pass. Landmark barbecue restaurants such as the Skylight Inn in Ayden, Allen & Son in Chapel Hill, and Parker’s in Wilson are fixtures of their part of the culinary South.

KATHLEEN PURVIS

Charlotte Observer

Jim Auchmutey and Susan Puckett, The Ultimate Barbecue Sauce Cookbook (1995); Rick Browne and Jack Bettridge, Barbecue America: A Pilgrimage in Search of America’s Best Barbecue (1999); John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987); Lolis Eric Elie, Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country (1996); Bob Garner, North Carolina Barbecue: Flavored by Time (1996); John Thorne and Matt Lewis Thorne, Serious Pig: An American Cook in Search of His Roots (1996).

 

Barbecue, Memphis and Tennessee

When it comes to Memphis barbecue, it’s all about the pig—preferably pulled and piled on a sandwich, topped with sauce and slaw, and served with a glass of sweet tea. Some Memphis restaurants offer beef brisket, smoked chicken, even the rare “vegetarian” barbecue (a Portobello mushroom sandwich at Central BBQ), but those dishes are like the Filet-O-Fish on a McDonald’s menu, a postscript to the main attraction—the pulled pork sandwich, which is the state’s very own Big Mac.

Memphis proclaims itself the center of the barbecue universe. It is likely one of the few cities on the planet where one can consume barbecue for breakfast (at the more than 10 Tops locations, which open at 9 A.M. or earlier). “Once you get 50 miles away from Memphis, there’s no such thing as barbecue,” said Nick Vergos, part of the city’s first family of barbecue, whose father, Charlie Vergos, opened the “world famous” Rendezvous in the early 1960s. Veteran restaurateur Walker Taylor, who has been serving barbecue at the Germantown Commissary for more than 25 years, casts a wider net. “You can get good Memphisstyle barbecue in a one-hundred-mile radius,” said Taylor, who jokingly referred to this territory as “The Ring of Fire.”

John Egerton offers yet another view of the state’s barbecue boundary, as the section of the state “that includes the area north of Jackson and around Dyersburg. It extends into parts of Arkansas and Kentucky,” he said. “There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, but that’s barbecue country to me.”

In Memphis—home of the world’s largest pork barbecue cooking contest, held on the banks of the Mississippi River every May—the passion for pig goes way back. According to a 1989 story in the Commercial Appeal, historian Ed Williams, with tongue in cheek, traced the region’s first pig roast back to the 1500s: “When Hernando de Soto landed in Florida in May, 1539, he had with him six hundred men, two women, three hundred and twenty-seven horses, and a herd of pigs. For two years, the Spaniards explored the southeastern United States, and the pigs multiplied. One night, in 1541, a surprise Indian attack set fire to the Spanish camp somewhere south of the Chickasaw Bluff, and most of the hogs were burned to death. It may have been the first time the smell of barbecue wafted over the Mid-South.”

Little Pigs Barbecue, Memphis, Tenn. (Courtesy Amy Evans, photographer)

Leonard’s, among the city’s first barbecue restaurants, opened in 1922, borrowing cooking techniques from the area’s African American backyard barbecuers who cooked in old bathtubs or in pits dug into the ground. “It all started around Brownsville, a hotbed for barbecue in the heart of an agricultural area,” said Taylor, who turned his family’s country store into the Germantown Commissary. “The reason people in that area cooked shoulder was because it was cheap.” The shoulder turned out to be a perfect fit for long, slow cooking over the embers of a hickory fire. “It’s got that plate on the bottom, and a layer of skin that protected the meat,” Taylor said. “It works like a piece of aluminum foil.”

Shoulders were often cooked 8 to 12 hours before the meat was tender enough to pull off the bone, chop, and pile onto a sandwich. Cooking times vary widely now, as the average size of hogs has ballooned over the years. “We used to have a local slaughterhouse until about four years ago,” Taylor said. “You would get a thirteen- to fifteenpound shoulder that would sit nicely over the pit. Those days are over. Now, there are three or four major producers and shoulders are seventeen to twenty pounds.”

The debut of the überhog is not the only recent development in the barbecue business. An increasing number of restaurants are turning to gas-powered cookers. They work on the same principle of cooking the meat at a low temperature for an extended period, with a separate burn box where smoldering wood smoke filters into the meat cooking on rotisserie racks. While advocates cheer this as a technological advance, barbecue purists are not convinced. In his 1996 book Smokestack Lightening Lolis Eric Elie describes “the mediocre barbecue we’ve endured in Memphis, meat with all the flavor of boiled cotton,” to that produced by a seasoned pitmaster he finds in the country. “They say they have barbecue, but they don’t have a thing in the world but baked meat with barbecue sauce on it,” muses Billy Anderson of Anderson’s Bar-B-Que in Lexington, Tenn.

Walker Taylor explains that the Germantown Commissary installed a Southern Pride cooker because the small kitchen couldn’t handle the increasing volume of business with its traditional pit. “If I was only doing eight or ten shoulders a day, I would do it, but I would burn this place down if I cooked everything on the pit.”

One of the city’s most recognizable barbecue restaurants goes against the “low-and-slow” grain altogether and cooks its ribs over the direct heat generated by hardwood charcoal. “We don’t call it barbecue. We call them charcoalbroiled ribs,” said Nick Vergos, who runs the shipping part of the business, sending pork all over the country. “But then, is the guy who bakes his meat and puts sauce on it and calls it barbecue more barbecue than ours?”

Vergos’s father’s original restaurant served ham sandwiches and added ribs to the menu at the suggestion of a savvy meat salesman. “Mr. Fineberg brought my father some loin ribs and convinced him to try them,” Vergos recounted the often-told history. “He had a waiter named Lil’ John who said every barbecue he had ever eaten used vinegar. They didn’t have any vinegar, but they did have pickles, so they used some diluted pickle juice to baste the meat.”

The first batch didn’t have much flavor, so the elder Vergos experimented with sprinkling the ribs with spices he had in the kitchen for his signature chili. And the dry-rub rack of ribs was born. For many, especially people outside the region, those dry ribs epitomize Memphis barbecue. Daisy May’s BBQ USA in Manhattan touts its Memphis-style dry ribs, for instance.

Whether it’s ribs or a chopped shoulder sandwich, sauce is used sparingly, or served on the side. The tomato-based sauces balance sweet and tangy and are often spiked with liquid smoke. Some barbecue restaurants in the Memphis area offer a hot sauce option, which is closer to the thin, vinegar-based sauces of North Carolina, but with a fiery kick.

Barbecue contest champion John Willingham writes in his cookbook, John Willingham’s World Champion Bar-B-Q, “I am convinced that sauce was invented to cover up mistakes in cooking. . . . I, however, serve my sauces on the side only.” Willingham, a Shelby County commissioner who operated a barbecue restaurant for several years, offers up his signature recipe that calls for tomato sauce, Coke, cider vinegar, chili sauce, steak sauce, lemon juice, dark brown sugar, soy sauce, and a host of spices.

Many restaurants have turned their sauces into side businesses. The Bar-B-Q Shop, which sells its sauce under the “Dancing Pigs” label, was singled out as having the country’s best vinegar-based barbecue sauce during Chili Pepper magazine’s 2005 Fiery Food challenge. Coleslaw, typically finished with a mayonnaise-based dressing, is the cool yang to the sauce’s yin on a shoulder sandwich. Slaw preparations vary widely in texture and taste, from minced to shredded, and from sweet to the savory mustard slaw found at Payne’s on Lamar—not to be confused with the Payne’s on Elvis Presley Boulevard.

At Mary’s Old-Fashioned Pit Barbeque in Nashville, pickles stand in for slaw. That shredded cabbage salad is an option, but costs extra. The pulled pork sandwich at Mary’s shows its regional colors in another respect: it’s offered on either the standard hamburger bun or on savory cornmeal cakes.

The atmosphere at restaurants in Tennessee barbecue country varies as much as coleslaw recipes. While some customers insist that the best barbecue is found at out-of-the-way holes-in-the-wall, full-service restaurants such as Corky’s offer a casual dining experience and drive-through service. Many diners have made personal connections with the boisterous crew of waiters at the Rendezvous, where the minimum tenure of most members of the wait staff is 20 years.

After gnawing through racks of ribs or tackling wonderfully messy pulled pork sandwiches, diners face another challenge at the end of the meal. With the exception of the Rendezvous, which does not offer anything sweet, Memphis barbecue restaurants tempt customers with caramel cakes, banana pudding, fried pies, and, at the Germantown Commissary, fresh-baked coconut cream and lemon meringue pies, which have been made by the same woman for the past 18 years.

LESLIE KELLY

Memphis, Tennessee

John T. Edge, Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South (2000); John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987); Lolis Eric Elie, Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country (2005); Jeffrey Steingarten, The Man Who Ate Everything: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Food, but Were Afraid to Ask (1999).

 

Barbecue, Texas

Like nearly everything else associated with the Lone Star State, Texas barbecue is stereotyped. The common assumption is that southern barbecue is slow-cooked pork and that Texas barbecue is slow-cooked beef. There is at least a grain of truth in that image—pork generally dominates barbecue in the Southeast, and beef often is the centerpiece of barbecue in the Southwest—but the history and culture of Texas (and its barbecue) are much more interesting and complex than the cowboy and beef cattle stereotype that throws such a long mythic shadow over all aspects of Texas, including its foodways.

Texas is a geographic and cultural crossroads, the site of a complex convergence of traditions where the Southeast meets the Southwest, where the southern plantations of east Texas encounter the ranches of south and west Texas, and where an ethnically diverse Texas culture shares an international border with Mexico. The music, food, and lifestyles of American Indians, Anglo Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and numerous immigrant groups—Germans, Czechs, Cajuns, among many others—came to Texas from every direction, encountered each other, and for centuries have been sharing (and sometimes fighting over) land, legal systems, politics, music, and food. No place is more reflective of that convergence than central Texas, an area surrounding the state capital of Austin by about 75 miles in every direction that appropriately has been called the Texas Barbecue Belt.

The foodways that historically came together in Texas formed a rich mélange of regional cuisines, including most notably Mexican (or “Tex-Mex”) food and barbecue. Because it has so many sources, Texas barbecue involves a wide array of meats (beef, pork, mutton, cabrito or kid goat, sausage, and chicken, among others), preparations (including dry rubs, wet mops, tomatobased sauce, vinegar-based sauce, and no sauce), woods (oak, hickory, mesquite, and more) and side dishes, drinks, and desserts that commonly go with it. Despite the many cultural sources and differences, all Texas barbecue traditions have one thing in common: meat (often beef) that has been slow-cooked over indirect heat and wood smoke, although sometimes grilling directly over coals is a component of the slow-cooking process, especially in cowboy cooking. It is also a given that the social scene that revolves around the all-day cooking and eating is referred to as “a barbecue.” Although barbecue has become a staple of Texas’s restaurant industry, and barbecue cookoffs and eating contests are now widespread in Texas, barbecues also are often special cultural events such as family reunions and political gatherings. In 1860 Sam Houston spoke at “The Great American Barbecue,” a major political rally, and nearly a century later, in 1941, Governor W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel threw a free barbecue on the grounds of the governor’s mansion to celebrate his inauguration. Some 20,000 Texans showed up to consume 6,000 pounds of barbecued beef, in addition to mutton, chicken, a half ton of potato salad, and all the fixin’s, plus one barbecued buffalo killed by Pappy himself for the occasion. U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson held many barbecues for world leaders at his ranch on the banks of the Pedernales River in the central Texas Hill Country.

Barbecue came to Texas as part of the cultural baggage of southern Anglo Americans and African Americans who brought with them barbecue traditions that had been noted in the colonial South as early as the 17th and 18th centuries. In his 1705 history of Virginia, planter Robert Beverley discussed the “Barbacueing” that had been picked up from local natives, and George Washington later in the century wrote about attending and giving barbecues. The term itself—barbecue in English or barbacoa in Spanish—is a phonetic pronunciation of the Indian term barbracot, which refers to the raised wooden grill set up over a bed of coals to smoke and slow-cook meats in the Caribbean and on the North American mainland. Beginning in the 1600s, southern Anglo American colonists and African American slaves picked up this tradition from Indians in the New World and raised it to a culinary art and well-known social institution in the American South. While these barbecue traditions were developing across the South, Spanish and French adventurers in the part of colonial Spanish Mexico that would become Texas were contacting Indians who had included the grilling and smoking of meat in their traditions for centuries. When La Salle was establishing a French presence in Spanish Texas in the 1680s, he and his colleagues often hunted buffalo, then roasted and smoked the meat in pits, even commenting that the meat “had a much better taste” than that found in France. By the time Anglo Americans and their African American slaves left the South for Mexican Texas in the 1820s and 1830s, they took with them various barbecue traditions, many based on pork, a staple of the southern diet, including that of poor whites, slaves, yeoman farmers, and plantation owners alike. African Americans were often the cooks on plantations that dominated some areas of the South, including parts of east Texas, and African American barbecuing has remained a component of southern and Texas barbecue to this day.

By the end of the Civil War the Anglo Americans in Texas had merged their southern cow herding traditions with the vaquero ranching traditions of Spanish Mexico to form the American cowboy way of life based on driving surplus longhorn beef cattle to distant markets. Southern barbecue and Mexican barbacoa cooking traditions combined in outdoor cowboy cooking in pits and over coals. As a result of the proliferation of cattle in Texas and eventually across the nation, beef assumed a new importance, joining pork as a staple in many people’s diets. Captain Flack, a famous frontier hunter, noted that it was common in mid-19th century Texas to hunt wild longhorn cattle along with deer, and that people would gladly use the meat. Adding to this mid-19th-century cultural mix were Texas’s many immigrant groups, including large numbers of Germans and Czechs who settled in the central Texas region, bringing with them their traditions of sausage making and smoked meats.

Over the next 100 years the convergence of southern barbecue traditions with Texas’s Spanish/Mexicanin-fluenced cattle culture and European ethnic foodways led to the classic barbecue meal found in the central Texas Barbecue Belt in the early 21st century: slow-cooked and smoked beef brisket, sausage, and ribs, with a variety of sauces for pouring or dipping, plus the now-traditional side dishes of potato salad, coleslaw, pinto beans, pickles, and onions. Iced tea, soda, and beer are the usual drinks, and there is often a stack of squishy white bread slices with which to make a “sausage wrap” or a sliced beef sandwich or to use for sopping the plate. A few barbecue restaurants stubbornly still serve only meat, with no side dishes, reflecting their origins as meat markets and butcher shops in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Especially in the years since World War II, many meat markets serving leftover smoked meats as a sideline evolved into full-fledged barbecue restaurants with side dishes and sit-down dining. Although there are a few successful barbecue restaurant chains, most well-regarded barbecue places are mom-and-pop joints in the form of a roadside stand, a small house on a city street, or a sprawling suburban restaurant. The slow-cooking involved in most barbecue simply defies the approach that makes fast-food restaurants successful.

Three sites widely regarded as the holy trinity of central Texas barbecue joints are Louis Mueller’s (pronounced Miller) Barbecue in Taylor, Kreuz (pronounced Krites) Market in Lockhart, and Cooper’s Old Time Pit Bar-B-Que in Llano. All three are located in towns that think of themselves as the barbecue capital of Texas, and all three have family histories that have led to competing branches and sometimes family feuds that are of great interest to barbecue fans. They also reveal much about the German, meat market, and cowboy roots of Texas barbecue as it evolved beyond its predominately southeastern origins. Mueller’s has a coarse-grained German “hot gut” sausage in addition to other meats; Kreuz’s serves only meat on butcher paper (although it has added a few side dishes in recent years); and Cooper’s enormous pits in the parking lot feature less smoking and more grilling in the cowboy tradition of cooking directly over coals. The many Mikeska brothers, sometimes referred to as the first family of Texas barbecue, have run barbecue joints in towns sprinkled all over central Texas for several generations. Despite the tight family connection, the menus, sauces, and meats are different in every Mikeska restaurant, illustrating the many differences in barbecue wherever it is found from joint to joint, town to town, and region to region throughout Texas and the rest of Barbecue Nation. There are many disputes about Texas barbecue as a result of its diverse cultural roots, but there is no doubt that it is a beloved culinary tradition and a nearly sacred meal served at some of the most important moments in the private and public lives of Texans.

GEORGE B. WARD

Austin, Texas

T. Lindsey Baker, in Juneteenth Texas: Essays in African-American Folklore, ed. Francis E. Abernethy (1996); Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia, ed. Louis B. Wright (1947); Bill Crawford, Please Pass the Biscuits, Pappy: Pictures of Governor W. Lee O’Daniel (2004); J. Frank Dobie, The Longhorns (2000); David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989); William C. Foster, ed., The La Salle Expedition to Texas: The Journal of Henri Joutel, 1684–1687 (1998); Ernestine Sewell Linck and Joyce Gibson Roach, Eats: A Folk History of Texas Foods (1989); Jack Jackson, Los Mesteños: Spanish Ranching in Texas, 1721–1821 (1986); Terry C. Jordan, Trails to Texas: Southern Roots of Western Cattle Ranching (1981); W. W. Newcomb Jr., The Indians of Texas: From Prehistoric to Modern Times (1961); Robb Walsh, Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook: Recipes and Recollections from the Pit Bosses (2002).

Beans for sale at a farmers’ market (Bill Tarpenning, photographer, United States Department of Agriculture)

 

Beans

Beans have been a mainstay of the southern table since long before European settlement. Fresh from the garden, dried, canned, or frozen, they have sustained the South for centuries.

The signature dish of the mountain South is a bowl of soup beans, with a wedge of hot cornbread and a slice of onion. Although most beans yield a flavorful soup, in southern Appalachia, pintos are the legume of choice, simmered in water and seasoned with pork. In times when meat was scarce, neighbors often passed hunks of pork among themselves to season their beans, until all the flavor was cooked out of this “community sinker.”

Green beans, strung and broken into washpans on southern porches, are one of the most common side dishes all through the region. They, too, are typically cooked slowly, with pork side meat, until the beans are quite soft, usually about two hours. When new potatoes are freshly dug, cooks add them for the second hour. Half-runners and Kentucky Wonders are favorite varieties of green beans, staked in the garden with cane poles and tied with twine. The term mess of beans is used to describe the harvest and is a vague form of measurement that indicates roughly the amount of beans required to feed one’s family. Before canning techniques were taught throughout the mountains by home demonstration agents, green beans were preserved for the winter by drying. The beans, left whole, were sewn onto threads and dried in the sun for about three weeks. These “leather britches,” shuck beans, or shucky beans were then stored in covered containers for months. Cooking required a long soak in water and about six hours in simmering water on the stove before the proper tenderness was achieved.

Farther south, diners savor butter beans, particularly the speckled variety that William Faulkner supposedly reminisced about in Paris with fellow writer Katherine Anne Porter. Butter beans are related to limas but have a creamier flavor, hence the name. White navy beans, in a thick broth, are common cafeteria fare throughout the South.

Seasoned beans served over rice are basic to the coastal cooking of the South. A traditional Hispanic meal is Moors and Christians, featuring saucy black beans over boiled white rice. In Louisiana, cooking red beans and rice evolved into a Monday tradition, since that was washday and cooks could leave the beans relatively untended on the back of the stove while completing their housework. The dominant seasoning for a pot of red beans and rice is pork, in the form of ham, andouille sausage, or even Spanish-inspired chorizo. Either the stewed, spicy beans are cooked separately and served atop a plate of rice, or the rice is cooked in the bean liquid.

Diners all across the Deep South sit down to bowls of hoppin’ John for good luck on New Year’s Day. This dish is a blend of black-eyed peas and rice, again flavored by pork—ham hocks, side meat, or bacon. Brought to America on slave ships in the 17th century, blackeyed peas are actually beans (Vigna unguiculata) and are also commonly referred to as cowpeas, field peas, or crowder peas. A hip-hop group, the Black Eyed Peas, finds this bean a symbol for their African American–inspired music.

In the novel and play The Member of the Wedding, by Georgia native Carson McCullers, a bowl of hoppin’ John is the final test of a character’s mortality: “Now hopping-john was F. Jasmine’s very favorite food. She had always warned them to wave a plate of rice and peas before her nose when she was in her coffin, to make certain there was no mistake; for if a breath of life was left in her, she would sit up and eat, but if she smelled the hopping-john and did not stir, then they could just nail down the coffin and be certain she was truly dead.”

Beans even show up on the southern dessert table, in the form of bean pies. Pinto beans in the Upper South and red beans in the Deep South are mashed, sugared, and baked in a crust, sometimes with pecans or other nuts added to the filling.

Storehouses of southern soil and sun, beans are nourishing, filling, and inexpensive, giving substance and variety to menus from the mountains to the marshes.

FRED W. SAUCEMAN

East Tennessee State University

John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987); Ronni Lundy, Butter Beans to Blackberries: Recipes from the Southern Garden (1999), Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken: The Heart and Soul of Southern Country Kitchens (1991); Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding (1958).

