In the Mississippi Delta, funerals bring out the best in people, while weddings, which are supposed to be happy occasions, bring out the worst. It takes a strong love to survive a Delta wedding. Funerals bring out our genuineness; weddings bring out our pretentiousness. A lady we know is still smarting from the time, several years ago, she was asked in to view a relative’s wedding presents. “I’m glad you could come now,” said Cousin Snooty, mother of the bride, “because I won’t have room for you at the wedding.” Actually, this was unusual in the Delta, because we tend to invite everybody we know, plus some. But at least Cousin Snooty made sure everybody had an opportunity to see the gifts (and certainly to give one).
A carpenter had been called in to build a tiered, bleacher-like affair that was draped in white organdy, with bows and swags. The custom of displaying wedding presents in this manner has gone down as the price of silver has gone up. Brides now in their forties are probably the last generation to have observed this tradition.
A Delta wedding is an extravaganza that has been years in the making (for the exception to this rule, please see, “weddings, shotgun,” here). Weddings in the Delta do not begin with a young man’s proposal of holy matrimony—they begin the moment a squirming bride-to-be is presented in swaddling clothes to her mother’s arms at the King’s Daughters Hospital in Greenville, Mississippi, where the nicer Delta babies are born. A small but choice group, it must be noted, composed of several of the very nicest of Greenville babies, was born in Greenwood, a town with which in ordinary circumstances we are highly competitive. But several Greenville matrons admired a prominent physician so much that, when he took his practice to Greenwood, instead of begging their husbands to shoot him, they followed him. Driving fifty miles to go to the doctor or a party is nothing in the Delta. Because of this distance, however, one baby was almost born on her father’s airplane in the doctor’s front yard—her mother had waited until the last minute. Being told by his wife that a plane was landing in his yard, Dr. Poindexter reportedly replied, “Adelaide, I told you not to have that last scotch and water.”
Peering into her baby’s eyes, whether in Greenwood or the King’s Daughters, the Delta mother beholds the future: cheerleading, Chi Omega, and that special day when her beautiful daughter will waft up the aisle on the arm of her father (if she is a genuine Delta bride, you will smell her before you actually see her—we are a people of the perfume bottle, and other bottles, too). The Delta wedding is the apotheosis of all the mother’s dreams—and, of course, all her social ambitions. A father, whose role, as one local matron put it, is to sit up, to pay up, and to shush up, is expected to behave like a good child: seen but not heard.
Another important extra is a groom. In the Delta, you still can’t have a wedding without one. His job is to be presentable at all times and exude ecstasy because a paragon of Southern womanhood has done him the honor of accepting his offer of holy matrimony, even if being united in that blessed state requires a production that would have put Mr. Cecil B. DeMille of Hollywood in Whitfield. (Whitfield is our state mental institution. We affectionately refer to it as “the bin,” which is nicer than loony bin.) After being in one of our weddings, you’ll feel you’ve been to the bin, or ought to head there immediately. We have a special name for a Delta wedding that is an unusually elaborate, or famous, or perhaps notorious, or, in some undefined way, a particularly noteworthy occasion—for some reason, which none of us now remember, we always call it “the last Delta wedding.” Any wedding of epic proportions is accorded the high accolade of being designated a last Delta wedding; there have been hundreds upon hundreds of last Delta weddings over the years. As long as there is a Delta, there will be one more last Delta wedding.
Before we leave the King’s Daughters, there is one more consideration regarding the initial stages of wedding planning: The Southern mother wants her daughter to have a proud old Southern name that conjures up the notion of fine breeding. To this end, we like names redolent of our Virginia or Kentucky pasts, real or imagined. This has created a Delta-wide penchant for last names as first names for girls. For this reason, the Mississippi Delta has the lowest Janet-quotient of any region in the United States. Suitable names for a Delta girl are Dabney, Meriwether, Harper, and Bland (didn’t they have a county in Virginia?), though in day-to-day parlance, the bearers of these fine old Southern names will likely go by Baby Doll, Presh (which is actually short for Precious), or Sistuh.