 

Beaufort Stew/Frogmore Stew

The South Carolina Lowcountry, embracing the Sea Islands and the coastal plain, is home to a broad range of culinary traditions. Greatly influenced by French, English, African American, and Native American foodways, the variety is impressive and includes several seafood stews, of which Beaufort stew, also known as Lowcountry boil or Frogmore stew, is the most well known.

Taking its name from two of the oldest Sea Island communities, Beaufort and Frogmore, the stew typically calls for a rather simple recipe: combine several large boiling potatoes, a couple pounds of smoked sausage, half a dozen ears of corn, and two pounds of shrimp. Most recipes call for these ingredients to be boiled with certain seasonings, like crab boil, and the stew is normally served with hot sauce.

This stew is equally at home on Lowcountry townhouse tables and at the family reunions of people who have traditionally farmed and fished the Sea Islands. This is a clear indication of the sharing of traditions, or creolization, that took place during the era when rice plantations dominated the South Carolina coastal plain. Enslaved African Americans brought from Africa the skills and knowledge needed to grow rice, as well as culinary traditions that became intertwined with traditions of other ethnic groups.

Planters, slaves, and small family farmers all depended on one-pot meals prepared in large black iron kettles. Whether the dish contained potatoes or rice depended largely on availability and time of year. Quoting from the antebellum records of Hagley Plantation, Charles Joyner notes that between April and October each worker was allowed a pint of “small [rice] twice a week” and that “seafood ran a close second in popularity to pork among the Waccamaw slaves,” who added “to their allowances of food by using their off times for fishing, crabbing, oystering, and clamming.”

Even traditional dishes are subject to change and variation, and Beaufort stew is no exception. Although the longstanding prevalence of one-pot meals in American cooking points to antebellum origins, many argue that the nomenclature has been in use only since the middle years of the 20th century. Stories attempting to account for the stew’s origins are numerous. They include tales of a fraternity cookout on a South Carolina beach and the last desperate attempt of an Army National Guard cook to feed the soldiers in his unit. Many scholars attribute the addition of link sausage to the influence of European butchery.

Numerous narratives clearly point to antebellum origins. Sabe Rutledge, who was born on a rice plantation just before the Civil War, told a researcher in the 1930s about two cooking pots maintained by her mother: “Boil all day and all night . . . cedar paddle stir with.” Regardless of differences in nomenclature or recipe variations, one-pot meals have been a significant part of the American cooking heritage for hundreds of years.

The ingredients in Beaufort stew are boiled and then strained. The vegetables, shrimp, and sausage are removed from the pot and eaten only after this straining process is completed. This, when compared to other southern stews, presents a distinct difference in the method of consumption. It is commonly agreed that a Beaufort stew cooked long enough to thicken significantly becomes what folks generally refer to as a muddle.

SADDLER TAYLOR

McKissick Museum, Columbia, South Carolina

Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (1984), Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture (1999); Stan Woodward, Southern Stews: A Taste of the South (documentary film, 2002).

 

Benne

Benne is a South Carolina term for sesame. The oilseed Sesamum indicum is thought to have been brought to the United States from Africa during the period of the slave trade. The term itself seems to confirm the African origin of the plant as the word bene means sesame in the language of the Bambara peoples of Mali and among the Wolof of Senegal and Gambia. Sesame is among the herbs and spices listed in Egypt’s Ebers papyrus (a voluminous record of ancient Egyptian medicine) and has long been used in the cooking of the southern part of the Mediterranean basin. The plant will tolerate high temperatures and drought. Most important, its oil has a nutty flavor and is resistant to rancidity.

Benne was noted in South Carolina records as early as 1730 as sesamum and appears in Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book. In the colonial period, sesame was much cultivated in personal gardens by enslaved Africans along with other foodstuffs of African origin like okra, black-eyed peas, and watermelon. The British even contemplated cultivating the plant in the American colonies for its oil in hopes that its use would supplant that of imported olive oil.

In the South Carolina Lowcountry, the seeds are the major ingredients in a variety of dishes and turn up in almost every course of the meal from the benne crackers that accompany drinks to the benne brittle that may end the meal. Sarah Rutledge offers a recipe for benne-oyster soup in her 1847 Carolina Housewife. Finally, for many folks in the Carolinas, benne seeds are reputed to bring good luck.

JESSICA B. HARRIS

Queens College

Dorothea Bedigian, in The Cambridge World History of Food, ed. Kenneth Kiple and Kriemild Connee Ornelas (2000); Jessica B. Harris, The Welcome Table: African American Heritage Cooking (1995); Sarah Rutledge, The Carolina Housewife (1847); John Martin Taylor, Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking (1992).

 

Biscuits

Biscuits have provided nourishment to generations of southerners, been a part of everyday family rituals, and become the symbols of regional tradition. North Carolina chef and author Bill Neal entitled a chapter of one of his books “The Pride of the South: Hot Biscuits.” One of the first stories that legendary chef and food writer Edna Lewis told her friend Scott Peacock was of the northerner who came to the South and returned home. Someone asked him about the biscuits, and he explained, “Every time someone would start to bring biscuits to the table, they’d stop and say, ‘I’m sorry but they’re not hot enough’ . . . and they’d disappear.” Peacock saw this as an illustration of “the pride, even fanaticism, with which Southern cooks regard traditional breads.”

Biscuits are quick breads, those not needing to rise before being baked. The term bis coctus is Latin, biscuit is Old French, and bisquit appeared in Middle English. Biscuits are likely European in derivation, although a British biscuit is a thin, crispy cracker or a cookie. Perhaps the first biscuits in the South were beaten biscuits, made with high-gluten flour and water, producing a dough that is beaten, or “broken,” until it is spongy in texture. These baked biscuits are tender, as would be bread made with yeast. Beaten biscuits require considerable work, though, involving pounding of the dough with a mallet, skillet, or other heavy instrument, continually folding and flattening the dough. In 1877 the invention of a dough-kneading machine made the process less burdensome, although the machine was rare in parts of the South. Beaten biscuits almost disappeared from some regions of the South in the 20th century, but they did survive in the Upper South, often as an accompaniment to that region’s cured country hams. Thinly sliced pieces of ham piled high on halves of a beaten biscuit are still a prized southern treat. Angel biscuits, sometimes called bride’s biscuits, are also frequently served with country ham. These biscuits are made with both baking powder and yeast, making them yeast rolls that have some of the character of beaten biscuits.

The standard biscuit of the South has been called a soda, baking power, or buttermilk biscuit, with all three of those ingredients important to most recipes. They are also known as raised biscuits. Commercial baking powder and baking soda were both available in the South by 1870, but even more important was the accessibility of flour from midwestern mills. The falling price of flour in the 1880s made it affordable to a wide range of southerners and promoted the southern turn to biscuits. The White Lily company soon began producing low-gluten flour, which was softer than that of the midwestern mills. Cooks have insisted ever since that it produces the best biscuits. Fat is another key element. Bill Neal’s contemporary take on biscuit making suggests that vegetable shortening is the easiest fat to handle in biscuit dough, while butter produces the best flavor but weakest structure. “A biscuit without some little bit of lard will never taste truly Southern to me,” he added. Many cooks produce “cat head biscuits,” termed that because of the large size and rough exterior texture of the dough dropped onto the baking pan.

Biscuits became part of the standard southern breakfast—along with ham, eggs, grits, and redeye gravy. Some families ate biscuits three times a day, although cornbread remained typical bread for midday dinner. Biscuits on Sunday helped to make that a special day in the South. Bluesman B. B. King, son of a Mississippi sharecropper, remembers that “we always had buttered biscuits on Sunday mornings, with preserves that we put up ourselves.” Biscuits were also often an accompaniment to Sunday chicken dinners after church.

The appeal of biscuits is partly seen in ways that people talk about them. African American writer James Weldon Johnson came south in the height of Jim Crow’s racial oppression. Amidst many depressing experiences, he had breakfast at a café whose biscuits made a profound impression upon him. He found them “so light and flaky that a fellow with any appetite at all would have no difficulty in disposing of eight or ten.” When finished, he felt that by eating in a homey café with good food, well run by African Americans, he had “experienced the realization of, at least, one of my dreams of Southern life.” Kentuckian Martha Neal Cooke, in the 1950s, remembered from her childhood “silver dollar biscuits that would fog your glasses when you pulled them apart.” John T. Edge has noted of Mississippian Queenie Dixon’s bread: “Some say her biscuits are so light, they let you taste heaven.”

Modernization has affected the production and consumption of biscuits. Comedian Jerry Clower saw the rise of store-bought, packaged biscuits as a sign that the world was going to hell in a breadbasket. In exuberant prose, he recounted, in one of his stories, his mama making cat head biscuits, wallowing the lard and flour in her hands. “Now them biscuits was fit to eat,” he said, in his southern idiom. In contrast, the biscuits in little cardboard tubes, which you had to “whop on the side of the counter,” were not. Nonetheless, working mothers in the South as elsewhere found packaged biscuit dough an acceptable substitute for homemade biscuits when they were marketed in the mid-20th century. Cookbooks soon offered recipes for “food processor biscuits” to save time in producing more authentic biscuits. Since the 1970s major chicken and hamburger fast-food chains in the South have served biscuits. A Hardee’s franchise in North Carolina popularized a biscuit recipe that was popular with consumers, and Bojangles and Biscuitville are also popular outlets. As John Egerton has noted, fast-food biscuits have become in many communities “the new standard of what a biscuit is.”

Southern singers have sung about biscuits, with “baking biscuits” given sexual implications by blues-singing women. Memphis Minnie warned, for example, “Don’t let no outside women make no biscuits for your man.” Since 1951 Sonny Payne has hosted his radio show, King Biscuit Time, from downtown Helena, Ark., kicking it off with “Pass the biscuits, because it’s King Biscuit Time on KFFA radio!” And southern writers have written about biscuits. Terry Kay has a memorable biscuit-making scene in his novel, To Dance with the White Dog. Trying to duplicate his wife’s recipe for biscuits, he is so unsuccessful that “he put one in front of the dog and the dog sniffed and looked up at him sadly and trotted away.”

One southern sports team has made the biscuit a part of its name. The Montgomery Biscuits are a minor league baseball team, whose logo is a talking happy biscuit. They recently have partnered with Mary B’s Biscuits and Alaga Syrup. Mary B’s Biscuits, manufactured by Hom/Ade Food, Inc., of Bagdad, Fla., are the best-selling fresh-baked frozen biscuit on the market, which is the latest expression of the continuing southern embrace of the biscuit. The product appeared on the market in 1998 and now can be purchased at 9,000 retail stores across the country. Whitefield Foods, Inc., headquartered in Montgomery, has manufactured Alaga Syrup since 1906. The Montgomery Biscuits have biscuits and syrup at the concession stands during their games, and a biscuit launcher fires Mary B’s Biscuits into the bleachers between innings.

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

John T. Edge, A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South (1999); John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987); Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock, The Gift of Southern Cooking: Recipes and Revelations from Two Great American Cooks (2003); Bill Neal, Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet Potato Pie (1990).

 

Black-eyed Peas

Black-eyed peas, Vigna unguiculata (Vigna sinensis is a synonym), are a variety of cowpeas and part of the fabaceae or pea family. Shelled black-eyed peas are kidney-shaped and have a dark eye in the center. The black-eyed pea’s origins can be traced to east Africa, where cowpeas grow wild, and to India and other parts of Asia, where relatives of the black-eyed pea are found, including the Chinese bean or yardlong bean. Black-eyed peas came to the United States from Africa. The slave trade introduced them to the Caribbean and the continental U.S. as early as the 1600s.

Common names for black-eyed peas include blue-eyed beans, bung belly, chain-gang peas, China beans, cow beans, cowpeas, cream peas, field peas, and crowders. In northern and northcentral areas of the United States, they are called black-eyed beans. In early America, black-eyed peas were also called cornfield peas, reflecting the practice of sowing them between rows of corn. Because English peas could not endure the warm climate, southerners used the word “peas” to describe the substitute they could successfully plant; hence the names southern peas and southern field peas.

George Washington experienced the difficulty of growing English peas first-hand when he tried to grow imported vetch and garden peas at Mount Vernon. In a 1796 letter to Thomas Jefferson, Washington expressed concern that peas from England could not survive the Virginia heat. The next year, he experimented with black-eyed peas. In a letter dated 15 July 1797 Washington wrote, “From the cultivation of the common black eye peas I have more hope and am trying them this year both as a crop, and for plowing in as a manure.”

Early American farmers grew cowpeas as animal fodder and to improve soil. As for human consumption, blackeyed peas were often associated with slaves and the poor. Yet dishes containing black-eyed peas found their way to the tables of the rich, too. An entry on 3 August 1774 in Thomas Jefferson’s garden book reads “black eyed peas come to table.” Jefferson, in fact, grew several varieties of black-eyed peas at Monticello. Mary Randolph, daughter of a legislator and wealthy plantation owner, gave a recipe for field peas in her cookbook The Virginia House-wife, first published in 1824. Her recipe calls for the peas to be mashed, fried into a cake, and garnished with bacon.

In the beginning of the 20th century, agricultural scientist George Washington Carver increased the popularity of black-eyed peas through his work at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Farmers often had to work with poor soil, and fertilizer was expensive. Though farmers knew manure would improve conditions, the poor could not afford to keep a large number of animals. Carver encouraged farmers to grow cowpeas, emphasizing their value as a nitrogen fixer. Carver also taught women how to cook cowpeas. He published four bulletins promoting their cultivation and use, highlighting nutritional benefits. In “Bulletin No. 5, Cow Peas,” printed in 1903, Carver wrote, “As a food for man, the cow pea should be to the South, what the White, Soup, Navy, or Boston bean is to the North, East, and West: and it may be prepared in a sufficient number of ways to suit the most fastidious palate.” Five years later, he published a new edition of the bulletin, noting a demand for information about cowpeas and the increase in production in various states. “Bulletin No. 35,” published in 1917, contains 40 recipes, including croquettes, baked peas, creamed peas, griddle cakes, hoppin’ John, pea coffee, and “cow pea custard pie.”

Southerners traditionally eat blackeyed peas on New Year’s Day for good luck. They are often boiled with salt pork or fatback. In some regions they are served with greens or cabbage, which symbolize dollar bills, and the black-eyed peas represent coins. In the Carolina Lowcountry, they are paired with rice in a dish called hoppin’ John. In Texas, black-eyed peas are the main ingredient in a type of salsa or relish called Texas caviar, which is served with corn chips.

Some southern communities celebrate local ties to black-eyed peas. Athens, Tex., calls itself the “Black-Eyed Pea Capital” because commercial production of peas became the town’s largest industry in the early 20th century. People in Harmon County, Okla., have held a black-eyed pea festival every August since 1987.

SHAUN CHAVIS

Boston University

Robert C. Baron, ed., The Garden and Farm Books of Thomas Jefferson (1987); Victor R. Boswell, in The World in Your Garden, ed. National Geographic Society (1957); Jane Carson, Colonial Virginia Cookery (1985); George Washington Carver, “Bulletin No. 5. Cow Peas” (1903), “Bulletin No. 13. How to Cook Cow Peas” (1908), “Bulletin No. 35. How to Grow the Cow Pea and 40 Ways of Preparing it as a Table Delicacy” (1917); Frederic G. Cassidy, ed., Dictionary of American Regional English, vol. 1 (1985); Frederic G. Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall, eds., Dictionary of American Regional English, vol. 2 (1991); John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745–1799, vol. 35 (1940); Karen Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection (1992); Rackham Holt, George Washington Carver: An American Biography (1946); Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont, Eating in America: A History (1976); John Martin Taylor, Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking (1992).

 

Bourbon Whiskey

Bourbon is a type or style of whiskey associated, in terms of production, with the Mid-South, and, in terms of consumption, with all of the southern states. The term whiskey refers to any spirit distilled from fermented grain and aged in hardwood barrels. Bourbon whiskey is such a spirit made from a mash of primarily corn, with smaller amounts of malted barley and either rye or wheat. The other major distinguishing characteristic of bourbon is that the barrels in which it is aged are heavily charred on their inside surface and used only once. This practice maximizes the filtering effect of the char and the extraction of sugars and flavors from the wood. The wood used for barrels is typically American white oak from Arkansas or Missouri.

The beverage known today as bourbon whiskey emerged in the mid-19th century, although the name was in use a few decades earlier. Its antecedents are the other whiskeys produced in America and Europe prior to the 19th century, as well as other aged spirits such as brandy.

The path to bourbon begins at the Cumberland Gap, the easiest point of passage through the Appalachian Mountains, where Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia meet. European settlement of that region began in earnest after the French ceded control of it to the British with the Treaty of Paris in 1763. The distillation of spirits from grain was a common activity on this frontier. Based on observations of Native Americans in the area, the new settlers quickly concluded that native corn (maize) was better suited to the region than wheat, rye, or other familiar Old World grains. One reason was that the new lands were heavily wooded and corn could be cultivated in fields from which stumps had not been removed. Corn also matured quickly in the Mid-South climate, so a crop could be harvested in about three months.

Farmers ate their corn and fed it to livestock. The only practical way to market surplus corn was in the form of whiskey. Many farmers had stills with which they processed their own corn and that of their neighbors who did not possess the skills or equipment. Millers also operated distilleries. On the frontier, whiskey functioned as virtual currency. Whiskey, along with flour and hemp, was one of the earliest and most successful frontier products sold in markets downriver.

The routine aging of bourbon began in the mid-19th century. Aging improves the taste of the whiskey significantly, enriching, mellowing, and polishing it. Whiskey is aged in 53-gallon (200-liter) barrels stored in large warehouses, also known as rickhouses, rackhouses, or barrel houses. During the warm days of summer, whiskey expands deep into the wood. In the cool nights it contracts, extracting various wood sugars and other flavors. This expansion/contraction is referred to as cycling. Humidity and air circulation are other factors that affect how whiskey ages. Two whiskeys made exactly the same way can taste very different when mature, because of differences in how they are aged.

Straight bourbon must be aged for at least two years. It usually is aged for four to six years and may be aged for 20 years or more. Because bourbon is aged only in new barrels, over-aging is possible.

The name bourbon comes from the Kentucky county of that name. Bourbon County was formed in 1785 when Kentucky was still a territory of Virginia. It was named in honor of the French royal family in gratitude for France’s help during the Revolution. The original Bourbon County covered a vast area comprising 32 modern Kentucky counties. When the term bourbon first began to be used for whiskey, it described any whiskey made in that region. As the unique corn-based whiskey of the region grew in popularity, so did the name.

While bourbon whiskey can be made anywhere in the United States and has been made in states other than Kentucky, the beverage is most associated with Kentucky and today virtually all of it is produced there. With the exception of Tennessee whiskey, the other types of American whiskey (rye, corn, and blends) are mostly produced in Kentucky as well. The Kentucky Bourbon Festival is held each fall in Bardstown, Ky. Bourbon came to prominence with the opening of the western territories following the Civil War. Commercialscale distilling developed during this period because of growing demand from western markets and the improved ability to reach all markets by rail rather than water transport.

Today the definition of bourbon is a matter of federal law. The Standards of Identity for Distilled Spirits describe “bourbon whisky” as “whisky produced at not exceeding 160° proof from a fermented mash of not less than 51 percent corn . . . and stored at not more than 125° proof in charred new oak containers.” To be called “straight” bourbon whisky it must “have been stored in the type of oak containers prescribed, for a period of 2 years or more.” All whiskey sold in the United States must be bottled at not less than 80° proof (40 percent alcohol by volume). Although 80° is the most common proof, other proofs available are 86, 90, 100, 101, and 107.

“Degrees (°) of proof” is a way of describing alcohol concentration in an alcohol and water solution. For example, 100° proof describes a solution that is 50 percent alcohol and 50 percent water. The term evolved on the frontier, where various crude methods were used to determine the alcohol content of whiskey. A whiskey that passed these tests was said to be “proved.”

Bourbon is the most popular type of American whiskey, but it is not the only type. The best-selling brand of American whiskey, Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey, is not bourbon but a sourmash whiskey. Tennessee whiskey is produced exactly like bourbon except it is filtered through sugar-maple charcoal before barreling. Other types of American whiskey are straight rye, straight corn, and American blended whiskey.

Bourbon whiskey plays a major role in southern culture, especially in cooking, hospitality, and literature. In the kitchen it shows up in recipes for many popular sauces and glazes, in sweet potato casserole and bread pudding, and in confections such as bourbon balls. It is the main ingredient in classic cocktails such as the mint julep, oldfashioned, whiskey toddy, and whiskey sour. Naturally, it is often paired with another iconic southern beverage, Coca-Cola.

In literature, bourbon whiskey figured prominently in both the works and life of William Faulkner. The image of a hard-drinking writer is hardly confined to the South, but if the writer is southern, the drink is likely bourbon. As Walker Percy wrote in his 1975 essay “Bourbon,” “Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.” Bourbon whiskey once was the most popular distilled spirit in the United States, but it began to fall from favor after World War II everywhere except the South, which is still known in the beverage industry as “the bourbon belt.” Since the 1980s, bourbon and Tennessee whiskey have grown in international popularity.

Landmark distilleries such as Jim Beam, Jack Daniel’s, Four Roses, Heaven Hill, Maker’s Mark, Wild Turkey, Woodford Reserve, and Buffalo Trace are popular tourist attractions in Kentucky and Tennessee. The Oscar Getz Museum of Whiskey History is located in Bardstown, Ky.

CHARLES K. COWDERY

Chicago, Illinois

Gerald Carson, The Social History of Bourbon: An Unhurried Account of our Star-Spangled American Drink (1963); Charles K. Cowdery, Bourbon, Straight: The Uncut and Unfiltered Story of American Whiskey (2004); Henry G. Crowgey, Kentucky Bourbon: The Early Years of Whiskey-Making (1971); William Downard, Dictionary of the History of the American Brewing and Distilling Industries (1980); Gary Regan and Mardee Haidin Regan, The Book of Bourbon and Other Fine American Whiskeys (1995).

 

Brennan, Ella

(b. 1925) RESTAURATEUR.

Ella Brennan, matriarch of one of the most prominent restaurant families in the South, was born in New Orleans, La., on 27 November 1925. Early in her life, Brennan was introduced to outstanding food in her mother’s home. She praises her mother as a great home cook who instilled in her children a love of local ingredients and traditions. At the age of 19, Ella Brennan began working with her brother, Owen Brennan, who had purchased a restaurant in the French Quarter. Instead of opting for college, Ella Brennan went to Europe, where she made a study of restaurant service, and New York City, where she worked briefly at the 21 Club.

Brennan’s, the seminal family restaurant, specializes in French Creole dishes, served, contrary to expectations, by a family of Irish descent. It is still operated by a branch of the family. Since its opening in 1946, Brennan’s has birthed a number of New Orleans offspring as well as restaurants in Houston and Las Vegas.

At Commander’s Palace, the restaurant housed in a Victorian mansion in New Orleans’s Uptown neighborhood operated by the family since 1974, Ella Brennan serves what she calls Haute Creole cuisine—the sophisticated cooking of old Creole New Orleans, reinterpreted for the modern palate. An example of the dishes served at the flagship Brennan restaurant, now operated by the branch of the family aligned with Ella Brennan and her descendants, is bread pudding soufflé gilded with whiskey sauce.

Over the course of her career Brennan has exhibited a reputation for recognizing and developing restaurant talent. Among the now-famous graduates of her kitchen are Paul Prudhomme, who arrived in 1975, and Emeril Lagasse, who began his service in 1983. What’s more, Brennan has worked with farmers and fishermen to cultivate local markets for their goods and provide her restaurants with the best possible ingredients. In her role as restaurateur, she has promoted the sociability of dining and the art of conversation. As the 21st century dawned, a new generation of the Brennan family, led by Ti Martin and Lally Brennan, stepped into the spotlight at Commander’s, intent upon upholding the standards Ella Brennan set.

SCOTT R. SIMMONS

New Orleans, Louisiana

Ella Brennan and Dick Brennan, The Commander’s Palace New Orleans Cookbook (1984); Pip Brennan, Jimmy Brennan, and Ted Brennan, Breakfast at Brennan’s and Dinner, Too (1994); John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987); Ti Adelaide Martin and Jamie Shannon, Commander’s Kitchen: Take Home the True Taste of New Orleans with More than 150 Recipes from Commander’s Palace Restaurant (2000).

 

Brown, Marion Lea

(1903–95) COOKBOOK AUTHOR. Writer, radio personality, textile designer, journalist, and editor, Marion Lea Brown, is best known for her two culinary works, Marion Brown’s Southern Cook Book (1951) and Marion Brown’s Pickles and Preserves (1955). Born in Petersburg, Va., Brown spent most of her adult life in Burlington, N.C., where she lived with her husband, Walter C. Brown, and two sons.

Marion Brown’s Southern Cook Book remains an invaluable reference for culinary historians. Almost encyclopedic in its scope, and drawing on many community cookbooks, it chronicles a broad spectrum of historical and contemporary recipes, showcasing the state of southern cooking as it was in the mid-20th century. The book has been continuously in print for more than 50 years. Brown revised the book in 1968, updating and freshening the material for a contemporary audience.

Though Brown was not a professional historian, her understanding and use of materials available to her at the time make the cookbook an invaluable reference for historians, not so much for the actual historical recipes as for the selection of modern ones. Her collection of historical examples is telling and interesting; however, it is often drawn from such charming but historically unreliable works as Helen Bullock’s Williamsburg Art of Cookery (1938). Of far more value for historians is Brown’s keen eye for characteristically contemporary recipes, which is not merely exemplary of her own age, but is startlingly forward-looking. A good example is an early recipe for the vinaigrette-dressed black-eyed pea salad that was to become so popular toward the end of the century under such names as “Mississippi,” “black-eyed pea,” or even “redneck” caviar.

DAMON LEE FOWLER

Savannah, Georgia

Marion Brown, Marion Brown’s Pickles and Preserves (1955), Marion Brown’s Southern Cook Book (2001); Helen Bullock, Williamsburg Art of Cookery (1938, 1985); Damon Lee Fowler, Classical Southern Cooking: A Celebration of the Cuisine of the Old South (1995).

 

Brunswick Stew

Despite humble beginnings, Brunswick stew has been the subject of more public debate than any other southern stew. The stew is such a matter of pride that both Virginia and Georgia claim to be its birthplace. For years, stewmasters and their assistants from both states have competed in cook-offs at public festivals in an effort to settle the socalled stew war, and neither side has shown any willingness to relinquish its claim.

Historical markers found on U.S. Highway 1 in rural, south central Virginia proclaim Virginia’s view and describe Brunswick stew in its most basic form: “According to local tradition, while Dr. Creed Haskins and several friends were on a hunting trip in Brunswick County in 1828, his camp cook, Jimmy Matthews, hunted squirrels for a stew. Matthews simmered the squirrels with butter, onions, stale bread and seasonings, thus creating the dish known as Brunswick Stew. Other states have made similar claims but Virginia’s is the first.” Likewise, strategically located near Interstate 95, just outside of Brunswick, Ga., a concrete-filled, cast-iron stew pot is the backdrop for a plaque proclaiming coastal Georgia as the birthplace of Brunswick stew. Without a doubt, the signs give clear evidence of the ongoing stew war between Virginia and Georgia—although the war has spilled over to parts of Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee, and a great deal of North Carolina.

Matthews’s recipe generally follows the pattern for other early stew dishes, such as those described in antebellum cookbooks that involve meat, sometimes marinated in vinegar, gently boiled in an iron pot with onion, seasonings, and butter. Gradually, the widespread domestication of animals such as sheep, hogs, chickens, and beef cattle eliminated the need to rely on the wild game common in early camp stews. Most contemporary recipes for Brunswick stew substitute pork, beef, or chicken for squirrel or other wild game, include several vegetables, and add seasonings that were missing in 19th-century versions.

While Virginia boasts ownership, the Georgia connections are also very strong. A book of antebellum recipes gathered by a Georgia homemaker, Annabella P. Hill, lists Camp Stew—Mr. B’s Receipt. The recipe is virtually identical to contemporary Brunswick stew, including such vegetables as butter beans, corn, and tomatoes, while it calls for roughly equal quantities of squirrel and chicken meat.

It is important to note that Jimmy Matthews was African American. That fact, combined with the understanding that Native American cooking traditions also influenced these early camp stews, reminds us that Brunswick stew resulted from synthesis of shared food traditions.

Clearly, the stewmasters and crew members from the Brunswicks of Virginia, Georgia, and even North Carolina not only love the stew, but also cherish the ritual of stew making. The inconvenience of rising before dawn, the hard work of peeling potatoes and onions, and the hours spent pulling and pushing a five-foot paddle through an ever-thickening pottage become a labor of love. This sense of pride in the stew is effused with a strong sense of community service and camaraderie that strengthen the foundation of a tradition that remains an integral part of the community landscape.

SADDLER TAYLOR

McKissick Museum, Columbia, South Carolina

Annabella P. Hill, Mrs. Hill’s Southern Practical Cookery and Receipt Book (1995); Elwood Street, Brunswick County: The Home of the Stew (1942); Stan Woodward, Southern Stews: A Taste of the South (documentary film, 2002).

 

Burgoo

Virginia sheep stew and Kentucky burgoo are unique among southern stews in their use of mutton or lamb, hinting at the historical importance of sheep in southern culture and diet. The inclusion of mutton is the major difference between burgoo and Brunswick stew. Otherwise, the two stews are quite similar, in both preparation and consumption.

While western Kentucky burgoo recipes are distinguished by this critical difference, many of them actually include other meats as well. Some recipes call for squirrel, veal, oxtail, or pork, bringing to mind jokes told by stewmasters that refer to “possum or animals that got too close to the pot.” The storytelling and banter during the long hours of stew preparation are keys to strong social bonds that develop over a period of time. Kentuckians tell stories about the legendary Gus Jaubert, a member of Morgan’s Raiders during the Civil War, who supposedly prepared hundreds of gallons of the spicy hunter’s stew for the general’s men.

The origin of the term burgoo is ambiguous. The term could be a corruption of the word bulghur, referring to a cereal porridge commonly fed to 17th-century English sailors, or a derivative of the Arabic word burghul, which refers to boiled cracked wheat. Another possibility stems from the French term ragoût (pronounced ra-goo), which is a heavy soup or thick stew. Nomenclature aside, the most striking characteristic of burgoo remains the inclusion of sheep as the primary meat ingredient.

While sheep raising is not commonly associated with the South, both the Spanish and English brought sheep to the New World during the earliest years of colonization. Early breeds such as Native Florida and Hog Island survive today. Domestic sheep production increased dramatically in the Owensboro area after high tariffs on imported sheep were established in 1816. Both the topography and climate of western Kentucky were suited for the lowmaintenance, grazing livestock. Able to survive on the most scant vegetation and capable of withstanding wide fluctuations in temperature, sheep were a natural fit.

Cooking burgoo for a benefit barbecue supper on the grounds of St. Thomas’ Church, near Bardstown, Ky., 1940 (Marion Post Wolcott, photographer, Library of Congress [LC-USF33-030971-M3], Washington, D.C.)

Accomplished stew makers generally are men, sometimes dubbed “stewmasters” by their peers and stew consumers alike. The veneration of elders who carry closely guarded knowledge pertaining to “secret ingredients” and special techniques is an essential part of the burgoo tradition. The subsequent variety of burgoo recipes lends itself to a very localized sense of pride and distinctiveness from community to community. In no situation is this more evident than in the annual church parish picnic. During the summer, throughout western Kentucky, no less than 36 churches cook hundreds of gallons of burgoo. These picnics serve as fundraisers, homecomings, and community festivals. Most parishes have bumper stickers and signs proclaiming their barbecue and burgoo the region’s “finest.” Like other stews, burgoo is communal by nature, not only in preparation, but also in consumption. Through this sense of congregation, community stew makers come to identify with a particular tradition and proclaim a true sense of stew ownership.

SADDLER TAYLOR

McKissick Museum, Columbia, South Carolina

W. E. R. Byrne, Tale of the Elk (1995); Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food(1996); Reay Tannahill, Food in History (1973); Stan Woodward, Southern Stews: A Taste of the South (documentary film, 2002).

 

Cakes

To many southerners, the thought of favorite cakes brings to mind certain occasions. Weddings, holidays, “dinner on the grounds” church picnics, and funerals. Memories of fellowship hall tables laden with traditional southern sweets such as pineapple upside-down cake, Lane cake, coconut cake, and red velvet cake not only conjure tastes but also stories of the ladies who bake them. Some of these recipes are so linked to the baker that they become locally legendary. A church picnic becomes a silent yet fierce competition between cooks, and the event turns diners into unofficial judges, as it is not uncommon to see one plate with three types of coconut or caramel cake. Traditional favorites continue to evolve as ingredients become easy to find throughout the year and the price of expensive ingredients falls.

Early recipes were developed according to availability of products as well as economic status. While one family may have been able to prepare a dessert using store-bought tropical fruits like oranges or coconut, another family would need to send the kids out to gather pecans or black walnuts for free. The use of refined sugar as opposed to honey, molasses, or sorghum was also dictated by price and privilege. Location in the South drove recipes as well: someone living in Florida would have easier access to citrus fruits, while folks living in the mountains would be growing sweet potatoes and picking wild berries.

According to The Williamsburg Art of Cookery—An Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Guide, published in 1742, “From christenings to funerals, cakes were most intimately associated with family and social life. There was a special cake for each happy or sad occasion.” Early southern cakes were adapted from English recipes in order to use ingredients found specifically in the South. Because most southerners, rich and poor, had access to fresh dairy products such as milk, butter, and eggs, many delicious sweets made regular appearances at the dinner table as well as appearing for celebrations.

Humble cakes such as the pound cake—which uses a simple ratio of a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of flour, and a dozen eggs—are rich and delicious yet easy to mix and do not require a written recipe to remember. Leftover pound cake doubles as a delicious simple breakfast with coffee, and to this day even young southerners practice the ritual of smearing butter on a slice and toasting it for a morning meal. Pound cake is also one of those cakes that lasts a few days (because of the high fat content) and is something that a southern hostess can pull out in case someone happens to “drop by.” Southern hospitality has reached mythical status partly because of the seemingly effortless ability of a woman to bring out a tray of sweets at any given moment. Pound cake is one of those foods that, dressed up with a dusting of powdered sugar or a light lemon flavored glaze, allows a hostess to appear to have spent all morning baking.

Another fruit cake is the stack cake. The method of making six or eight thin cake layers and spreading cooked dried apples between all the layers not only made the dessert look grand, it allowed a humble cake to soak up sweetness, moisture, and a rich flavor from the cooked apples. Two methods of preparing stack cake emerge from old records: one calls for a dough, rather than a batter, from which thin rounds are rolled and cut on a floured board and then baked, filled, and stacked. The other method directs the baker to pour batter into pie pans or cake rounds six or eight times to make that many thin layers. Dried apples, which carry the best flavor for this recipe, are cooked with cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg to create a thick yet chunky applesauce. This sauce is spread between the cake layers and then the cake is stored, covered, for at least two days to allow the flavors to marry. The result is a flavorful and impressive cake that was most likely enjoyed during the colder months when fresh apples were not available.

More expensive and labor-intensive cakes, like Lane, Lady Baltimore, and Robert E. Lee cake, were made for special occasions, including weddings. While these three cakes are similar and are sometimes mistaken for each other, each has its own beginnings, and each has two or three distinct ingredients. The Lane cake was originated by Emma Rylander Lane of Clayton, Ala., and the original recipe was published in a little hometown cookbook entitled Some Good Things to Eat (1898). The cake layers are a basic yellow cake, and the filling is a boiled icing that includes raisins and “one wine-glass of good whiskey or brandy.” The Lady Baltimore cake was born from Owen Wister’s novel Lady Baltimore, set in Charleston, S.C., and published in 1906. In the novel Wister uses a character to describe the cake as “all soft, and in its layers it has nuts.” The cake is indeed a white cake filled with raisins and nuts and with a meringue frosting. In the same manner, a Robert E. Lee cake, so named because it was made to honor General Lee, is a soft cake that includes lemon rind and juice. The icing that covers the cake is an egg white frosting, which takes its flavor from the juice of an orange or lemon. All three of these cakes emerged at about the same time, as reliable baking powder became available.

Modern southern bakers continue to use these recipes as a basis for their cakes. The availability of ingredients such as coconut and pineapple gave inventive cooks a way to dress up a humble skillet cake or yellow sponge cake. Cooking down sugar with butter creates a delicious caramel, and if one cooks this caramel in a cast-iron skillet, adds a single layer of pineapple rings with cherries in the center, tops it all with a simple yellow cake batter, bakes it, and turns it out on a decorative plate, the result is the favorite pineapple upside-down cake. Using the same method for making caramel, but allowing it to get to the soft-ball stage before mixing vigorously, gives the signature filling and frosting for the classic southern caramel cake. Layers of yellow cake filled and topped with seven-minute boiled icing and coconut create elegant and exotic coconut cake. Rich and mysterious, red velvet cake is actually a type of devil’s food or chocolate cake that benefits from the addition of a little vinegar, copious amounts of red food coloring (one one-ounce bottle per recipe), and its signature cream-cheese frosting. The idea that red velvet cake originated in the South comes from the early use of beets in the recipe, which provided a less expensive sugar source and cast a red tone to the cocoa-filled batter.

While European pastries are now easy to find in southern towns, and it seems as if home bakers are harder to find, a quick survey of classic bakeshops reveals that most southerners continue to pine for the traditional flavors they grew up with. Perhaps youngsters now wax poetic about the caramel cake from Rhodes Bakery or the coconut cake from the Rich’s Department Store bakeshop rather than their grandmother’s cake.

ANGIE MOSIER

Atlanta, Georgia

Joseph E. Dabney, Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking (1998); John Egerton, Southern Food; At Home, on the Road, in History (1993); Emma Rylander Lane, Some Good Things to Eat (1898); William Parks (publisher), The Williamsburg Art of Cookery or Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion (1742); Linda Stradley, I’ll Have What They’re Having— Legendary Local Cuisine (2002); Owen Wister, Lady Baltimore (1906).

 

Catfish

There are some 2,000 species of catfish in the world, of which a couple dozen can be found in the United States, and, of these, about a dozen are native to the South. They can be roughly divided into three types: flathead, channel, and blue catfish. Flatheads and blues weighing upward of 150 pounds have been hauled out of southern waters. People in the South who live anywhere around a fishable body of water—whether it’s a farm pond or the Mississippi River—have been eating catfish since time immemorial.

Catfish are omnivores in the true sense. They will eat practically anything, and this means they are easy to angle. A chicken liver or a ball of dough is sufficiently appetizing to entice a catfish to a hook. They grow to 18 inches in a year and, if left alone, will stay down near the bottom of whatever water they are in, living to old age and huge size. They were exploited first by Native Americans, followed by Americans of African and European descent. In the South the latter two groups tended to cook catfish in one way—bread it in cornmeal and fry it in hot grease in an iron skillet. Because of their omnivorous eating habits and preference for feeding close to the bottom, wild catfish have a musky flavor.

Once caught, and before being cooked, a catfish must be skinned. The time-honored method is to nail it to a board or tree by its head, make a slit around the gills with a knife, break off the dorsal and pectoral fins with pliers, and then use the pliers to grasp a loose flap of skin from the incision and pull it down toward the tail. The skin should peel away from the fish like a tight piece of clothing coming off. Extreme care needs to be exercised when handling catfish: the spines at the tip of the dorsal and pectoral fins are bordered by a venom gland whose secretions can put a human being in severe pain lasting anywhere from 20 minutes to a couple of days, and hospitalization may be necessary if a fin breaks off in one’s hand.

A mess of wild-caught catfish (Courtesy Wiley Prewitt Jr., photographer)

The catfish has proven adaptable to aquaculture, and it is the largest-selling farm-raised fish in the United States. Catfish can be easily trained to come to the surface for food, and if they are fed a diet of grain-based aquaculture feed, their meat will have a neutral flavor that will take on the taste of whatever spices are used in its preparation. The lion’s share of the North American fish-buying public does not want the fish it consumes to have a strong flavor, and the adaptability of farm-raised catfish has been a marketing plus.

The catfish industry originated in the northwest quadrant of Mississippi below Memphis known as the Mississippi Delta. Four states now report catfish as a commercial crop, but still nearly half the nation’s catfish are grown in the Delta. For more than a century, this huge, flat stretch of fertile Mississippi River bottomland was cotton country, but international competition virtually destroyed the market for North American cotton, beginning in the 1970s. Catfish saved many a Delta farmer’s vast postplantation cotton land from the foreclosure auction block.

The Delta’s soil holds water extremely well. The climate is warm, and a channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) can be grown to the market weight of a pound and a half in a year. A 15-acre pond can hold 50,000 fish. The pondbank price in 2001 was hovering around 70 cents a pound, just as it had done over the past decade, and the fish sold for around five or six dollars a pound in supermarkets. A lot of it was selling. In the year 2000, some 600 million pounds were processed in the United States, according to the federal department of agriculture.

Like those from cotton cultivation before it, the profits from catfish farming are not widely distributed in the Delta. Workers in and around the ponds, and those in the processing plants, are generally from the same African American families that used to work the cotton fields. Wages are low, and the work is difficult, particularly for the women employed in the plants. The development of the catfish industry in the Delta has been marked by a series of labor-management conflicts.

Catfish farming is not cheap, nor is it for the faint-hearted. A modest eight ponds, each 15 acres, will cost nearly $500,000 to dig and stock, and then it will be 18 months until the first fish can be harvested—if they do not get sick and die or if a pond’s oxygen level does not descend on a summer night past the critical level, suffocating all 50,000 fish in the pond. Nevertheless, in short order, catfish have gone from trash fish to preferred buys in supermarkets across the United States.