By the time a Delta girl is eight years old, she knows more about wedding etiquette than a Yankee bridal consultant. By the time she is ten, she has given serious thought to selecting a silver pattern—preferably Rich Aunt Bess’s, to facilitate inheritance. We like to say we are born this way, that we Delta girls inherit an etiquette gene. In reality, it’s a mixture of nature and nurture. We were toddling up aisles in flower girl outfits in real weddings or participating in Tom Thumb weddings at St. James’ Episcopal Church, an especially nice place to get married, as soon as we could put one foot in front of the other. Still, very young children sometimes make a faux pas, even in the Delta. When Dexter and Davenport, the Jenkins twins, were ring bearer and flower girl respectively in a big wedding in Hollandale, Mississippi, they got up the aisle just fine. Then they plopped unceremoniously down on the steps leading to the sanctuary. When the door opened to admit the bride, a fire truck with sirens blaring passed by; hearing this clarion call, the children fled and had chased the fire truck halfway down the block before somebody caught them and brought them back to church.
We are also particular about what the children wear. One of the most important rules: Do not dress your ring bearer up like a miniature man. This rule cannot be sufficiently stressed. There is nothing cute about a four-year-old boy in a tiny suit or a tux. The proper ring bearer wears an Eton suit, which has short pants and a circular collar—we may pronounce it E-ton, and while some of us don’t know that the name comes from a school in England that is even older than Ole Miss, we know that little boys look sweet in an E-ton suit. We’re still talking bad about the tacky bride whose ring bearer wore itty-bitty tails, with a white tie, just like the grown-ups. Even in the Delta, there are people who Don’t Know.
Alice Hunt McAllister, who lives in New York City, shudders every time she tells her sad story about a little boy who tried to sit by her in church. When Alice Hunt realized that he was wearing a clip-on bowtie and long pants, she moved to another pew quicker than if he’d had cholera. “I didn’t want a homunculus sitting in my lap,” she harrumphed. A homunculus is what alchemists called a teeny-tiny little man that hasn’t been born yet, and they are ugly as sin.
The Southern girl knows before she is accepted into the Dirt Daubers Garden Club that it is wrong to bring a wedding present to the reception (it has been sent previously—you have one year to write a thank-you note, but the Southern bride will write a gushing note almost before you get home from mailing the gift). While still in her high chair, the Southern girl has heard her mother utter an all-important dictum. “Reply in kind.” That means that a formal invitation requires a formal reply (in black ink—and not ink from a ballpoint pen) in the same form as the invitation: “Miss Dabney Harper Jones accepts the kind invitation of…” Dabney Harper Jones will reply like this if the invitation is from her cousin next door. A less formal invitation calls for a less formal reply. Hence Mama’s reply-in-kind rubric. The Southern girl at a very early age is conversant with the proper role of the usher: The mother takes the usher’s arm, while her husband and children follow her up the aisle. The late Margaret Reynolds, a revered member of our community whose job it was to prepare the wedding party, laid down a rule for ushers during the rehearsal: “Keep your sword arm free,” Mrs. Reynolds always ordered. She was oblivious to the effect this injunction had on visitors from the North, whose eyes always bulged with fear, but it is a good mnemonic device to prevent an usher from offering a lady the wrong arm. The sword arm, the right one, is kept free for the exclusive use of the young lady, to whom it is presented on the way up and down the aisle.
Alice Hunt McAllister, who seems to do nothing but run into pitiful etiquette mishaps up north, also had a very unfortunate experience with regard to proper ushering. This time she was attending a wedding in Washington, D.C. It seems that Alice Hunt took the usher’s arm, expecting to sail up the aisle. Halfway up, she realized she was dragging the poor man. “That poor little leprechaun left skid marks on the floor,” Alice Hunt has recalled many, many times. Alice Hunt seriously considered throwing the book—the Amy Vanderbilt book, which otherwise was hidden at the bottom of her closet for emergency consultation only—at somebody. (It is okay to peek at an etiquette book, but if you rely too heavily on it, people will think that you are not fully acquainted with what is right and wrong and could fall into the unattractive category of People Who Don’t Know.)
We expect Southern girls to have digested all these etiquette rules and to go out of their way to behave, at weddings and elsewhere. Southern mothers have a dictum: “Even if it kills you, be nice.” If you e’vuh do anything bad, the mother always adds, somebody who knows your parents, or your grandparents, will be present and we will hear about it. That is why it is never safe to be rude in the Mississippi Delta. There are no secrets here, which is fun unless you’re the one provoking the juicy gossip.