RICHARD SCHWEID

Barcelona, Spain

Linda Crawford, The Catfish Book (1991); Bruce Halstead, Poisonous and Venomous Marine Animals of the World (1988); Michael McCall, The Catfish Journal (August 1990); Richard Schweid, Catfish and the Delta (1992).

 

Chase, Leah Lange

(b. 1923) NEW ORLEANS CREOLE COOK AND RESTAURATEUR.

Leah Chase was born in Madisonville, La., where she grew up. The oldest of 11 children, Chase maintains that her mother hated to cook, except for baking bread. The Lange home nevertheless was the center of huge family feasts, and when those happened, everybody cooked. A typical Thanksgiving celebration would start with a glass of homemade strawberry wine and a bowl of gumbo. The meal itself would consist of fresh pork roast, wild game that Chase’s father had killed, oyster patties, oyster dressing, and petits pois. Cakes and pies would round out the dinner.

Abandoning Madisonville for New Orleans, Chase bypassed Haspel Brothers’ Sewing Factory, where wellraised Creole girls were expected to work, and struck out for the French Quarter. Within a short time she was hired at the Colonial Restaurant, where she worked under the tutelage of Bessie Sauveur. After marrying Edgar (Dooky) Chase II, she moved into his family’s business, helping turn what had been a po’ boy stand into the Dooky Chase Restaurant, one of the most prominent Creole restaurants in the country. Chase took her place in the kitchen, from which she has wielded great influence on what is considered today to be Creole cuisine.

Leah Chase, owner of Dooky Chase Restaurant (From And I Still Cook © 2003 by Leah Chase. Used by permission of Pelican Publishing Co., Inc.)

Rudy Lombard, in Creole Feast (1978), states, “The single, lasting characteristic of Creole cuisine is the Black element. Black involvement in the New Orleans Creole cuisine is as old as gumbo and just as important.” Lombard further describes Creole cuisine as a “creative improvisation,” with the Creole chef relying “heavily on experience, combined with the full use and development of all five senses.”

Leah Chase is the kind of Creole chef Lombard describes. She is self-taught and rarely measures an ingredient. She has strong opinions about the basics of Creole cooking and does not hesitate to pronounce, “That’s not Creole.” The gumbo at the Dooky Chase Restaurant is what Leah Chase calls typical Creole gumbo: it contains crab, shrimp, chicken, two kinds of sausage, veal brisket, ham, and the perfect roux. “Not a real dark roux,” she says. “That’s more Cajun.” But she maintains the roux must be the perfect color and texture and that the cook had better stand by her pot to make that happen. “Don’t give me that sticky, gooey stuff.”

Chase has other rules: onions and seasonings must be cut fine—they cannot float; beans cannot float either— they have to be creamy; okra has to be cooked down, cabbage has to be smothered; a good dose of paprika makes gravy glow; onions and garlic and green peppers had better be there; and only the best ingredients will do— Vaucresson’s chaurice, the best smoked sausage, lean ham, and lean veal brisket. Creole desserts are pretty basic fare: bread puddings, pound cakes, and apple or custard pies. Under Chase’s hand, as one might expect, even bread pudding gets a kick. She tosses in a glass of rum to “pep it up.”

Leah Chase played a significant role in the civil rights movement in New Orleans, as her restaurant became a gathering spot for activists. She has continued to play a role since then as a community leader. Her influence on Creole cooking meanwhile spread beyond the city in the 1970s, when she became the focus of articles in regional and national publications. She has been honored repeatedly as a “Queen of Creole Cooking.”

After Hurricane Katrina inundated much of New Orleans and left Dooky Chase sitting in five feet of floodwater, the restaurant was temporarily closed. But after a collective effort of fund-raising, Dooky Chase reopened.

CAROL ALLEN

Paris, France

Carol Allen, Leah Chase: Listen, I Say Like This (2002); Nathanial Burton and Rudy Lombard, eds., Creole Feast (1978); Leah Chase, And I Still Cook (2003), The Dooky Chase Cookbook (1990), Down Home Healthy: Family Recipes of Black American Chefs (1994); Brian Lanker, I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America (1989).

 

Chess Pie

The origins of the name chess pie are hard to trace, primarily because the dish does not appear in southern cookbooks before the 20th century. Some of the earliest printed references to the pie were penned by Sister J. M. Mangus of Roanoke, Va., in The Inglenook Cook Book in 1906 and in a cookbook published by the Fort Worth Women’s Club in 1928. Food writers have offered several playful explanations for the unusual name. First, because of their high sugar content, chess pies were stored at room temperature in pie safes or storage cabinets called pie chests. When the t was dropped from chest, the pie was called ches’ pie. Another explanation suggests the pie is so simple that when a southern cook was asked to name it, the reply, “it’s just pie,” became “it’s jes pie,” and the “jes” became “chess.”

The cheese etymology seems a likely explanation, because in old cookbooks, cheesecakes and pies that were sometimes made with cheese, sometimes without (referring to cheese in the textural sense), are often included in a single category. A number of cheeseless “cheese” pastries in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) are made with egg yolks, sugar, butter, milk, and lemon juice—very much like chess pie filling. While the pie could have grown out of a British cheesecake tradition, it probably also developed in response to the increased availability of both refined sugar and dairy products. During the 1930s sorghum and molasses were replaced by refined white sugars, and rural electrification made refrigerators more common and dairy products more widely available.

The chess pie is a relatively recent addition to the dessert repertoire of southern families. Since the 1930s this simple pie-confection has been made with four basic ingredients: milk, sugar, eggs, and butter. Traditional cooks sometimes added vanilla, cinnamon, and cornmeal or flour before stirring the mixture together and baking it in a pie crust. Chess pie is a custard or transparent pie that became so popular it spawned chess cakes, chess bars, and chess cookies.

With the rise of celebrity restaurant chefs at the end of the 20th century, chess pies became a symbol of new southern cooking. One such chef and food writer, Bill Neal, prefaces a chess pie recipe in his book Southern Cooking, by saying: “In Tennessee, as many as six or seven of these pies, once baked and cooled, are stacked on each other and sliced as a cake. Elsewhere, they are offered singly, with a little whipped cream.” Basic chess pies have been expanded to assume many different forms, including chocolate chess pies. The December 2001 issue of Southern Living magazine featured recipes for tangerine, grapefruit, lemon-lime, and orange chess pies. A new generation of chefs use chess pies as the foundation for innovative confections that feature allspice, cumin, curry, ground white pepper, pecans, coconut, and rich pastry crusts. To this mixture they add garnishes of meringue, mint leaves, and fresh fruit. Mississippi pastry chef Martha Foose dishes up sweet-tea chess pie.

Chess pie has strong associations with the notions of home and comfort. And in her book Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena writer Julia Reed discusses the importance and uniqueness of southern cooking, specifically invoking the chess pie as a unique staple of the South’s cuisine and culture.

MARK F. SOHN

Pikeville College

FRANCES ABBOTT

University of Mississippi

Sarah Belk, Around the Southern Table (1991); Craig Claiborne, Craig Claiborne’s Southern Cooking (1987); John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987); Bill Neal, Bill Neal’s Southern Cooking (1989), Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet Potato Pie (1996); Mark F. Sohn, Southern Country Cooking (1992).

 

Chicken, Fried

Columbus brought chickens to America in 1493, and they have graced American tables—particularly in the South—ever since. Southern fried chicken is probably the single most popular and universally consumed food ever to come from this region of the country. It appeared in the earliest cookbooks. Mary Randolph’s Virginia House-wife (1824) recommended a method strikingly similar to that commonly used today: cut-up pieces of chicken dredged in flour, sprinkled with salt and pepper, and fried in hot fat.

There are, of course, numerous variations on the basic technique. Some cooks insist on frying chicken in lard, but others prefer vegetable oil; some say pan frying in an inch or so of fat is best, while others choose deep frying instead; some use only flour to coat the chicken pieces, but others add cornmeal or milk or egg; some restrict seasonings to salt and pepper, while others go for spicier or more pungent tastes, such as hot sauce, garlic, red pepper, or lemon; some seek a dry, crisp, crunchy exterior, and others pour gravy or cream sauce over the finished product.

Chicken gravy is, in some circles, a classic accompaniment. The gravy is made from the dregs in the frying skillet, supplemented by a mixture of flour and either milk or water and seasoned with salt and pepper. Spooned onto potatoes or rice or biscuits, chicken gravy offers a savory flavor that southerners have known and loved for generations.

The standard explanation for the origins of fried chicken suggests that the wide availability of fowl in the colonial era and the cooking techniques of African slaves combined to produce “fried” chicken, and cooks of African descent have long been recognized as among the region’s best fryers. But rarely do southerners reach consensus on a definitive version of the dish. Virtually the only aspect of southern fried chicken that no one debates is the best way to eat it: with the fingers, the only practical means of separating the crisp skin and tender meat from the bone. “Finger lickin’ good” became a motto of Colonel Harland Sanders’s Kentucky Fried Chicken when the Corbin, Ky., entrepreneur launched a fast-food chicken business in 1956.

Mrs. McLelland cooking fried chicken for Sunday dinner, Escambia Farms, Fla., 1942 (John Collier, photographer, Library of Congress [LC-USF34-082651-C], Washington, D.C.)

Following in the wake of Sanders, numerous fast-food franchise outlets now dispense the popular finger food in cities and towns throughout the nation and the world. The volume of fried chicken sales is such that the raising of chickens has become a major agricultural industry in the South.

Purists bemoan that mass production yields an inferior fowl, one that is oversized and lacks the leanness, tenderness, and taste that young pullets had when they scratched in southern yards and received ample rations of cracked corn as they approached frying size. Noting the mid-20th-century trend toward larger, less flavorful fowl, Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution declared a preference for “barnyard subdebs, rarely more than ten to twelve weeks old and weighing from a pound and a half to two pounds.”

Even as chicken raising and chicken cooking have become increasingly industrial, the southern affinity for fried chicken has not waned. Fried chicken has come to be appreciated as both symbol and sustenance. As such, the dish remains proudly provincial. In his 1982 book American Taste Jim Villas of North Carolina observed: “Let’s not beat around the bush for one second. To know about fried chicken, you have to have been weaned and reared on it in the South. Period.”

What is more, fried chicken is the stuff of song, as in “Fried Chicken,” a single cut in 1957 by Hank Penny, that featured a song called “Rock of Gibraltar” on the B-side. It is also the stuff of tragicomedy. “Last time I was down South, I walked into this restaurant,” wrote Dick Gregory in his memoir, Callus on My Soul. “This white waitress came up to me and said, ‘We don’t serve colored people here.’ I said, ‘That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.’ About that time, these three cousins came in. You know the ones I mean, Ku, Klux, and Klan. They said, ‘Boy, we’re givin’ you fair warnin’. Anything you do to that chicken, we’re gonna do to you.’ So I put down my knife and picked up that chicken and kissed it.”

JOHN EGERTON

Nashville, Tennessee

John T. Edge, Fried Chicken: An American Story (2004); Damon Lee Fowler, Fried Chicken: The World’s Best Recipes from Memphis to Milan, from Buffalo to Bangkok (1997); Ronni Lundy, Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken: The Heart and Soul of Southern Country Kitchens (1991); Page Smith and Charles Daniel, The Chicken Book (1975); Southern Living (September 1995); Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (2006).

 

Chitterlings

Many aspects of contemporary African American and southern white cuisine have their roots in the eating habits of the Old South. Many of the principal foods and dishes use pork products. These dishes include fatback, pigs’ ears, pigs’ feet, pork chops, and chitterlings. Chitterlings, or chitlins, are the small intestines of hogs, cooked in batter. Studies of early African American eating habits suggest that such foods as chitlins came into the diet because of the necessity for rural, poverty-ridden southerners to use every bit of food available. When a hog was slaughtered, no edible part was wasted. In the book Chitlin Strut and Other Madrigals novelist and essayist William Price Fox of South Carolina asks the question, “Who will eat a chitlin?” He answers, “You take a man and tie him to a stake and feed him bread and water and nothing else for seven days and seven nights, and then he will eat a chitlin. He won’t like it, but he will eat it.” Fox perceives the consumption of chitlins as a badge of impoverished circumstances, emerging as a staple in the southern diet out of necessity as opposed to preference.

To prevent spoilage, chitlins were prepared and eaten soon after the hog was killed. The common method of preparation was to clean the intestines carefully, soak them in water for a day, parboil them, and only then to fry them in batter. Viscera have been part of the staple diets of other cultures, including the Eskimos and people in Central Europe and the Balkans. They have been found to be nutritious and a good source of iron. Southerners have disdained the eating of viscera at times, and some people who eat chitlins have attempted to hide them behind names such as “Kentucky oysters.” Not all southerners are ashamed of the uncommon food, however.

White, rural southerners of the 20th century celebrated chitterlings as both cultural emblem and nourishment. Active chitterling eating clubs like the Royal Order of Chitlin Eaters of Nashville, Tenn., and the Happy Chitlin Eaters of Raleigh, N.C., emerged by the middle of the century. The traditional song “Chitlin Cookin’ Time in Cheatham County” indicates the importance of chitlins to regional identity:

There’s a quiet and peaceful county in the state of Tennessee.

You will find it in the book they call geography.

Not famous for its farming, its mines, or its stills,

But they know there’s chitlin cookin’ in them Cheatham county hills.

When it’s chitlin cookin’ time in Cheatham county,

I’ll be courtin’ in them Cheatham county hills.

And I’ll pick a Cheatham county chitlin cooker.

I’ve a longin’ that the chitlins will fill.

African Americans with roots in the rural South also claimed a specific cultural meaning for chitlins. Because of the restriction imposed on cuisine by life at the bottom of the white power structure, African American cooks fashioned a cuisine of their own, reinventing traditional foodways in an African-influenced manner, and claimed chitterlings as distinctly African American.

Chitterling imagery infuses African American cultural forms. The informal circuit of juke joints and clubs patronized by African Americans has long been called the Chitlin Circuit. Bluesman Mel Brown, a veteran of the circuit, titled his early 1970s greatesthits album Eighteen Pounds of Unclean Chitlins and Other Greasy Blues Specialties. In his novel Invisible Man Ralph Ellison invokes chitterlings as both a chosen cultural icon and a liability. The protagonist imagines a scene wherein he accuses Bledsoe, a pompous but influential educator and leading citizen of a small southern town, of a secret love of chitterlings: “I saw myself advancing upon Bledsoe . . . and suddenly whipping out a foot or two of chitterlings, raw, uncleaned, and dripping sticky circles on the floor as I shake them in his face, shouting: ‘Bledsoe, you’re a shameless chitterling eater! I accuse you of relishing hog bowels! Ha! And not only do you eat them, you sneak and eat them in private when you think you’re unobserved! You’re a sneaking chitterling lover!’”

When soul food came into vogue in America during the late 1960s and early 1970s, chitlins were privileged as an authentic cultural marker. But not all African Americans embraced chitterlings as a badge of identity. In 1968 Eldridge Cleaver mused, “You hear a lot of jazz about soul food. Take chitterlings: the ghetto blacks eat them from necessity while the black bourgeoisie has turned it into a mocking slogan. . . . Now that they have the price of a steak, here they come prattling about Soul Food.”

Today, chitlins endure as an element of southern culinary culture. Each fall in Salley, S.C., as many as 20,000 people gather to celebrate chitlins at the Chitlin’ Strut festival. The one-day event features the crowning of Miss Chitlin’ Strut, the frying and eating of five tons of chitlins, and the Chitlin’ Strut contest itself. The “Chitlin’ Strut” is a dance with twisting gyrations reflecting, some participants say, “the way chitlins make you feel.”

KAREN M. MCDEARMAN

FRANCES ABBOTT

University of Mississippi

Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (1968); Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952); William Price Fox, Chitlin Strut and Other Madrigals (1983); Bob Jeffries, Soul Food Cookbook (1970); Julian H. Lewis, Negro Digest (April 1950); Southern Living (November 1979); Calvin C. Schwabe, Unmentionable Cuisine (1979).

 

Claiborne, Craig

(1920–2000) FOOD WRITER, EDITOR.

Born in Sunflower, Miss. (population 500), Craig Claiborne cherished childhood memories of beaten biscuits, churned clabber, hot cornbread, and chicken barbecues tended by his father. Another memory, that of his mother’s monogrammed silver spoon, used to stir so many sauces that “the lip, once a perfect oval, [was] worn down by an inch,” had special significance. Forced by financial setbacks to move to Indianola and open a boardinghouse in 1924, his mother used her ability to “divine” ingredients, reproducing countless dishes from Creole snapper to Brunswick stew, to keep the family solvent and make Miss Kathleen’s one of the most “genteel” and well-regarded establishments in the Mississippi Delta. John Dollard rented a room in her home while researching his classic study of southern race relations, Caste and Class in a Southern Town.

Shortly after graduating from the University of Missouri in journalism (June 1942), Claiborne enlisted in the navy, having “never sampled a glass of wine” nor eaten anything more exotic than jellied consommé. By the end of his tour of duty, however, he had tasted Moroccan lamb couscous and French pastries in Casablanca and had visited cafés and bistros throughout Europe. Following a brief stint in advertising and publicity in Chicago, another year in Europe, and reenlistment in the navy at the outbreak of the Korean War, he finally decided to fuse his interests in food and writing and enrolled in the Lausanne Professional School of the Swiss Hotel Keepers Association.

Claiborne settled in Manhattan and worked a series of part-time jobs, including bartending in upstate New York and acting as a receptionist at Gourmet magazine. Eventually he moved into an editor’s position. In 1957 Claiborne met and was interviewed by Jane Nickerson of the New York Times, who was looking for someone to replace her as food editor at the paper. Despite the tradition of women filling the post, Claiborne became the paper’s food editor upon Nickerson’s resignation in 1957. During his 29 years at the Times, Claiborne pioneered a new system for restaurant reviews by concluding each review with a rating on a four-star scale after repeated visits. His new work revolutionized the place of restaurant reviews in American newspapers, moving them from the arena of advertising to important food criticism. After his retirement from the Times in 1986, he continued to travel, lecture, and write books. He authored numerous recipes and more than 20 books.

Shortly before the publication of his now-classic New York Times Cook Book in 1961, Claiborne began to test and prepare recipes with Pierre Franey, former chef of Manhattan’s Le Pavilion restaurant. Working together in Claiborne’s East Hampton home, the two concocted recipes that enriched the food pages of the Times and served as the basis for a series of cookbooks. Claiborne died in January 2000 at the age of 79.

In addition to his regular column, cookbooks, and a dining guide to Manhattan, Claiborne published A Feast Made for Laughter (1983), a memoir complete with 100 favorite recipes. Listed next to the oeufs à la chimay is, of course, a recipe for cheese grits.

ELIZABETH M. MAKOWSKI

University of Mississippi

Craig Claiborne, Best of Craig Claiborne: 1,000 Recipes from His New York Times Food Columns and Four of His Classic Cookbooks (1999), Cooking with Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey (1985), Craig Claiborne’s A Feast Made for Laughter (1982), Craig Claiborne’s Gourmet Diet (1980), Craig Claiborne’s Kitchen Primer (1993), Craig Claiborne’s Southern Cooking (1992), The New York Times Cook Book (original edition, 1972; revised edition, 1990); Bryan Miller, The New York Times (24 January 2000); Jim Villas, Gourmet (April 2000).

 

Coca-Cola

William Allen White once called it “the sublimated essence of all that America stands for,” and an anonymous but no less fervent admirer called it “the holy water of the American South.” The “it,” as the latest in a long line of slogans proclaims, is, of course, Coca-Cola.

John S. Pemberton, known as “Doc,” like most pharmacists of his era, concocted Coca-Cola in 1886 primarily as a hangover cure. It has subsequently been many things to many people—to Robert Winship Woodruff, its high priest for nearly 60 years, it was “a religion as well as a business.” Pemberton first made Coke, its nickname from early on, in Atlanta, and Coca-Cola men have bestrode that city ever since. Pemberton was pleased soon after his invention to sell the rights to the beverage for $1,750 to another Atlanta pharmacist, Asa Candler. Candler was even more pleased in 1919 to sell the Coca-Cola Company for $25 million. It was the biggest financial deal, until then, in the history of the American South. (Candler sold only part of his bounty; earlier, in 1899, thinking that consumption of the drink would be limited largely to soda fountains, he had disposed of practically all the bottling rights to it for one dollar. The drink had first been bottled back in 1894 by Joseph Biedenharn in Vicksburg, Miss.) The prime mover in the 1919 transaction was the banker Ernest Woodruff. His son Robert (1889–1985) took over the company in 1923. “Asa Candler put us on our feet,” one Coca-Cola executive would say years afterward, “and Bob Woodruff gave us wings.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower once speculated that his good friend Bob Woodruff might be the richest man in the United States. Atlanta’s Emory University, on whose predecessor campus Woodruff had spent less than a year as an undergraduate before being invited to leave, would over the ensuing years be endowed, by him and his family, with some $150 million of Coca-Cola largess.

Until World War II, when the Coca-Cola Company construed it to be its patriotic duty to get Coke to every thirsty American serving abroad, the drink was chiefly marketed in the United States. Soon it was universal. Asa Candler had briefly flirted with the idea of Coca-Cola cigars and Coca-Cola chewing gum at the turn of the century, but until the 1950s the company was strictly a one-product enterprise. Then it began to diversify. Orange juice, other soft drinks, eventually even wines, and most recently films (Columbia Pictures) have merchandised under Coca-Cola’s auspices around the world. The placid liquid that Doc Pemberton had first mixed in a backyard, three-legged iron pot (stirring it with an oar) had become the foundation of a multibillion-dollar industry.

In 1985 Coca-Cola chairman Roberto Guizueta announced that, for the first time in 99 years, the drink’s taste formula would be changed, leading to much hoopla and to criticism from some for yet another change in a southern tradition. The company relented in the face of the public pressure and continued marketing “classic” Coke. However, despite (or perhaps because of) the overwhelming public demand for a return to the “classic” Coke taste, Coca-Cola currently comes in a variety of flavors such as Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke, and Coca-Cola with Lime, as well as in low-calorie and caffeine-free formulas. As of 2006, the Coca-Cola Company operates in over 200 countries and produces over 400 brands. It is undoubtedly the most ubiquitous consumer product in the world.

E. J. KAHN JR.

The New Yorker

Frederick Allen, Secret Formula: How Brilliant Marketing and Relentless Salesmanship Made Coca-Cola the Best-Known Product in the World (1994); Bob Hall, Southern Exposure (Fall 1976); Constance L. Hayes, The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company (2004); E. J. Kahn Jr., The Big Drink: The Story of Coca-Cola (1951); Kathryn W. Kemp, God’s Capitalist: Asa Candler of Coca-Cola (2002).

 

Coons and Possums

These days, if southerners consider raccoons and opossums at all, they think of them as little more than ruined piles of fur along the highways or noises around the garbage can at night. There was a time, however, when folks accorded these creatures almost mythic status and prized them as game and food animals. The words of a song collected in 1920s Mississippi by folklorist A. P. Hudson evokes those days when

Old Blue treed,

I went to see.

There sat the ’possum on a ’simmon tree.

He grinned at me,

I looked at him.

I shook him out,

Blue took him in.

I took him home and baked him brown,

Placed them taters all around.

In the heavily farmed and settled South of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when species like white-tailed deer and wild turkey dwindled into memory, coons and possums remained available and familiar game. Through that long association coons and possums became symbols of a rural South where hunting was commonplace and foodways were closely tied to the land.

The lore of the South is crowded with references to coons and possums. Some people kept coons as pets despite the havoc they could cause in a household, and even today older folks may compare an overly active or curious person to a pet coon. Hunters respected the coon as game, and a coonskin cap was long the mark of an accomplished woodsman. In a more obscure tradition, hunters preserved the S-shaped penis bones from large boar coons as trophies, charms, or even toothpicks. The wide mouth of the possum and its 50 teeth (more than in any other North American land mammal) engendered the phrase “to grin like a possum,” as its practice of feigning death when frightened produced the charge of “playing possum.” As the only marsupial native to North America, the possum inevitably inspired fantastic tales about its biology. Some folks insisted that the male used his forked penis to copulate with the nostrils of the female, who later blew the baby possums into her pouch through her nose. Others believed that the baby possums formed on the ends of their mother’s nipples like fruit. Strangely enough, the notion that possums are immune to snakebite is partly true. Though susceptible to the neurotoxins from cobras and coral snakes, for example, when subjected to venom from common southern vipers such as copperheads, water moccasins, and rattlesnakes, possums survive with no apparent damage.

Snakebites have been the least of their problems as both possums and coons endured consistent hunting pressure in the rural South that last peaked during a spike in fur prices in the late 1970s and early 1980s. While trappers probably took the greatest number of animals, hunting with dogs is the most recognizable method of capturing coons and possums. Early on, coon hunting evolved into a more specialized pursuit than possum hunting. Hunters used hounds like redbones, blueticks, or treeing Walkers that showed a special ability for coon hunting. Coon hides were always valuable, and coon hunts themselves are sometimes quite rigorous, involving the traversing of hills or swamps, walls of briars, and cold water, all in darkness. Good coon dogs and their owners could achieve a level of local celebrity that possum hunting seldom offered. Almost any canine might develop into a good possum dog, and hunters generally did not have to travel far to find their quarry. Though few hunters would have shunned the possum as game, they considered it less of a challenge and always more common than the coon.

For the actual chase, both coon and possum hunters went out at night with one or perhaps a few hounds. They searched areas like the margins of agricultural fields, wooded streams, or river bottoms and stands of mast-producing trees that offered a chance of striking game. With coons, the hunt’s duration depends upon how long the animal runs before taking refuge in trees, holes, or caves. Coons often end the chase in some of the tallest trees available. In early times, hunters might simply cut down the tree to get at the coon; in later years they used torches or flashlights to “shine” enough of the animal to shoot. Possums, on the other hand, usually go up the first available tree or sapling, making them more accessible to those with few resources, like children or the very poor. Sometimes people could indeed simply shake the animal out like the hunter in “Old Blue.” Hunters also took advantage of possums’ habit of feigning death as a way to bring them home alive; they might then pen and feed the animals for days or weeks to improve the quality of the meat or just to save them for a special occasion.

For many hunters the meat was just as important as the hide. If hunters took more than they needed, they could always sell or trade the excess. A big coon might weigh 20 pounds, and a large possum, 7 or 8. While they grow larger in the northern states, the coons and possums in the South offered a significant addition to any rural kitchen. Folks relished them in part because both animals accumulate large amounts of fat during late summer and early fall when food is abundant. Now that modern medicine associates fat with so many health problems and we get much of ours from drive-through windows, it is difficult to appreciate the importance of fat in the diets of earlier southerners. Edible animal fat was valuable, and in the autumn a quarter of the body weight of healthy coons and possums might be fat. John Audubon and John Bachman noted the anticipation that proceeded a 19th-century possum hunt and pronounced the animal an “excellent substitute for roast pig.” While hunters almost always took the pelts from the more valuable coons, people often scalded and even singed the fur from possums during times when the fat was more important than the skin.

In a nod to that older preparation, Louisiana biologist George H. Lowery Jr. enlivened his 1974 biology text with a possum recipe. He suggested stuffing the body cavity of a scalded and scraped possum with a combination of its own browned, chopped heart and liver, onion, bread crumbs, boiled egg, spices, and a dash of Tabasco. Most published recipes for both possums and coons are somewhat less elaborate and follow a fairly standard formula. They call for skinning the animal, removing the glands or lymph nodes under the legs, trimming away most of the once-prized fat, and parboiling before seasoning, covering, and baking. Baking time varies, but averages around two hours at 300° to 375°, depending on the size of the animal. Cooks often call for the addition of the traditional sweet potatoes or some other root vegetables during the last hour of cooking. Some folks barbecue the meat after parboiling, especially that of coons. Barbecued coon is not uncommon at large-scale game dinners sponsored by hunting clubs or churches where cooks grill other types of less oily game. The dark, rich meat of coons holds up well to a spicy sauce and is less threatening to timid modern diners than is the plain baked animal. Many southerners still enjoy coon hunting, even though the pelts are worth very little, and thus the animals still find their way onto the table. Hunters seldom kill and eat possums today. People associate possums with rural poverty and reject them perhaps because they are too common, too easy to hunt, and too greasy—the same reasons they were once so valuable.

Certain groceries and fish markets still carry coons and possums in season, and trappers and hunters sell them to those who know where to look. For the interested, a call to local wildlife conservation officials can probably put one in touch with trappers and hunters who can fill any order. Buyers should be aware, however, that the skinned carcasses of the animals are very difficult to distinguish from that of a housecat. At one time, passing off stray cats as coons or possums was such a standard practical joke that most buyers refused to pay unless the carcass had a foot attached for positive identification. Determined cooks who choose to purchase rather than hunt their own will also encounter an interesting facet of American wildlife law that makes coons, possums, and other furbearers the only truly wild game legally sold in the United States. Around the turn of the 20th century legislatures criminalized the sale of game like deer and quail as part of general wildlife conservation efforts but made allowance for furbearers. Nowadays the laws of individual states vary but many continue to allow licensed trappers and hunters to sell furbearer carcasses for food. Recent interest in game in upscale American restaurants is misleading, as animals and birds typically marketed as “game” in the United States are grown on farms and do not live in the wild. Furbearers may be the nonhunting cook’s only chance at purchasing truly wild southern game.

WILEY C. PREWITT JR.

Lodi, Mississippi

John James Audubon, The Quadrupeds of North America (1856); Burkhard Bilger, Outside (July 2001); Jerry Clower, Stories from Home (1992); Billy Joe Cross, Cooking Wild Game and Fish Mississippi Style: A Treasury of Unique Recipes for the Sportsmen (1976); George A. Feldhamer, Bruce C. Thompson, and Joseph A. Chapman, eds., Wild Mammals of North America: Biology, Management and Conservation (2003); Arthur Palmer Hudson, Journal of American Folklore (April–June 1926); T. A. Long, The Rugged Breed: True Adventures of Coon Hunters and Their Dogs (1965); George H. Lowery Jr., The Mammals of Louisiana and Its Adjacent Waters (1974); Keith Sutton, Hunting Arkansas: The Sportsman’s Guide to Natural State Game (2002); Keith and Theresa Sutton, Duck Gumbo to Barbecued Coon: A Southern Game Cookbook (2001); Leon F. Whitney and Acil B. Underwood, The Coon Hunters Handbook (1952).

 

Corn

Stephen Vincent Benét, in Western Star, wrote a significant quatrain about one group of early settlers and their contact with corn:

And those who came were resolved to be Englishmen,

Gone to world’s end, but English everyone,

And they ate the white corn-kernels, parched in the sun.

And they knew it not, but they’d not be English again.

Indeed, the parched corn and the seed corn that various Indian tribes gave to colonists saved their lives and changed their diets, habits, and culture. Corn became the most important crop in the South and throughout the country, feeding families and their livestock and thus establishing and sustaining a new way of life in a new land. Indians throughout what would become the United States, as well as Mexico and Central and South America, had grown corn, or maize, for thousands of years, selectively improving it from a coarse grass with a few kernels into a strong stalk with primitive ears bearing more kernels. Maize was not then grown in Europe. Early European settlers in America understood the value of this crop and further developed it through their traditional farming practices to produce enough grain to feed their livestock and their large families. Eventually, there would be enough surplus to sell, but corn, in the early days, anchored a subsistence way of life.

Corn involved the entire farmstead. Horses, mules, or oxen provided the power for turning the soil, harrowing, laying off rows, cultivating, and hauling the harvest to barns and cribs. The whole family, adults and children, often worked in the fields, cultivating, hoeing, cutting tops, and pulling fodder for livestock feed, as well as harvesting, shucking, shelling, and grinding the corn. This subsistence way of life also depended on additional livestock—milk and beef cattle, hogs, sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, and turkeys—all eating corn. The manure they produced was spread over the fields as fertilizer. Corn that shattered in the field or traveled through the digestive system of the domestic animals fed the wild birds and other game that also supplemented the family’s diet.

Imaginative cooks made a variety of dishes from the product—cornbread, muffins, fritters, roasting ears, corn pudding, pickled corn, hominy, grits, mush, and coating for fried meat and fish. However, a steady diet of corn brought on pellagra with diarrhea, loss of appetite, ulcers of the tongue and skin, depression, sluggishness, fever, and delirium, because corn does not contain vitamin B (niacin). Fortunately, southerners also grew a variety of beans that provided niacin.

The carbohydrates in the corn made it a potent source of alcohol when distilled after a fermenting process. Whiskey became a transportable trade item as well as a social one. Cornhusks not consumed by livestock could be braided into chair seats or horse collars, and even fashioned into attractive dolls. Cobs made a functional bowl for tobacco pipes and served a useful purpose in outhouses. They also became stoppers for jugs, and, soaked in fat or oil (later kerosene), they were useful in starting fires. Cornstalks were made into toys for children. Corn husking was an excuse for parties, with music, dancing, and sometimes a jug of whiskey from last year’s crop.

By 1849 the South had 18 million acres planted in corn, as compared to 5 million in cotton. Corn’s reproductive return is greater than that of any other cereal crop, with one grain producing anywhere from 500 to 4,000 kernels. With new varieties of hybrid seed corn and better methods of cultivation and use of fertilizers, corn became a major crop for domestic use and export. In 2002, 9.5 billion bushels of corn, at an average of 127.6 bushels per acre, and 102.4 tons of silage were grown in the United States. Products made from corn syrup and carbohydrates are used in numerous foods that we consume every day. In addition, there are more than 500 industrial uses of corn, which makes its way into automobile paint, plastics, tires, textiles, library paste, gunpowder, baby powder, sandpaper, soap, surgical dressings, insecticides, shoe polish, embalming fluids, rubbing alcohol, deodorants, mattresses, varnish, brake fluid, adhesive tape, and fireworks.

The crop that had been essential to subsistence living in the early days of the South is now a major crop with innumerable uses at home and abroad.

LOYAL JONES

Berea, Kentucky

Samuel R. Aldrich and Earl R. Leng, Modern Corn Production (1966); Joseph E. Dabney, Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking (1998); Betty Fussell, The Story of Corn (1992); Nicholas B. Hardeman, Shucks, Shocks, and Hominy Blocks (1981); Janice B. Longone, Mother Maize and King Corn: The Persistence of Corn in the American Ethos (1943); Paul Weatherwax, Indian Corn in Old America (1954).

 

Cornbread

Ground corn provided the staff of life for Native American societies throughout the Western Hemisphere before the arrival of Europeans, and later southerners followed their example. The Indians called their breads suppone and appone, and pone became the term in the South for cornmeal bread. Made from meal, salt, water, and bear or hog grease, these early pone breads might be called ashcake, from being baked in fireplace coals; hoecake, bread literally baked on a hoe; johnnycake, an adaptation of “journey cake” (a pocket bread), or corn dodgers, which were originally cooked in boiling water that caused the bread tidbits to bounce around.

“Second generation” cornbreads came later, with additional ingredients, such as flour, baking powder, baking soda, eggs, and buttermilk. They are sometimes called batter cakes, eggbread, or corn cakes. Cracklings, the crispy morsels remaining after the rendering of lard, were also added to cornpone. Later cornmeal breads included corn light bread, griddle cakes, and corn muffins and corn sticks, the latter baked in their own special iron pans. Hushpuppies, a traditional accompaniment to fried fish, are balls of cornmeal, with such other ingredients as onions, eggs, sugar, milk, or self-rising flour. Observers first noted hushpuppies around World War I, with the fish camps near St. Marks, Fla., south of Tallahassee, the likely point of origin. The name famously comes from cooks’ tossing the bread to barking dogs to quiet them.

Student cafeteria helper at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Fla., with a large tray of cornbread she has prepared for luncheon, 1943 (Gordon Parks, photographer, Library of Congress [LC-USW3-016880-C], Washington, D.C.)

Spoonbread is perhaps the highest culinary attainment of cornbread. Redding S. Sugg Jr. called it “the apotheosis of cornbread,” and Bill Neal referred to it as “an elegant soufflé; the fabled spoonbread, a mainstay of the aristocratic southern table.” John Egerton has described it as a “steaming hot, featherlight dish.” The Native American porridge called suppone may be the ancestor of spoonbread, but southerners did not add butter, milk, and eggs until after the Civil War. The term was not used in print until 1906, and the dish was most common in the Upper South.

Cornbread is a prime expression of the popularity of quick breads in the South. Wheat was the most popular grain throughout much of North America by the 19th century, but it was a rarity in most of the South until the latter part of that century. Southern mills did not grind high-gluten wheat, and people in the South continued to rely on the ground cornmeal they had used since frontier days. Cornbread did not keep well from one day to the next, so the daily preparation and serving of hot, fresh bread became the norm. Cornbread ingredients long represented a southern distinctiveness. Food writers have noted that northerners were more likely to use yellow cornmeal and southerners white cornmeal, with people from nonsouthern areas more likely to add sugar and flour.

John Egerton sees philosophical meanings in the evolution of cornbread from its Native American origins to the high-styled spoonbread. A correctly baked dish of spoonbread “can be taken as testimony to the perfectibility of humankind,” whereas a hot and crispy hoecake testifies to “another kind of perfection, an enduring strength that has not been improved upon in four centuries of service to hungry people.” An examination of contemporary regional cookbooks suggests that cornbread continues to be a common dish in the South and less so across the nation. This conclusion reinforces what Sallie F. Hill wrote in The Progressive Farmer’s Southern Cookbook (1961): “To try to cook without cornmeal in the South is a lost cause.”

CHARLES REAGAN WILSON

University of Mississippi

John T. Edge, A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South (1999); John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987); Damon Lee Fowler, Damon Lee Fowler’s New Southern Kitchen: Traditional Flavors for Contemporary Cooks (2002).

 

Country Captain

Country captain—also, chicken country captain—is a spicy dish of chicken simmered in a tomato-based curry sauce, usually served with plain white rice. Different recipes call for onions, garlic, raisins, and almonds, and the cooking time varies from kitchen to kitchen. Shrimp is also cooked “country captain” style.

Legend places the origin of the dish in Savannah, Ga., but nearly every seaboard city from Baltimore to Savannah lays claim to it. It does not appear in printed Georgia cookbooks until the 20th century, and neither Henrietta Stanley Dull (Southern Cooking, 1928) nor Harriett Ross Colquitt (The Savannah Cook Book, 1933) mentions it. One of the earliest printed recipes was from Philadelphia-based Eliza Leslie (Miss Leslie’s New Cookery Book, 1857). Leslie credited British sea captains trading between the East and West Indies with the introduction of the dish; other legends credit local sea captains. One version of the story recognizes a particular British captain who brought the dish from Bengali, India, where he had been stationed, to friends in Savannah. Savannah was then an important shipping port for the spice trade, and the dish may have been named for officers in India called “country captains.” As this legend has it, the enthusiasm of these friends catapulted the dish onto the permanent menu of Savannah and the country kitchens of Georgia.

The Georgia connection was cemented in the 1940s, when Mrs. W. L. Bullard served country captain to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and General George S. Patton during a visit to Warm Springs, Ga. Roosevelt visited the town’s naturally heated mineral springs regularly as treatment for his polio-related paralysis, and country captain became a fixture in his Warm Springs diet. His love of the dish helped to rekindle its popularity and raise it to the southern classic status.

Despite the lack of hard evidence about its origins, the dish remains firmly planted in the southern repertory. Today’s country captain retains curry and Indian spices as the dominant seasonings but evidences southern appropriation as well, with the addition of regional favorites like bacon, chicken fried in grease, and garden vegetables.

DAMON LEE FOWLER

Savannah, Georgia

FRANCES ABBOTT

University of Mississippi

Alan Davidson, Oxford Companion to Food (1999); John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987); Damon Lee Fowler, Classical Southern Cooking: A Celebration of the Cuisine of the Old South (1995); John F. Mariani, Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink (1999); Patricia Bunning Stevens, Rare Bits: Unusual Origins of Popular Recipes (1998); John Martin Taylor, The New Southern Cook: 200 Recipes from the South’s Best Chefs and Home Cooks (1995).

 

Country Ham

Country ham is a 19th-century southern term for a pork delicacy that has been known and loved in Asia and Europe for more than 2,000 years. It is the hind quarter of a hog that has been cured with salt, (often but not always) colored and flavored with wood smoke, and hung up to age through a summer or longer.

The first British colonists who came to Virginia brought pigs with them, and they also brought knowledge of the ancient technique of preserving meat by covering it with salt. The necessary combination of winter cold for slaughtering and summer heat for curing was ideally found in the colonies of Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, and ever since, country hams have remained popular in those states and their westward extensions, particularly Kentucky and Tennessee. Virginia’s renowned Smithfield hams and the prime products of western Kentucky and other places in the region are unsurpassed by the best that France, Italy, and other nations have to offer. Trigg County, Ky., holds an annual festival to honor its history as a notable center of country ham production. Each October the Trigg County Country Ham Festival, started in 1977, brings in tens of thousands of people from all over the country to sample the county’s famous hams and witness the awarding of a first prize for the year’s best country ham.

Modern food technology has developed short-cut methods of duplicating the appearance of genuine country ham, but not its taste. As a result, many commercial “country” hams on the market today have been artificially cured, smoked, and aged and do not have the rich aroma and flavor of hams produced by traditional processes. Diligent inquiries in rural areas of the Upper South can, however, still turn up hams that are in every way equal to those that came from the smokehouses of the region more than 300 years ago.

Wife of tenant farmer cutting piece of ham in smokehouse near Pace, Miss., 1939 (Russell Lee, photographer, Library of Congress [LC-USF34-032054-D], Washington, D.C.)