Southerners have been told from infancy that they must always go around the room and speak to the older ladies and gentlemen at any party. “Did you speak to the chaperones?” Olivia Morgan Gilliam once asked a daughter who was hugging the commode for dear life and barely able to speak to Olivia Morgan at that point. We will speak to the older ladies and gentlemen even if we are so blind drunk that we barely know our own names, much less theirs. It’s considered all right to get drunk as long as it doesn’t impede doing the right thing. For example, we know one Memphis father of whom it was said that, no matter how drunk his daughters got Saturday night, he always made sure to get them up and go to Second Presbyterian Sunday morning. One of the most courtly Southern gentlemen we know is Bo Crittenden, who just happens to be a direct descendent of a famous general in The War (by which we mean the late unpleasantness with our friends to the north), who was always so inebriated that an aide de camp had to tell him whether they had won or lost the battle.
Bo was once invited to a strict, hard-shelled Baptist wedding of a prominent Midwestern family. No alcohol. The groomsmen, all gentlemen of the Southland, promptly devised a new drink: Café Jacques Danielle; it consisted of an ennsy-beensy dab of black coffee in a brimming cup of Jack Daniel’s. The bride’s mother called Bo over, and he thought he was done for. He just about ma’am-ed her to death. If you could be mauled with ma’ams, this lady would have had to go to the hospital. She was impressed. But she spoke her mind: “I worry about you young men—you drink too much coffee,” she sighed. The moral is that with good manners and sufficient libations, you can have a Southern wedding in Idaho. His mama had taught him to be a gentleman.
Southerners never needed etiquette books in the past because all Southern towns had socially connected matrons who ruled the roost with an iron hand. In Greenville, one of these matrons was the late Louise Eskridge Crump, who worked—but it was okay because her job was being society editor at the Democrat. Another Greenville doyenne was Louise B. Mayhall, who was the society stringer for the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Although we pretend that we don’t like publicity and that nice people are only in the newspaper when they are born and die, go off to camp, have a tea dance, get into the garden club, attend a meeting of the book club, or win a prize for the best pigs in the county at the 4-H club, we actually care a great deal about it, especially wedding write-ups. The local paper in the Crump era had four large spaces for pictures on the front of Sunday society pages, and Mrs. Crump dictated who got them. The best-connected bride got the upper left-hand corner on the Sunday front page. Anyplace on the page was considered good. We know a Memphis bride-to-be who got married, the first time, at least, during the hippie era. She nearly killed her poor mama by refusing to have a write-up in the Sunday paper. She relented, possibly because she did not want to go through life with the stigma of matricide attached to her name. By then all the good spots had been taken. Her big sister, a famous Memphis beauty and prominent matron, had to debase herself by calling the society editor. “Is she top-drawer?” the editor asked. “She’s my sister,” the matron replied. Hippie sister, of course, got the upper left-hand corner, and mama could hold up her head at the bridge club. Write-ups in the golden era of Mesdames Crump and Mayhall were decorous affairs: Initials were eschewed in favor of full names, and no chatty details, such as how the couple met at the Qwik Tyme car wash, were included; on the other hand, important pieces of information, such as the bride’s direct line descent from Queen Elizabeth I, also known as the Virgin Queen, were.
While weddings in the Delta have always been major social events, in recent years some have taken on the patina of a pageant. Some are even more elaborate than the baton twirling at Mississippi State University, the kingpin twirling school. While Ole Miss is our premiere institution of higher learning, Mississippi State University, which inspires so much loyalty that one daughter moved to Europe so she wouldn’t have to listen to her father talk about how NASA sends broken space shuttle doors to MSU to be repaired, has emerged as a very popular motif in Delta weddings. One groom’s loyalty to his alma mater was reflected in a groom’s cake baked in the shape of the MSU mascot, a bulldog. Grooms’ cakes are a recent innovation with which we are not entirely comfortable—our rule of thumb is that anything that was not done in the past needn’t to be done now. We are especially against a groom’s cake that features a fishing tackle or golfing theme, or a replica of the groom’s beloved Labrador retriever in a sleeping pose. Absolutely beyond the pale was the groom’s cake surrounded with sugar-spun frogs, which, the write-up informed us, stood for “fully rely on God.” We do fully rely on God, but we feel certain that He doesn’t like bad taste any better than we do. One couple departed their reception at the country club in a golf cart to the accompaniment of MSU cowbells; cowbell favors were given to all the guests, who were encouraged to ring them in lieu of throwing rice (more on the rice issue later), but the big cowbell was rung by the groom’s father. It was his own personal cowbell, a family keepsake, a gift from his father before him, which he had rung at numerous football games in the halcyon days when he studied animal husbandry at that fabled institution of higher learning. Cowbells have deep significance at State, but we ask: Is there such a thing as going too far?