Ideal country hams are produced from year-old hogs that weigh at least 300 pounds and have been fattened on corn or peanuts. Such hams will weigh 25 to 30 pounds when butchered and about 20 percent less when properly cured and aged. As soon as a hog has been butchered in cold weather, the hams are rubbed down with a dry mixture of salt and other additives, usually sugar and saltpeter. Then they are completely covered in a bed of salt for four to six weeks, after which they are washed off and trimmed, and finally hung by their hocks in a dark smokehouse, there to take on a deep nut-brown appearance and a distinctive flavor from the enveloping hickory smoke. The hams must remain suspended to sweat through the hot summer months. A bare minimum of nine months is needed to complete the entire curing, smoking, and aging process; a full year, or even two years, is considered more nearly ideal.

Many variations on this basic method are favored from one ham maker to the next. Some mix a large amount of sugar with the salt and call their hams “sugar cured” (though sugar is actually not a preservative); some make smoke with oak or sassafras; some skip the smoking stage altogether, claiming it has no effect on flavor. But for the salt and the aging through the “summer sweats,” there are no satisfactory substitutes and no alternatives, modern technology notwithstanding.

When a ham is ready to eat, it may be baked in the oven, boiled on top of the stove, or sliced and fried. (It could also be eaten raw, as is common in Italy and Spain, but southerners generally are leery of raw pork, even if it has been properly cured.) Fried ham yields a rich bonus in the form of redeye gravy, produced by adding a little water to the frying skillet. In whatever form it is prepared, country ham is as old as the South itself.

Country ham has featured frequently in a number of forms of cultural expression, reifying the importance of the dish to southern life. Mississippi-born comedian and author Jerry Clower chose Country Ham (1974) as the title for one of his albums containing stories and jokes about rural southern life. Also focusing on a depiction of southern country communities, North Carolina novelist Reynolds Price places country ham and southern foodways at the heart of his fictional scenes of community and family in Good Hearts (1988). Narrating a main character’s attendance at a family meal in her country home, he writes: “It was Mama’s usual light lunch—the turkey with cornbread dressing and cranberry sauce, country ham, snaps and little butterbeans she’d pulled up last July, spiced peaches . . . every mouthful made the only way, from the naked pot upward by hand.” A meal including country ham embodies the spirit of rural southern family and community in this context.

Evidence of the importance of country ham to southern culture also emerges in an investigation of country ham in the lyrics of southern musicians. Georgia native Cledus T. Judd penned the song “Bake Me a Country Ham” (2004). In the song, the singer meets a woman who offers to do something to make his day better. He responds to her offer in his chorus:

Let the sweet smell fill the air,

Serve it to me in my underwear.

I’m tired of eating imitation Spam:

Could you bake me a country ham?

Images of country ham appear in contemporary southern hip-hop music—another significant contemporary southern musical genre. The Kentucky-based rap sextet Nappy Roots regularly celebrates country heritage through lyrical tributes to the symbols of rural southern life. Their 2002 album Watermelon, Chicken, and Gritz speaks to the joys and restrictions of a southern country experience. Rapper Ron Clutch lyricizes: “Candied yams, chitlins, greens, and smoked country ham / Chicken wings, cornbread, Gran in the kitchen throwin’ down.” County ham connects Nappy Roots with several generations of family, with southern home space, and with southern identity itself. The significance of country ham to southern tradition thus continues to materialize in the artistic expression of multiple southern communities.

JOHN EGERTON

Nashville, Tennessee

FRANCES ABBOTT

University of Mississippi

John T. Edge, Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South (2000); John Egerton, Side Orders: Small Helpings of Southern Cookery and Culture (1990), Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987); Sam Bowers Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840–1860 (1972); Jeanne Voltz and Elaine J. Harvell, The Country Ham Book (1999).

 

Crawfish

Known provincially as “crayfish,” “crawdads,” or “mudbugs,” crawfish are related to shrimp and lobster. Their average length is four inches, and they are most active at night. There are over 500 species in North America, where the vast majority make their home in fresh water, although they are sometimes kept as pets. The crawfish is widely farmed in Louisiana (nearly 120,000 acres of lakes within the state produce 50,000 or so tons of live crawfish a year), where it consists primarily of two species, the Red Swamp (Procambarus clarkii) and the White River (Procambarus acutus), which are harvested from November through June.

The crawfish, while abundant across the South, is a culinary icon in Louisiana. As Cajun legend has it, the crawfish followed the Acadians south to the bayous of Louisiana when they were exiled from Nova Scotia in the 1700s; enormous lobsters when the journey began, the crawfish diminished in size as they traveled deeper into the heat and humidity of the Deep South. In reality, however, American Indians were the first in the region to harvest and eat the diminutive creatures. The Indians placed reeds baited with deer meat in ponds and streams, periodically pulling them up to see if any crawfish were attached. Using this primitive fishing method, they would harvest crawfish by the bushel. White immigrants to the area primarily used crawfish as fish bait until the 1920s and 1930s, and the crawfish did not begin to be widely consumed outside of southern Louisiana until the 1960s.

Today, chiefly during spring and summer months, crawfish can be found on restaurant menus, at roadside stands, and at backyard boils. Standard preparation of crawfish consists of boiling them whole, with various seasonings and spices as well as vegetables, such as potatoes and corn, and sometimes with another meat, such as sausage. The Cajun and Creole cuisines of Louisiana have made famous many unique dishes comprised of the tail meat of crawfish, including crawfish étouffée, crawfish bisque, the crawfish po’ boy, and crawfish pie. Also, crawfish boils are a standard social event throughout southern Louisiana. Most often, crawfish are eaten while standing, usually at a makeshift crawfish table crafted of plywood, with a hole in the middle; the hole accommodates a garbage can, into which the shells are tossed as the crawfish are peeled and eaten (generally about five pounds of whole crawfish per person make a meal). A hotly debated point among crawfish consumers is whether to “suck the head.” Sucking the head is necessary to obtain the spicy juices within. Many refrain from this tradition, considering it crass and unpalatable, while others maintain the practice, avowing the head is the best part.

Louisiana mudbugs (PDphoto.org)

The crawfish has become a major part of southern culture through annual local festivals like the Breaux Bridge (Louisiana) Crawfish Festival (Louisiana is the self-proclaimed “Crawfish Capital of the World”) and the Texas Crawfish & Music Festival. Events at these festivals usually consist of crawfish-eating contests, crawfish étouffée cook-offs and demonstrations, Cajun dance contests, zydeco music, and the always-popular crawfish races. Inevitably, Hank Williams’s paean to the crawfish and to Cajun living, “Jambalaya,” is heard again and again:

Jambalaya, a-crawfish pie and-a file gumbo,
’Cause tonight I’m gonna see my machez a mio.
Pick guitar, fill a fruit jar and be gayoh,
Son of a gun, we’ll have big fun on the bayou.

RENNA TUTEN

MARY MARGARET MILLER

JAMES G. THOMAS JR.

University of Mississippi

The deviled egg, an iconic southern hors d’oeuvre (Courtesy Angie Mosier)

 

Deviled Eggs

Few covered-dish dinners in the South are without a plate of deviled eggs. Hostesses have been making them since the 1920s, when hors d’oeuvres began to be fixtures at luncheons and showers. Deviled eggs are among the easiest to prepare and least inexpensive of such dishes, being simply halved hard-boiled eggs whose yolks have been removed and mashed with other ingredients and then stuffed back into the cavities of the whites. Mustard is perhaps the ingredient that changed stuffed eggs to deviled ones. Although deviled foods had long been popular with the English, who had embraced them in India, the Underwood company purports to have coined the term deviled in the United States for its canned spiced ham product that contains mustard.

In their most basic form, deviled eggs include only mayonnaise, mustard, salt, and pepper blended with the egg yolks, though some cooks have been known to use softened butter rather than mayonnaise. Sweet pickle heads the list of other common additions, which also include curry powder, crumbled crisp bacon, crabmeat, pimiento, and horseradish.

As noted in Damon Lee Fowler’s New Southern Kitchen, “No matter how sophisticated the crowd professes to be, they will go after deviled eggs like cats after cream, leaving latecomers to hover around that empty plate with a look of wistful disappointment. I unashamedly admit that there has been more than one batch that never made it out of my kitchen.”

Deviled eggs grew in popularity to such a degree that plates specifically designed with elliptical depressions to accommodate the slippery eggs were mass produced and became popular bridal shower gifts in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. “No southern bride, rich or otherwise,” John Martin Taylor writes, “was without the funny piece of china with its 24 egg-shaped indentations to hold the stuffed eggs. Often the plate was relegated to the back of a shelf, but it would always come out for parties.” These days, china egg plates are in short supply, but pressed-glass ones are still widely available.

John T. Edge has written on the multiplicity of approaches to deviled eggs in today’s southern restaurants: “At Sally Bell’s Kitchen in Richmond, Virginia, they do it by the book, boiling the egg whites to a springy turn and mashing the yolks with a bit of mustard, a smidgen of relish, and a dusting of paprika, before wrapping each egg half in its own pouch of wax paper.”

In 2004 the Southern Foodways Alliance hosted the Deviled Egg Recipe Competition. The five finalists, spanning the nation from New Orleans to New York City, discussed the significance of deviled eggs in their family histories and shared recipes, which included innovations such as capers, onion, anchovies, black olives, and garlic.

DONNA FLORIO

Birmingham, Alabama

FRANCES ABBOTT

University of Mississippi

John T. Edge, Attaché Magazine (April 2003); Debbie Moose, Deviled Eggs: 50 Recipes from Simple to Sassy (2004); Moreton Neal, Remembering Bill Neal: Favorite Recipes from a Life in Cooking (2004); Helen Siegel, The Totally Eggs Cookbook (1997); Marie Simmons, The Good Egg: More than 200 Fresh Approaches from Soup to Dessert (2000).

 

Dull, Henrietta Stanley

(1863–1964) COOKBOOK AUTHOR. Born in 1863 on a plantation in Laurens County, Ga., Henrietta Stanley married S. R. Dull and had a family of six children by the time she was 30. She expected to live a quiet life as a mother and homemaker, but her husband’s failing health made it necessary for her to take up a career outside the home.

Dull seems to have migrated toward cooking naturally. She began her long career in food by baking for her neighbors, an enterprise that eventually expanded to a catering business. Her reputation grew when the Atlanta Gas Light Company hired her in 1910 to teach homemakers about cooking on new gas ranges. Her teaching expanded to such prominent venues as Macy’s department store in New York. In 1920 she began writing a cooking column for the home economics page of the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine.

Repeated requests for printed recipes led Dull to compile her columns under a single cover. In 1928, when she was 65, she published Southern Cooking, a work that set the standard for southern cookbooks for the rest of the century. It remained in print until after her death in 1964, selling more than 150,000 copies (and is still available in a facsimile edition).

In 1945 Dull stepped down from the newspaper, but her mark on the history of southern cooking had been made. Southern Cooking remains a critically important work for food historians, forming a definitive bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries. Known for their concise, no-nonsense brevity and illuminating clarity, the book’s more than 1,300 recipes give a sharp picture of a cuisine in transition. Dull brought a cuisine still rooted in the land and wedded to its own traditions into the urbanized, international age of the 20th century.

DAMON LEE FOWLER

Savannah, Georgia

Henrietta Stanley Dull, Southern Cooking (1928; with introduction by Damon Lee Fowler, 2006); Damon Lee Fowler, Classical Southern Cooking: A Celebration of the Cuisine of the Old South (1995).

 

Fast Food

Fast food is the antithesis of traditional southern foodways. Traditional southern food is, almost by definition, cooked and consumed slowly, preferably in the presence of one’s friends and family. The image of a traditional southerner speeding down a highway munching on a burger and fries from a paper sack is so alien that until recently it was inconceivable. The fast-food phenomenon, at least initially, was seen by many southerners not as a new convenience, but as an abomination.

Fast food is a misnomer and does not actually delineate a class of food items. Rather, it is a category of restaurants partially defined by its offerings, but, just as important, by its “quick” service and minimal dining setting without table service. The restaurant industry prefers the term quick-service restaurant, divorcing the concept entirely from the food items offered. Strictly speaking, many traditional southern restaurants fulfill the bare requirements of speed and service, but the implicit tie to specific items tends to exclude barbecues, fish camps, and buffets from being called fast-food restaurants. This partially explains the scarcity of classic fast food in the South during the product’s early years, but the lack is also attributable to the region’s low frequency of eating outside the family environment, low travel index, and low average incomes.

This is not to say that fast food was unknown in the South. Colonel Harland Sanders created the Kentucky Fried Chicken business in Kentucky, though he did not initially see it as a business that would create freestanding restaurants. He first franchised his chicken as a menu item in cafeterias and other restaurants. His success was so great that some analysts predicted in the late 1950s that chicken, not hamburgers, would dominate the fast-food market in the future. By the late 1960s, Minnie Pearl, the Grand Ole Opry comedian famous for her hats and homespun humor, secured commitments for 1,400 locations of Minnie Pearl’s Fried Chicken. Though her chicken chain ultimately did not take flight, numerous southern franchises did, including Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits of New Orleans, La.; Church’s Chicken of San Antonio, Tex.; and Bojangles’ Famous Chicken ’n’ Biscuits of Charlotte, N.C.

Three important hamburger chains originated in the South. Krystal, founded in 1932 on the corner of Seventh and Cherry Streets in Chattanooga, Tenn., is the second-oldest fast-food chain in the United States and the oldest in the South. It was originally so popular that by necessity it became a pioneer in the “to go” industry. Now a southern cultural icon, Krystal today operates over 400 restaurants in 11 states—all in the South. Burger King, the nation’s second-largest burger chain, was founded in Miami, Fla., in 1954, though the company never had a strong regional identity. Hardee’s, founded in 1960 in North Carolina, however, continues to have a strong regional affinity, though many of its 2,200 locations are now outside the region, especially in the Midwest. Hardee’s pioneered fast food in hundreds of smaller and mediumsized southern towns and to this day continues to hold a special image in those smaller communities.

Critical for fast-food success in the South was the introduction of the breakfast biscuit sandwich and its widespread diffusion, especially through the Hardee’s franchise system. The breakfast biscuit played a particularly important role in making fast-food acceptable among older southerners. Thousands of aging southern wives, growing tired of baking two or three biscuits for breakfast each morning, discovered that palatable, inexpensive biscuits could be purchased down the street at a local fast-food outlet such as Hardee’s, Biscuitville, or Mrs. Winner’s. Thus many older southerners first entered a fast-food store to have a morning biscuit breakfast, not to purchase a Big Mac. Possibly more important was the social impact of this lifestyle change, as tens of thousands of these folks discovered their friends were doing the same thing. Impromptu breakfast clubs became a regular part of the rural and small-town social schedule for the generally aging population. Certainly traditional cafés also often had morning tables set aside for this purpose, but the low cost, large parking lots, and suburban locations of fast-food stores gave them an advantage in the battle for the breakfast market among this demographic group. An interesting sidelight to this phenomenon is the increasing number of wives who meet their women friends at a different location after they send their husbands down to have breakfast with the “boys.”

Beef consumption generally is lower in the South than elsewhere in the nation. An analysis of the top 50 quick-service restaurants nationally reveals that almost half of the 14 fast-food chains headquartered in the region are primarily known for their chicken menu items. Fried-fish restaurants, though few in number, tend more likely to be headquartered in the region as well. Hamburger-based chain restaurants are today found throughout the South, but are more prominent in urban areas or regions where nonsoutherners tend to congregate. In one sense the spread of hamburger fast-food outlets throughout the South could be used as a surrogate measure of the nationalization of the region’s culture.

RICHARD PILLSBURY

Folly Beach, South Carolina

John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age (2002); Richard Pillsbury, From Boarding House to Bistro: The American Restaurant Then and Now (1990); Michael Roark, in The Taste of American Place: A Reader on Regional and Ethnic Foods, ed. Barbara G. Shortridge and James R. Shortridge (1998).

 

Fish, Rough

Rough fish, coarse fish, gross fish, and commercial fish are some of the inclusive terms that describe numerous species seldom intentionally caught by recreational anglers despite their economic value and importance as food fish. Commercial fishermen traditionally use nets and other specialized tackle to capture fish such as buffalo, gar, and paddle fish for the table. In general, the commercial fisheries of the southern river systems are not widely known. Their patrons are often rural folk or the poor, and the popularity of many river species has declined in recent decades. Nonetheless, untold thousands of pounds of commercial species are caught and marketed as food every year.

Before the refinement of aquaculture in the 1950s and 1960s, commercial fishermen were the major source for southern catfish. While some southerners still prefer wild-caught catfish, and fishermen still sell them, the pondraised product has taken most of the trade. Buffalo, on the other hand, are not farmed and are available only through the commercial fishery or one’s own efforts. Bigmouth and smallmouth buffalo, members of the sucker family, commonly weigh 20 to 30 pounds and can reach around 50. Buffalo were always important food fish for the people who lived near rivers and larger streams. They became a particularly appreciated, cheap, consistent source of protein for farm laborers in the South, both before and after the Civil War. Like all suckers, buffalo are very bony except for the rib sections. Thus, in addition to common methods of frying, people sometimes process buffalo in jars—somewhat like salmon or tuna. The cooking process softens the small bones, with cooks using the canned buffalo, like salmon, for croquettes. Today, one can still purchase fresh buffalo in some grocery stores and fish markets in the South and find it fried in some of the region’s fish houses. Other suckers, including the various redhorse species, are important in some areas, usually during their spawning season, when fishermen net or gig them. Like buffalo, their flesh is considered excellent but bony, and cooks usually fry them very well done to break down the small bones.

The gar species, including the longnose, the shortnose, and the alligator, have also been important commercial fish. All of the species are quite palatable, except for their eggs, which can be extremely poisonous. Unfortunately, the alligator gar is very rare these days, except in its extreme southern range. Able to tolerate brackish water, the alligator gar is still taken in some of the lower rivers and coastal water of the Gulf of Mexico, with specimens reaching up to 10 feet long. The shortnose and longnose are much more common and much smaller, although the longnose commonly reaches five feet. Many people enjoy gar once they hull them out of their armorlike skin. Some commercial fishermen report that the demand for them is second only to that for catfish. Many gar are destined for the fryer, as are most fish in the South. There is also a tradition of smoked gar and gar balls. The latter is probably the most often cited preparation for gar. Cooks usually describe it as a simple fish fritter or fish cake made of minced or ground gar mixed with cornmeal, seasonings, egg, and buttermilk and deep fried much like a hushpuppy.

A longnose gar (Courtesy Wiley Prewitt Jr., photographer)

Like the alligator gar, the Atlantic sturgeon and its Gulf subspecies are hard to find today, though it and other sturgeon species once made up an important fishery. After decades of unregulated harvest, large sturgeon became rare catches even by the 1930s. In her Freshwater Fishes in Mississippi, Fannye A. Cook reported that one C. C. Charbonneau took a six-foot sturgeon—a youngster by the standards of the Atlantic sturgeon—from the Pearl River in 1933, providing “the chief food for seventy-five persons at a fish fry.” These days, the small but common shovelnose sturgeon is the only species taken by commercial fishermen in some numbers.

The general depletion of sturgeons, not only in the South but worldwide, has led to more pressure on the paddlefish, another traditional commercial species. Also known as spoonbill, or boneless cat (because of its cartilagenous skeleton much like a shark’s), the paddlefish has only one relative, an enormous species in the Yangtze River system of China. The American species of paddlefish is native to the Mississippi drainage and neighboring coastal rivers. Fishermen usually take the paddlefish in gill nets, trammel nets, or hoop nets, and specimens of a hundred pounds are not unknown. Fishermen and fish eaters have always highly regarded paddlefish as food, but the use of its roe as a substitute for sturgeon caviar has led to some outrageous overexploitation. Occasionally, game and fish officials confront gangs of poachers who net thousands of pounds of spoonbills just for the eggs that they can sell on the black market. Legally fished paddlefish roe brings a good price and is said by some to be the equal of sturgeon roe in quality.

For the mainstream culture, the rivers of the South, their fish, and their fishermen remain a mystery. The fish, if they are known at all, connote the foodways of the rural poor to some and raise fears of pollution to others. Tiny fish markets and fish peddled from the backs of pickups put off those accustomed to their food in plastic wrap and Styrofoam. The inland commercial fishery endures nevertheless and offers consumers an alternative to farmed fish with a variety of species available almost nowhere else.

WILEY C. PREWITT JR.

Lodi, Mississippi

Fannye A. Cook, Freshwater Fishes in Mississippi (1959); Jens Lund, Flatheads and Spooneys: Fishing for a Living in the Ohio River Valley (1995); Lawrence M. Page and Brooks M. Burr, A Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes (1991).

 

Fish Camps

While in many areas of the South fish camp refers to a campsite or lodge reserved for fishing expeditions, fish camp restaurants are local seafood houses, found in abundance in the Carolinas and well-established throughout the Deep South, specializing in deep-fried fresh- and saltwater seafood.