As we peruse the eagerly awaited bride’s issue of Mississippi Magazine—it features full-page color spreads on weddings and receptions—those of us who were blessed to be born in a better day sometimes find ourselves wondering: What would Mrs. Crump think? What, for example, might she make of the wedding write-up that put the name of the wedding planner in the second sentence, before naming the parents, the officiating clergyman, or the soloist who not only sang the Mississippi State University Fight Song, but also gave a beautiful reading of Philippians 2:9–11?
Many Delta wedding write-ups are more lethal than obituaries. A common fault is providing more detail than is, strictly speaking, necessary. One recent write-up featured the news that the five-layer wedding cake (with fondant icing that matched the lace on the bride’s veil) had been specially made for the occasion in New York City, and that it had been “flown to town on an airplane.” Like we thought it had walked or come on Trailways? But even the most tasteful write-up could not have saved a ranch-themed wedding in Rosedale, a small town that is justly famous for having the best dances in the Delta but in this instance flubbed badly. The bride and groom wore cowboy and cowgirl apparel, with the flower girl and ring bearer similarly attired. We don’t think the E-ton suit comes in a cowboy cut. It had been coordinated by a planning company named Touch of Class. We think not.
Anybody with a touch of taste (we don’t think it is nice to talk about c-l-a-s-s, even if we spend every waking hour thinking about it) would have told the groom that a horseshoe-shaped groom’s cake was even worse than a fishing tackle groom’s cake. Other refreshments included hogshead cheese (you don’t want to know), crackling, and bowls of trail trash (see the recipe for White Trash, an elegant variation, on here), stylishly served on tinfoil-covered trays. Is trash the operative word?
A Southern family is willing to go to the poorhouse for a nice wedding, and this doesn’t just mean the mother of the bride. A notoriously penny-pinching father will join the Greenville Country Club just long enough to launch his Precious Baby with a lavish reception. If able, the Delta mother builds her entire house around her eldest daughter’s wedding, even if the daughter hasn’t been born when the first brick is laid and the first Ionic column reaches for the heavens…. Think garden reception. Planting the appropriate trees for a reception or, for the more ambitious, the wedding itself, takes a great deal of thought. Live oaks are lovely, but only if you’re planning to skip a generation and wait for your granddaughter to wed. A good alternative is sweet olive bush, which in addition to being beautiful has a sweet fragrance, but not strong enough to drown out the bride’s. Magnolias have the added merit of being the state flower and conjure up an image of moonlight and magnolias on the Delta. If the bride has a past and magnolias might remind somebody of her moonlight escapades, stick with something less likely to induce amorous thoughts. Boxwoods are nice, though nice people in the Delta say box rather than boxwood.
Although the Delta mother’s allée, as she likes to call her double row of trees, is one of the most important concerns of her life, she forgets that, while she can dominate the wedding, she can’t control nature. Here is an important rule about Delta weddings: Nature will not cooperate, Mother Nature being even more powerful and unappeasable than the Mother of the Bride (known as the MOB, and believe us, you’d rather deal with a mob boss than a MOB boss on her special day).
It is odd that we’re always stunned by the torrential downpours that tend to greet the wedding morn, because, of course, we are an agrarian society. We should know better. Everybody in the Delta is in some way economically dependent on the workings of nature. Men in the Delta have tanned left arms from hanging out of their cars and pickups to observe the skies. When Percival Hampton, whose family had farmed in the Delta since before Lincoln was born, and who needed no further tutorials in seasonal transitions or downpour predicting, suffered financial reverses, he took to his bed—and watched the Weather Channel for three solid months. He was so glued to the Weather Channel that he refused to get out of bed and go to the dining room; his meals had to be sent back to him on a tray. “Your father is remarkable,” his wife, Miss Lady Belle Hampton, chirped happily to her eldest daughter, Sistuh. “Any other man who’d been through what Percival has been through would have had a breakdown.”
Torrential rains figure all too heavily in the sagas of many Delta weddings, including quite a few last Delta weddings. The Gordon Wilsons of Leland, Mississippi, had gone all out planning for a garden reception. Needless to say, it rained cats and dogs while the wedding party was on the way to witness the vows at the First Baptist Church in Greenville. Somebody had to rush to the casino over the levee and rent two buses. The Baptist church already had one bus. Even with three buses, somebody forgot to fetch the bride’s grandmother—she has no immediate plans to forgive anybody, and we would guess that some will-changing has taken place.