Although restaurants calling themselves fish camps can be found from Tennessee to Texas, a high concentration of fish camps can be found in the western half of the Carolinas. In Gaston County, N.C., there are half a dozen within a one-mile radius of one another, with another five or six less than a 10-minute drive away. Lineberger’s Fish Fry, a long-established restaurant in Gaston County, typifies the fish camp. As the name implies, this fish camp, like many others, began as a site at one of the local fishing spots, in this case the Catawba River, where in the 1930s Luther Lineberger set up vats of hot lard and offered to fry up the fresh catches of his fellow fishermen. Lineberger and a few other competing entrepreneurs began offering side dishes to go with the fish and in a short time replaced their frying sheds with clapboard-and-screen restaurants. These fry houses with dirt floors and long tables soon evolved into modern family restaurants, but their name and their cuisine remained the same.

Western Carolina camps are distinctive in that, unlike the calabash restaurants of the Carolina coast, they serve freshwater fish, particularly catfish, and unlike typical catfish houses found in Alabama, Tennessee, and elsewhere, they also offer saltwater seafood. Catfish, flounder, and shrimp tend to be the most popular items and are always accompanied by the trinity of slaw, hushpuppies, and french fried potatoes—all in large quantities at a low price. Menus are kept simple, as is the decor. And while a few fish camps serve alcohol, the majority serve nothing stronger than sweet tea or Coca-Cola. Most restaurants are family owned and operated and use traditional recipes and serving philosophies. Harold Stowe, the longtime proprietor of Stowe’s Fish Camp in Belmont, N.C., argues that the success of his family’s fish camps lies in their “family-oriented atmosphere” and the fact that they “treat everybody the same . . . all classes of people, all races . . . are treated the same.” (The popularity of Stowe’s Fish Camp has also been helped by its salt-and-pepper catfish, a dish Harold Stowe says his wife Betty invented.)

Recently the seemingly contradictory phenomena of the growing popularity of fast-food restaurants and an increase in dietary concerns over fried food have resulted in a decline of fish camp patronage in much of the South, a decline echoed in the 1999 cancellation of Gaston County’s long-running festival, the Fish Camp Jam. Nevertheless, as long as southerners believe, as historian Joe Gray Taylor has observed, that “God made fish to be fried,” fish camps will continue to serve up whole orders of flounder, half orders of perch, and all-you-can-eat salt-and-pepper catfish.

STEPHEN CRISWELL

University of South Carolina Lancaster

Kenneth S. Allen, Charlotte (June 1998); John T. Edge, Gourmet (May 2000); Sam Bowers Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840–1860 (1972); Joe Gray Taylor, Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South: An Informal History (1982).

 

Goo Goo Clusters

The Standard Candy Company heralds the Goo Goo Cluster as “A Good Ole Southern Treat.” Often advertised as “the South’s favorite candy” and “the Goodest Bar in town,” the Goo Goo Cluster has been a candy staple in Nashville, Tenn., where it originated, and throughout the South for almost a century.

First created by William H. Campbell in 1912, the Goo Goo Cluster is a combination of caramel, marshmallow, peanuts, and pure milk chocolate. (Later the company began making Goo Goo Supremes, which substitute pecans for peanuts.) Though the packaging and distribution techniques have changed with modernization and company expansion, the ingredients, cooking methods, and essential southern identity have remained the same.

The Goo Goo Cluster’s name has been a curiosity since its origin. One account says that Campbell settled on the name because his son, only a few months old at the time, uttered those words when first introduced to the new candy. Another version suggests that Campbell was struck with his son’s first utterance and decided it was an appropriate name. Whatever the true version, Standard Candy Company has long contended that a Goo Goo is the first thing a southern baby requests.

Since 1968 the Grand Ole Opry has been singing the praises of the Goo Goo to those in attendance and thousands more over WSM radio. So closely associated with the Opry is the candy that some have suggested Goo stands for Grand Ole Opry. Opry announcer Grant Turner long let listeners know how to order the candy by mail, encouraging them further with the familiar slogan: “Go Get a Goo Goo. . . . It’s Good.”

TOM RANKIN

Duke University

Steve Almond, Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (2005); Margaret Loelo, Wall Street Journal (8 December 1982); John F. Persinos, Inc. (May 1984); Tim Richardson, Sweets: A History of Candy (2002).

 

Gravy

Gravies moisten and flavor the foods they accompany, and in traditional southern kitchens they are usually thickened with flour and occasionally with cornmeal. Southern gravies are called pan gravies because they are made in a skillet with drippings from fried food, but a specific definition of pan gravy does not allow for the great variety of sauces that reflect the nature of southern cooking. Southerners enjoy many different types of gravy that go with a range of dishes and meals.

Brown gravy is prepared with beef drippings and often served over beef and potatoes. At Ajax Diner in Oxford, Miss., a locally cherished sandwich called the Big Easy, named in honor of onetime Ole Miss quarterback Eli Manning, is made with layers of chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, and butter beans, topped with thick brown gravy.

Woman preparing gravy in a sharecropper cabin, 1938 (Russell Lee, photographer, Library of Congress [LC-USF34-031226-D], Washington, D.C.)

Chicken gravy is made from the pan drippings of fried chicken. In his song “Lazy Bones” Savannah-born composer Johnny Mercer writes, “Long as there is chicken gravy on your rice / Ev’rything is nice,” illustrating one of the ways in which chicken gravy is incorporated into southern meals.

White gravy, also called cream gravy or breakfast gravy, is an all-purpose gravy boiled with milk or cream, served over biscuits for breakfast or chickenfried steak for dinner. When crumbled sausage and drippings from the pan are added, it is commonly called sawmill or sausage gravy. Texas country singer Guy Clark celebrates the marriage of chicken-fried steak and white gravy in his song “Texas Cookin’”: “Get them steaks chicken fried / Sho’ do make a man feel happy / to see white gravy on the side.” Particularly when called sawmill gravy, this variation is commonly conceived of as a subsistence food for the poor. Just a few scraps of meat and a small amount of milk are enough to make the concoction. Even the name may suggest poverty, as a possible reference to the limited diet of coffee, biscuits, and gravy once consumed by backwoods sawmill workers.

Some southern cooks make gravies with a white roux, a boiled but not browned mixture of butter and flour, which becomes a thickening for white sauce. Redeye gravy is a ham gravy made when the drippings of fried country ham, loosened with cola, coffee, or water. Legend of dubious authenticity implicates Andrew Jackson in naming this gravy. He supposedly ordered a whiskey-drinking cook to bring him ham with gravy “as red as your eyes.” More likely, the name redeye comes from the deep red color of the juice from country ham. In the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1948, Allan M. Trout wrote: “The most nourishing liquid in the world is the gravy that fried ham gives up. . . . There is abundant life in ham gravy. It will put hair on the hairless chest of a man, or bloom into the pale cheeks of a woman. Breast-fed babies whose mothers eat ham gravy are destined to develop sturdy bodies and sound minds. . . . But ham and gravy is a lopsided combination. The gravy always gives out before the ham. . . . That, sir, is why we cannot bottle ham gravy to sell to gravy lovers. A surplus of ham gravy cannot be attained.”

Another variety, popular in Appalachia, is chocolate gravy, sweet gravy prepared with cocoa and poured over biscuits for breakfast. This gravy is stirred with milk and occasionally cream. Chocolate gravy also enjoys a rich history in the cooking of the Arkansas Ozarks, although its origins are unknown.

Less-known, but still notable, gravies include egg gravy thickened with eggs, baloney gravy stirred in the pan drippings of fried baloney, and squirrel gravy cooked with fried squirrel and served for breakfast in place of sausage gravy. More obscure still are gravies made with wild game, pig’s feet, and oysters. Once, no meal—whether breakfast, lunch, or dinner—was complete without gravy to compliment the food, and for many people that remains true.

In all its varieties, gravy holds a central place in the culture of the American South. Songwriters and performers comment on the importance of gravy to cultural identity in their lyrics and titles, from the North Georgian Skillet Lickers’ old-time fiddle song “Soppin’ the Gravy,” to Jelly Roll Morton’s “Low Gravy,” to jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington’s “Ain’t the Gravy Good?”

Gravy shows up in a range of literary creations as well. It appears in the family dinner scenes over pork chops in Shirley Abbott’s 1983 memoir and historical exploration, Womenfolks, about several generations in her Arkansas farm family. James Agee documents the connection between gravy and a sense of home place in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939). In recording the lives of sharecropping families in Hale County, Ala., Agee comments on the importance of food, although scarce, to the sensory experience of home. Describing one home amidst the constant consumption of biscuits and gravy from pork, he writes: “There is even in so clean a household as this an odor of pork, of sweat, so subtle it seems to get into the very metal of the cooking-pans . . . yet this is the odor and consistency and temper and these are true tastes of home.”

MARK F. SOHN

Pikeville College

Jane Carson, Colonial Virginia Cookery (1968), The Women’s Day Encyclopedia of Cookery (1966); John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987); Ronni Lundy, Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken: The Heart and Soul of Southern County Kitchens (1991); William Woys Weaver, in Food in Change: Eating Habits from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, ed. Alexander Fenton and Eszter Kisban (1986).

 

Greens

Joining cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and broccoli, greens are members of the genus Brassica. Among the many species and hybrids of Brassica greens, southern greens include, but are not necessarily limited to, beet tops, collard greens, rapini (also known as broccoli de rabe or broccoli rabb), chard, kale, rape, Swiss chard (or chard), dandelion greens, mustard greens (or curly mustard), wild mustard (also known as old field mustard), summer mustard, turnip greens, cress (also known as creasy, creecy, or creesy greens or dry land creases), watercress, winter cress, old hen and chicken, plantain (or plantin), hen pepper, mouse ears, purslane, speckled breeches, old sage, wild lettuce, greenbrier sprouts, poke (also known as poke sallet, poke salad, pokeweed, and polk), crow’s foot, wild tung grass, chochanna (Kochvni), fiddleheads, chicory, bear lettuce (or bear lettice), dock, narrow leaf dock (or nar dock), marsh marigold dock, shonny, Uncle Simpson’s lettice, groundhog salit, stagger weed, Old King cure-all, lady’s fingers, lamb’s-quarters (also known as lambsquarters or pigweed), lamb’s tongue, sissle, red worms, sorrel, sheep sorrel, and branch lettuce. Many of these greens occur naturally or are farmed in the South and appear commonly on the southern table.

The inclusion of vegetables, particularly those homegrown, in the southern diet reflects the economic disadvantage under which the region labored for much of its past and into the present; as meat was an expensive food item, southerners had to rely more heavily on nutrition from vegetables. The climate and geography of the South offer greens a long growing season (from early spring until late fall or early winter), which fosters its elemental addition to subsistence gardening.

The peoples of the South also affected the important role greens play within southern foodways. The Native Americans residing in the South included native greens in their culinary repertoire and incorporated new greens brought from abroad in their agriculture. Just as the Native Americans received knowledge of greens of the Old World from European settlers, they, in turn, taught the “new” southerners about the greens native to the New World, such as poke sallet. Last, but definitely not least, African slaves carried some of their native greens (e.g., collard greens) to the South. The method most commonly used in preparing greens derives from African culinary techniques and was crafted by the slaves cooking in southern kitchens.

Makers of greens in restaurants and homes in the South traditionally begin preparation by cleaning the greens thoroughly, as the leaves tend to collect dirt and sand. After browning or parboiling some pork (often ham hock, salt pork, or bacon), the cook places the greens in a large pot with enough water to cover them and simmers the greens with the chosen pork product, onions, garlic, and other seasonings until the greens are well cooked and the water reduced; depending upon the cook, this can take anywhere from 45 minutes to several hours. Southern greens are frequently served with hot pepper sauce and vinegar and a slice of cornbread to soak up the potlikker.

Potlikker, the liquid remains at the bottom of a pot of greens, holds a special place in southern history. Huey “the Kingfish” Long brought potlikker national attention by sparking a 1931 debate with Julian Harris, news editor of the Atlanta Constitution, on whether crumbling or dunking was the better method for soaking cornpone in potlikker. Senator Long also carried potlikker into the national and historical spotlight by including a long-winded treatise on potlikker in a 15½-hour filibuster speech.

A shopping cart full of greens soon to be sold at a farmers’ market, Oxford, Miss. (Courtesy John T. Edge, photographer)

Politics aside, potlikker serves as a folk remedy for many ailments plaguing southerners. The intuition of early folk doctors regarding how to employ greens medically coincides roughly with scientifically informed contemporary treatments. Studies in the 1930s revealed that collard and turnip greens contain high amounts of vitamins A, B, and C; folk medicine has long utilized greens as a spring tonic. Because greens are iron rich and high in fiber, folk healers prescribe them to battle anemia and constipation. Greens are also known to help with rheumatism, a sore throat, and a waning libido.

Southern folklore has much to say about nonmedicinal effects of greens too. If consumed in too great a quantity, greens are prone to make a man become feisty and ill-tempered. Greens bring good luck and fortune, which explains the southern tradition of eating greens on New Year’s Day. Another southern myth pertaining to greens speaks to the precautions of the diet of recent mothers: if mothers with newborns eat turnip greens, their babies will die, suggesting a possible link between eating greens and the resulting toxicity of breast milk. Regarding the planting and harvesting of collard greens, a folktale warns that if the farmer lets the collards go to seed during the year they are planted, someone in the family will die; this correlates with the adage “waste not, want not” in the often poor and hungry South.

As greens hold such an important place in southern culture, many southerners celebrate them with local festivals. Harlan, Ky., in June, honors the town’s favorite food with its Poke Sallet Festival. Likewise, one September weekend each year, Ayden, N.C., pays homage to collard greens. The people of Ayden are so passionate about their collards that they produced a volume of poetry dedicated to these lauded vegetables, Leaves of Greens: The Collard Poems.

Southerners also praise their greens through song. Probably the most famous piece of music featuring greens is Tony Joe White’s “Polk Salad Annie,” which Elvis Presley recorded in 1970. Blues anthems eulogizing greens include “Good Old Turnip Greens,” “Collard Greens,” “Mustard Greens,” and “Them Greasy Greens,” each with renditions during the civil rights movement, when African Americans coined the term soul food and embraced the ethnic cuisine it described (of which greens were an important component) as a symbol of pride and solidarity. Though he never recorded a song specifically about greens, jazz pianist Thelonious Monk flaunted his southern heritage by often wearing a collard leaf as a boutonniere.

With growing interest in ethnic and regional foodways, greens are gaining national celebrity on network cooking shows. Southern cuisine was once epitomized by fried chicken and barbecue, but now other important staples are starting to taste the limelight.

BROOKE BUTLER

University of California, Davis

B. A. Botkin, Treasury of Southern Folklore (1977); James W. Byrd, Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin (1966); John Egerton, Side Orders: Small Helpings of Southern Cookery and Culture (1990); Evan Jones, American Food: The Gastronomic Story (1975); Kay K. Moss, Southern Folk Medicine: 1750–1820 (1999); Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (1968); Joe Gray Taylor, Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South: An Informal History (1982); Jackie Torrence, The Importance of Pot Liquor (1994).

 

Greens, Collard

Collard greens grow throughout the South and, probably as much as any other food, serve as a culinary Mason-Dixon line. Some claim greens kept Sherman’s scorched-earth policy from totally starving the South into submission; many today can testify to surviving Depression winters with greens, fatback, and cornbread. Southern childhood memories often focus on collard greens: either the pleasant, loving connection of grandma’s iron pot and steaming potlikker, or the traumatizing effects engendered by the first whiff of the unmistakable odor for which greens are famous. Writing in the Charlotte Observer in 1907, Joseph P. Caldwell explained, “The North Carolinian who is not familiar with pot likker has suffered in his early education and needs to go back and begin it over again.” Particularly among rural and poor southerners, collard greens have endured as a dietary staple.

Sometimes defined as headless cabbages, collards are best when prepared just after the first frost, though they are eaten year-round. They should always be harvested before the dew dries. When being prepared, they are “cropped,” then “looked,” then cooked; that is, cut at the base of a stalk, searched for worms, and then cooked “till tender” on a low boil, usually with fatback, or neck or backbone, added. The resultant “mess o’ greens,” topped with a generous helping of vinegar, can easily make a meal in itself. If they are summer greens (and much tougher), the tenderizing could take two hours or more of cooking; after first frost, it may take less than an hour. A whole pecan in the pot should eliminate the pungent and earthy smell. Potlikker, the juice left in the pot after the greens are gone, is a southern version of nectar from the gods and is valued both as a delicacy—particularly when sopped with cornbread—and for its alleged aphrodisiacal powers. Greens combine well with black-eyed peas and hog jowl in the South’s traditional New Year’s Day meal. To ensure good fortune, one should either eat lots of greens or tack them to the ceiling. In fact, a collard leaf left hanging over one’s door can ward off evil spirits all year long.

Nutritionally, collards are a good source of vitamins A, B₆, and C, as well as calcium, iron, thiamine, and niacin. They seem to have unique laxative qualities, though the resultant gas is often troublesome. Folk legends claim a fresh collardleaf placed on the forehead should cure a headache. The same remedy can be applied to nervous afflictions plaguing women, though it works best on such cases when the leaf is still wet with dew and the woman just rising. The roots bound on arthritic joints ease pain, and a poultice prepared from collard leaves has been recommended as a cure for cancers on the face, boils, and festering sores.

Though collard greens are grown year-round throughout the South and Southwest (Indians call them quelites), they are most prevalent in the Deep South and the eastern plains of North and South Carolina. The exporting of collards to displaced southerners in the Northeast has become a big business in the three leading collards-producing states. From the last week of October through May, eight firms from Georgia and the Carolinas ship a thousand tons of whole, fresh collards a week to the major northeastern metropolitan areas. The greens are cut and banded, then packed in bundles on ice, about 25 pounds per box or 20 tons a truckload.

In 2001, 7,500 acres of collards, with a cash value of over $17 million, were harvested in Georgia. South and North Carolina, numbers two and three in production respectively, each cultivate about a third as much as Georgia annually, although Burch Farms in Faison, N.C.—with 1,200 acres—has become the region’s leading producer for export. Exported greens are hybrids, but the most popular varieties grown for southern consumption are heirlooms.

Collards are usually grown for utilitarian purposes, but southerners have been known to decorate a particularly brilliant plant as a Christmas tree (some grow as tall as six feet). Thelonious Monk, the great jazz musician born in Rocky Mount, N.C., wore a collard leaf in his lapel while playing New York club dates. Greens were first officially celebrated in 1950, when the North Carolina playwright Paul Green led a “Collards and Culture” symposium in Dunn, N.C. According to the late Sam Ragan, Green “urged us all to move out of the commonplace and bring a new dimension to our collard lives.”

Flannery O’Connor’s Ruby Hill, in “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” takes a less favorable view of greens. When her brother, home from the European Theater, asks her to cook him some, she complies grudgingly: “‘Collard greens!’ she said, spitting the word from her mouth as if it were a poisonous seed.”

After William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, a fellow Oxonian wrote Sweden’s King Gustav IV: “I’ll bet William didn’t tell you what a big coon and collards eater he is. Now, I told William to carry some delicious coon and collards to you. If he had I am sure you would have given him a larger prize.”

Collard greens are celebrated in three annual festivals—in Port Wentworth, Ga.; Gaston, S.C.; and Ayden, N.C. A new world’s record for eating collards was established at the 2002 Ayden festival when Daniel Mitchell of Deep Run, N.C., ate eight pounds in 30 minutes and kept them down long enough to claim his prize.

ALEX ALBRIGHT

East Carolina University

Alex Albright and Luke Whisnant, eds., Leaves of Greens: The Collard Poems (1984); “Collard files,” Folklore Archives, English Department, East Carolina University, Greenville, N.C.; John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1993); Greenville, N.C., Daily Reflector (8 September 2002); Flannery O’Connor, in The Complete Stories (1971); Sam Ragan, The Pilot (12 July 1984); The State (July 1984).

 

Greens, Turnip

Turnip greens, or Brassica campestris, are the tender leaves of a white turnip. The variety of turnip typically grown for the harvesting of its greens is the Seven Top, though there are more than 40 turnip cultivars in the United States. Turnip greens are slightly sweet if gathered when the plant is young (about 5 to 7 weeks); they develop a somewhat bitter and shaper flavor when harvested from an older plant.

The turnip originated in Europe, where the root and its greens have been cultivated for over 4,000 years. Turnip greens are a favorite green of Appalachia, a region whose ancestry is thought to be made up predominantly of Lowland Scots and Ulstermen. Because of their isolation, people in the Appalachians had cooking methods for greens different from those of most other southerners, who traditionally simmer greens with a piece of pork for 45 minutes to several hours. Folks in the Appalachians commonly parboil their turnip greens and then fry them with fatback or other pork products; some cooks scramble eggs along with the greens while frying.

Turnip greens are richer in vitamins and minerals than most vegetables, including the root from which they stem. They contain significant amounts of vitamins A, B, and C, as well as riboflavin, calcium, beta carotene, iron, folic acid, and other beneficial nutrients. Because of the nutritive composition of turnip greens, they have long served as a folk-healing remedy for such ailments as rheumatoid arthritis, colorectal cancer, atherosclerosis, and emphysema. Turnip greens are also known to absorb fats in the stomach, aiding in digestion.

The first weekend in June residents of Easton, Tex., celebrate their local foodways with their Heritage Turnip Green Festival, which features the town’s annual Turnip Green Softball Tournament. Likewise, Nashville, Tenn., pays homage to turnip greens each fall with a special weekend devoted to the leafy greens at the city’s farmers’ market; highlights include a turnip greens eating contest, music, and free samplings of turnip greens and other favorite southern foods.

BROOKE BUTLER

University of California, Davis

John K. Crellin, comp. and ed., Plain Southern Eating: From the Reminiscences of A. L. Tommie Bass, Herbalist (1988); Joseph E. Dabney, Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking (1998); Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (1968).

 

Grits

Grits are—or is, as the case may be— a by-product of corn kernels. Dried, hulled corn kernels are commonly called hominy; grits are made of finely ground hominy. Whole-grain grits may also be produced from hard corn kernels that are coarsely ground and bolted (sifted) to remove the hulls.

Writing in the New York Times on 31 January 1982, Mississippi-born Turner Catledge provided a succinct history of grits in the South:

Grits is the first truly American food. On a day in the spring of 1607 when sea-weary members of the London Company came ashore at Jamestown, Va., they were greeted by a band of friendly Indians offering bowls of a steaming hot substance consisting of softened maize seasoned with salt and some kind of animal fat, probably bear grease. The welcomers called it “rockahominie.”

The settlers liked it so much they adopted it as part of their own diet. They anglicized the name to “hominy” and set about devising a milling process by which the large corn grains could be ground into smaller particles without losing any nutriments. The experiment was a success, and grits became a gastronomic mainstay of the South and symbol of Southern culinary pride.

Thus, throughout its history, and in pre-Columbian times as well, the South has relished grits and made them a symbol of its diet, its customs, its humor, and its good-spirited hospitality. From Captain John Smith to General Andrew Jackson to President Jimmy Carter, southerners rich and poor, young and old, black and white have eaten grits regularly. So common has the food been that it has been called a universal staple, a household companion, even an institution.

Grits cooked into a thick porridge are so common in some parts of the South that they are routinely served for breakfast, whether asked for or not. They are often flavored with butter or gravy, served with sausage or ham, accompanied by bacon and eggs, baked with cheese, or sliced cold and fried in bacon grease. Mississippi-born Craig Claiborne, the late New York Times food writer, loved grits and published elegant recipes for their preparation.

Some historians assert that neither hominy nor grits were universally eaten in the South prior to the Civil War, but most food scholars conclude that Indian corn in all its myriad forms— grits, hominy, roasting ears, succotash (usually a combination of corn kernels and lima beans), and various kinds of cornbread—sustained the pioneers and their succeeding generations from the beginning of European settlement on the Virginia coast.

Stan Woodward’s film It’s Grits (1978) chronicled national and regional attitudes toward the dish. Grits enjoyed a surge of national popularity during the early part of the Carter administration but have since returned to their status as a distinctly regional food. One noted foreign visitor who took a liking to grits was the Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution. So much did he enjoy eating the dish during his return visit to the United States in 1824–25 that he took a substantial supply back to France for himself and his friends.

The last 30 years have seen renewed interest in grits. It has become a part of southern creative expression, as when bluesman Little Milton says, “If grits ain’t groceries / Eggs ain’t poultry / And Mona Lisa was a man.” Jimmy Carter’s presidency in the 1970s led to media interest in grits as a southern icon and the film My Cousin Vinny included a humorous scene of a couple from the Bronx eating the mysterious (to them) grit. By the mid-1980s a new generation of renowned southern chefs, including Bill Neal from North Carolina and Frank Stitt from Alabama, began serving sophisticated dishes with grits, such as Stitt’s grits soufflé with fresh thyme and country ham. South Carolina cookbook author John Martin Taylor helped popularize stone-ground grits, and smaller producers of artisanal grits grew into successful businesses, including Old Mill of Guilford (North Carolina), Falls Mill (Tennessee), Logan Turnpike Mill (Georgia), Adam’s Mill (Alabama), Anson Mills (South Carolina), and War Eagle Mill (Arkansas).

JOHN EGERTON

Nashville, Tennessee

Marilou Awiakta, Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother’s Blessing (1993); John T. Edge, Saveur (November 2003); John Egerton, Side Orders: Small Helpings of Southern Cookery and Culture (1990); Betty Fussell, The Story of Corn (1992); John Martin Taylor, Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking (1992).

 

Gumbo

Gumbo, a regional specialty found most readily in south Louisiana and neighboring areas, is a soup or stew based on local ingredients, served with rice. There are many varieties of gumbo, and individual cooks or families often have their own special heritage recipes. Gumbo often consists of a seasoned mixture of two or more types of meat and/or seafood, usually in a roux-based sauce or gravy.

This heady, aromatic dish is a hybrid product of varied cultures. Its name comes from Africa—ngombo, the Bantu word for okra, and okra remains a primary ingredient in one family of gumbo recipes. Another variation, filé gumbo, contains filé powder (ground sassafras leaves) as thickener and unique flavoring agent borrowed from Native Americans. In southwestern Louisiana prairie country, chicken and sausage gumbo has no okra or filé powder but is thickened with a dark roux and flavored with more pepper than other varieties.

Mr. B’s Gumbo Ya-Ya

(Courtesy NewOrleansOnline.com)

Meats used in gumbo may include chicken, duck, squirrel, or rabbit, along with seasoning meats such as sausage or ham (but rarely beef, pork, or lamb stew meat), sometimes in combination with oysters. Seafood gumbo may include shrimp, crab, or oysters, but not often finfish. It commonly includes okra—and often tomatoes, too, in the New Orleans area. Onions, parsley, and pepper season gumbo, and often a dark roux enriches flavor and color.

Gumbo is sometimes called the “national dish of Louisiana.” Countless observers, both outsiders and locals, have seen gumbo as a metaphor for south Louisiana, with its ingredients and cooking reflecting the varied ethnic history and geography of the state. It is today a standard item on restaurant menus. The ingredients found in gumbo support the popular local belief that it is a dish that allows the cook to combine small amounts of various ingredients on hand, none of which would be sufficient for a family meal, into a single large dish, which can be extended with the addition of rice.

In Louisiana, gumbo comes in several forms, most notably Creole, Cajun, chicken and gumbo z’herbes. First, there is Creole. The word began as a description of offspring of European settlers (in Spanish, criollo) and then evolved into meaning homegrown (as in “Creole” tomatoes). Creole cooking, as a style, is that practiced in the areas in and around New Orleans by European and African immigrants and their descendants. Then there is Cajun, a shortening of the word Acadian, which refers to French settlers of the Nova Scotia region who, displaced by the English, finally settled in southwest Louisiana in the late 18th century.

As with any kitchen dispute, there are as many theories as there are cooks, but the usually accepted difference between a Cajun and a Creole gumbo lies in the roux. Browning flour in fat (slowly, slowly, stirring all the while) creates a roux, and in Cajun gumbos this is a necessary thickener. Creole gumbos rely mainly on vegetable aids for thickening, with a much thinner roux if one is used. Cajun gumbos have more pepper and other spices.

Gumbo nearly always begins with what some chefs call the holy trinity of vegetables—onion, celery, and bell pepper. These are seasoned and sautéed, and the seasonings might include salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, thyme, garlic, green onions, parsley, bay leaves, and basil. In okra gumbo, tomatoes are usually added. A typical filé gumbo contains the above seasonings, plus chicken or other fowl and its stock, oysters and oyster water, and a seasoning pork— ham, andouille, a smoked sausage, or tasso (dried and smoked meat, in this case, pork). A seafood gumbo contains okra, tomatoes, all the above seasonings, possibly a flavoring pork, and shrimp (with stock from boiling their shells) and hard-shelled crabs (also with stock). Crabmeat may be added.

Many variations on the recipes above are possible, and some people use both filé and okra. Rice always accompanies gumbo, and some cooks sprinkle filé over each bowl served rather than add it to the pot. Some cooks add a serving of potato salad in place of rice.

Two other gumbo families exist. Gumbo z’herbes is very similar to what is called greens and potlikker in other southern kitchens. When seasoning meat is left out, gumbo z’herbes becomes an ideal Lenten soup, and the number of greens in a Good Friday gumbo z’herbes can correspond to the number of apostles. Chicken gumbo is associated with Mardi Gras celebrations in southwestern Louisiana, where masked revelers have traditionally visited farmhouses, chasing live chickens and gathering other ingredients for a communal evening gumbo meal and dance. Every New Orleans cookbook includes a gumbo recipe, illustrating the endless variations of the dish. A few of the many famous gumbo recipes can be found in The Original Picayune Creole Cook Book (1906) and Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen (1984).

The word gumbo does have other meanings. Gumbo mud is black, sticky, and best created by the Mississippi River. Gumbo, or “Gombo” French, is a patois of French and African languages once spoken by blacks in New Orleans and surrounding areas. Gumbo, meaning a mixture of many ingredients, also is used in a Cajun saying: “Gumbo yaya,” roughly translated as “Everybody talks at once.”

The blended, diverse nature of gumbo itself makes the concept ripe for use as a metaphor in southern art. A number of southern musicians have written songs signifying the importance of gumbo, including Billie and Dede Pierce’s “Billie’s Gumbo Blues.” Gumbo often makes an appearance in southern literature. In A Night in Acadie (1897) by Kate Chopin references to gumbo as a symbol of cooking and social gathering in Louisiana and as a metaphor for social diversity and cultural blending abound. In Ernest Gaines’s 1993 novel A Lesson before Dying, gumbo marks the communion between two of the central characters, Grant, a schoolteacher, and Jefferson, a man sentenced to die for murder. In a central scene, Grant forges a relationship with Jefferson in prison by convincing him to eat some of the gumbo that Miss Emma has made for him. Grant tells Jefferson, “It would mean so much to her if you would eat some of the gumbo. . . . Will you be her friend? Will you eat some of the gumbo? Just a little bit? One spoonful?” Jefferson responds with a nod, signaling the growing bond between the two men. In this text, as well as others, gumbo signifies the merger of diverse ideas and forces and the development of a common language between southerners.

CAROLYN KOLB

New Orleans, Louisiana

C. PAIGE GUTIERREZ

Biloxi, Mississippi

Rima and Richard Collin, New Orleans Cookbook (1987); John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (1987); C. Paige Gutierrez, Cajun Foodways (1992); Howard Mitcham, Creole Gumbo and All That Jazz: A New Orleans Seafood Cookbook (1978); Paul Prudhomme, Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen (1984); Lena Richard, New Orleans Cookbook (1998); Lyle Saxon, ed., Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales (1945); The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book (1906).

 

Hash, South Carolina

In South Carolina, hash (“barbecue hash” in some places) takes the place of honor held by Brunswick stew in Georgia and Virginia and burgoo in Kentucky. Like both Brunswick stew and burgoo, South Carolina hash is widely regarded as an accompaniment to barbecue. Like other stews, hash has a long history and holds an important place as a food of congregation. By the colonial period, hash was a stew made from small pieces of roasted meat of any kind, cooked down with onions, herbs, and vinegar water.

Served over rice (or sometimes grits), hash varies in terms of specific ingredients from one cook to the next. Broadly speaking, there are three major hash types in South Carolina, corresponding to the state’s primary geographic regions. Hash from the Lowcountry consists of several deboned hogsheads, supplemented with organ meats like pork liver, cooked in a stock that favors tomato and ketchup. Vegetables can include onions, corn, and potatoes. Hash from the midlands consists primarily of higher-quality cuts of pork, onions, and a mustard-based stock. Finally, Upcountry hash is largely beef-based, with no dominant ketchup, vinegar, or mustard-based stock. This hash most resembles the camp stews or hunter’s stews of the early 19th century. Its ingredients are normally limited to beef, onions, butter, and a variety of seasonings.

Any mention of stew ingredients yields opportunities to discuss issues of socioeconomic class, since most stew recipes ultimately come from rural folk traditions. The transformation of very common ingredients into exceptional stews is a theme integral to the story of hash making.

Hash makers from communities throughout South Carolina—much like the burgoo makers of Owensboro and other Kentucky towns—have developed recipes that are a source of immense local pride. Hash consumers tend to be loyal to a certain hash maker or at least develop preferences for certain types of hash. In general, folks who prefer mustard-based hash do not consider ketchup- or vinegar-based hash to their liking and vice versa. In addition, the consistency of the hash is a defining characteristic. In this regard, hash can be separated into two basic categories: hash with meat that has been processed in a grinder and hash with meat that has been “pulled.” The latter results in hash with a stringy, more irregular consistency—much different from hash cooked with ground meat.

While many hash makers still cook in the large, cast-iron pots that have been a part of the cooking tradition for generations, some have opted to go with similarly sized stainless steel or aluminum pots. The quality of the hash produced in such pots is at issue for many hash makers. Some feel that hash produced in cast-iron pots over a woodfed fire is of the best quality. Similar sentiment is found among many who make burgoo, Brunswick stew, bogs, and muddles.

While many rural fire departments, agricultural clubs, and other civic organizations cook hash several times a year for community fund-raisers, the most prolific producers of South Carolina hash are locally owned barbecue restaurants, many of which developed from family “shade tree” cooking traditions. These families traditionally cooked barbecue and hash for reunions or celebratory occasions like the Fourth of July, but found that demand was high enough to warrant a full-time venture.

Whether through restaurants, clubs, or churches, groups of all sizes—from families to whole communities—are involved in the hash making process. Over time, people maintain, adapt, and reform these local traditions. Hash masters, like their stewmaster contemporaries in neighboring states, typically go to great lengths to retain the uniqueness of both their recipes and their cooking techniques.

SADDLER TAYLOR

McKissick Museum, Columbia, South Carolina

STAN WOODWARD

Greenville, South Carolina

 

Hearn, Lafcadio

(1850–1904) JOURNALIST, AUTHOR, ILLUSTRATOR.

On 27 June 1850 Patricio Lafcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn was born to a Greek mother and an Irish father, a surgeon in the British army, on the Greek island of Lefkas. His parents divorced and abandoned Hearn, who was subsequently raised in Great Britain by a great aunt and then by a guardian. At 19 Hearn moved to Cincinnati and worked as a newspaper reporter, embarking on a career that eventually led him to New Orleans. From 1877 until 1888 Hearn worked as a journalist and correspondent reporting for local New Orleans publications, as well as Harper’s Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Scribner’s, and other national magazines. Hearn became a prolific writer and illustrator of stories about the unique vices, traditions, and cultural expressions of New Orleans. His romantic and imaginative articles instilled readers in the United States and Europe with an image of New Orleans that continues to shape the world’s view of the Crescent City.

While Hearn lived in New Orleans, he also collected local songs for a New York music critic, opened the shortlived 5-Cent Restaurant, and collected recipes of local dishes from homes he visited. Hearn published these recipes in 1885 as La Cuisine Créole, which became the earliest published collection of New Orleans and Louisiana recipes. “‘La Cuisine Créole’ (Créole cookery),” Hearn writes in the introduction, “partakes of the nature of its birthplace— New Orleans—which is cosmopolitan in its nature, blending the characteristics of the American, French, Spanish, Italian, West Indian and Mexican. In this compilation will be found many original recipes and other valuable ones heretofore unpublished, notable those of Gombo filé, Bouille-abaisse, Court-bouillon, Jambolaya, Salade à la Russe, Bisque of Cray-fish à la Créole, Pousse Café, Café brulé, Brûlot, together with many confections and delicacies for the sick, including a number of mixed drinks.” La Cuisine Créole made a permanent contribution to Creole cuisine and a lasting impact on American culture. Hearn’s work in La Cuisine Créole continues to serve as an invaluable record of the history of Creole food, New Orleans, and Louisiana.

After making, and writing, history in New Orleans, Hearn moved to Japan, taught English, changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo, married a Japanese woman who was the daughter of a samurai, learned Japanese, and continued his voluminous writing and illustration. As had been the case with his work in New Orleans, Hearn’s critics accused him of “exoticizing” Japan for his readers. However, Hearn secured a place in history after publishing numerous volumes in Japanese, particularly Japanese fairy tales, for which he is eminently famous. Hearn died on the Japanese island of Honshu on 26 September 1904.

SCOTT R. SIMMONS

New Orleans, Louisiana

Lafcadio Hearn, Lafcadio Hearn’s Creole Cook Book (reprint ed., 1990); S. Frederick Starr, Inventing New Orleans: The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (2001).

 

Hill, Annabella Powell

(1810–1878) COOKBOOK AUTHOR. Born in Madison County, Ga., in 1810 to Virginia natives Major John Edmonds and Annabella Burwell Dawson, Annabella Powell Edmonds married Edward Young Hill in December 1827. The Hills lived in Monticello, Ga., until 1845, when Edward, a judge, was elected to the superior court and the family moved to La Grange, Ga. The Hills figured in the politics of the Baptist church in Georgia and helped found at least one girls’ academy. Judge Hill died in December 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. After the war, economic hardship forced Annabella Hill to sell her property in La Grange and move to Atlanta, where she became principal of the lottery-funded orphan’s school from around 1868 until shortly before her death in 1878.

Annabella Hill began writing a cook-book sometime in the late 1850s or early 1860s. Published in 1867 as Mrs. Hill’s New Cook Book, it proved to be a seminal work, one that could almost be called the southern Fanny Farmer of its day. It enjoyed numerous editions through the remainder of the 19th century and is frequently referenced in later cookbooks. Since 1995, it has been reprinted in a facsimile edition

Hill’s cookbook stands today as a critical link in the chain of southern food history. In addition to being one of the only printed records of antebellum cooking in Georgia, it clearly illustrates the complicated cross-pollination among diverse cultures that shaped southern cooking. Comprehensive and encyclopedic in its scope (there are more than 1,100 culinary and medicinal recipes), unparalleled in its detail, and invaluable for its rare crediting of borrowed material, Mrs. Hill’s New Cook Book is in many ways a telling portrait in recipes, not only of one woman, but of a place and era that have been for too long distorted by romance and legend.

DAMON LEE FOWLER

Savannah, Georgia

Damon Lee Fowler, Classical Southern Cooking: A Celebration of the Cuisine of the Old South (1995); Annabella Powell Hill, Mrs. Hill’s New Cook Book (1867).

 

Hines, Duncan

(1880–1959) CRITIC, ENTREPRENEUR. Although today his name is widely recognized as a cake mix brand, Duncan Hines was in fact influential in shaping the qualitative experiences Americans expect from their restaurant meals. Born in Bowling Green, Ky., on 26 March 1880, Hines was raised near there by his grandparents after his mother’s death in 1884. From his grandmother he learned to appreciate southern cooking and the importance of sanitary cooking methods. He attended Bowling Green Business College (1896–98), then moved west. He worked for several employers before relocating to Chicago in September 1905. From there he worked for the next 33 years as a traveling salesman.

In that profession, as Hines traveled from one town to another, he had a keen interest in where he dined. Aware of the problem of restaurant food poisoning and unsanitary roadside meals, he noted dining facilities that were clean and served excellent food. Between 1905 and 1934 Hines secured a reputation for discovering superior restaurants; for him, detecting them was both a preventive measure and a hobby. In 1934 a Chicago newspaper heard of Hines’s expertise and published an article about him. Soon people by the thousands began calling and writing him, all wanting to know where quality restaurants could be found in specific cities.

Responding, Hines compiled a list of 167 superior restaurants in 30 states and sent it with his 1935 Christmas cards. The response to this card was so overwhelming that he compiled an expanded list, and in June 1936 self-published his first book, Adventures in Good Eating, a national restaurant guide. By March 1938 the book was selling so well that he quit his sales job and became his own publisher.

Hines received new attention in December 1938, when a Saturday Evening Post article about his avocation made him an overnight national celebrity. The reasons for Hines’s sudden fame and widespread acceptance were twofold: his writings were widely needed, and he would not accept payment for a listing in order to preserve the perception of his impeachable independence and his public credibility. Because of his impartiality and the accuracy of his recommendations, Americans flocked to he restaurants he favored; by the mid-1940s he had become the nation’s most trusted name in the food industry.

Hines moved back to Bowling Green in April 1939, conducting his operations from there and announcing that restaurants that wanted his recommendation would have to implement his suggestions. Many restaurants, aware of the good fortune his favor could bring, complied with his wishes—which were soon copied in other establishments as well. By the conclusion of World War II, America’s expectations for quality restaurant dining had been permanently altered.

In October 1949 Hines and businessman Roy Park inaugurated Hines-Park Foods, Inc., which eventually produced over 250 items that were personally approved by Duncan Hines for consumption. Wanting a brand name that would produce instant success, Procter and Gamble bought the exclusive rights to Duncan Hines’s name in August 1956, compensating him with a percentage of each case of cake mix it sold. Hines died of cancer on 15 March 1959.

LOUIS HATCHETT

Henderson, Kentucky

John T. Edge, Oxford American (September/October 2000); Louis Hatchett, Duncan Hines: The Man Behind the Cake Mix (2001), Kentucky Living (May 1999); Duncan Hines, Duncan Hines’ Food Odyssey (1955); Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in America (1993); David M. Schwartz, Smithsonian (November 1984).