Fortunately, the other little old ladies had more fun than a barrel of monkeys and loved being helped (read, shoved from the derriere) into the buses by young men. The Delta female never gets too old to appreciate the touch of a younger man. The old ladies grew giddier with every sip of champagne, which, along with the wine and hard liquor, was the only thing flowing harder than the rain. The Leland liquor store had to open up several times that night, starting at 9:30, when the bride’s family first realized that they were on the brink of hosting a dry party—and nobody in the Delta wants a dry party, not dry in that sense anyway. Mr. Jim from the liquor store couldn’t thank the Wilsons enough. He said the wedding was the reason for his wife’s getting a new SUV for Christmas.
Then the electricity went out, and the Wilsons had to bring in generators, and two guests slipped on the hastily imported Astroturf and ended up in the swimming pool. But everybody had a good time, including the father of the bride, who did the Alligator (the Gator consists of lying on the floor and shaking—it is not unlike a mild convulsion. We reckon he had real convulsions when he toted up the bills). When the video came back, the family figured out why Mr. Jim from the liquor store had become, next to the groom, the most important man there: Half the Delta, many not recipients of an invitation, engraved or otherwise, could be seen gyrating on the dance floor.
Another Leland bride, whose wedding took place at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Greenville (the Leland Episcopal Church is too tiny for most Delta weddings, especially if it is the bride’s first), held her reception on the old plantation. It was her family’s plantation, the custom of renting scenic places for weddings not yet having made its way to the Delta. The house had been redone, including beige carpet in the living room. It was a three-tent wedding, which is the best kind in the Delta, more lavish by far than the mere two-tent or one-tent wedding. Everything was to be perfection itself, from the tiny little lamb chops, to the band from Memphis, naturally. Woodchips had been laid on the ground to make it easier to walk about and talk. We watched these very woodchips sinking into the mud. It rained buckets. The caterer wore knee boots, which was fortunate, as the mud came up to his calves. Still, it was a last Delta wedding—you saw everybody. When Bill Jessup had to dig his wife out of the mud that was sucking her to China, he used a silver spoon. That is what mattered, much more than the loss of the shoes, which were never found.
Frances Tuthill had spent her entire married life planning her daughter Eleanor’s garden wedding. Every bulb had been procured, often at great expense and from foreign lands, with an eye to the wedding vista. On the morning of Eleanor’s wedding, it was raining so hard that the allée looked like it was in the Amazon rain forest. Standing in the downpour, Miss Frances was gesturing wildly toward said allée when a solicitous cousin found her. “Eleanor will look so sweet walking down the allée this afternoon,” she said. Well, not unless Eleanor rented a kayak. Finally, the cousin persuaded a reluctant Mrs. Tuthill to come in out of the rain. She called yet another cousin, and ordered, “Get over here and cut these bushes and get them to the Methodist church.”
Despite the weather’s refusal to bend to the will of a grand dame, even one who practically ran the garden club, the wedding came off beautifully. The rain stopped just in time for the reception, which was a blowout. We knew it would be long remembered as the last Delta wedding the next morning when we saw the wedding cake tilted on the breakfast room table and looking like the Leaning of Tower of Pisa. Notables from all over the South, splattered with mud, began straggling into the breakfast room around noon, soggy from a night spent in the gazebo. It had been a romantic Delta wedding—and not just for the bride and groom. It was one of those last Delta weddings that almost caused some first Delta divorces.
We don’t want you to think that all Delta weddings, even ones that qualify as last Delta weddings, are big blowouts with a cast of thousands. This recipe makes a wonderful alternative wedding cake for a smallish wedding. We don’t recommend groom’s cakes, but we cannot say enough good things about this delicious cake. It came with a nice note from art curator George Shackelford, whose mother, Sue Shackelford, was a beloved lady who learned never to go out of the house without her gloves while finishing at the Ward Belmont School in Nashville. She was also the daughter of Mrs. Madison (1900–1991), whose specialty this was. “Here is the wonderful pound cake recipe, dug out of Sue’s card files at Christmas in a bit of culinary archaeology,” George wrote. “It really needs to be made when you are expecting enough people to mostly eat it up. Otherwise you end up at 3 A.M. in your underwear or nightgown in the kitchen sneaking just one more slice.”
3 cups flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
2 sticks butter
½ cup shortening
Add the wet ingredients to the dry and blend to the consistency of corn meal. Then add
3 cups sugar
5 eggs
Blend, then add
1 cup milk
½ teaspoon rum flavoring
½ teaspoon coconut flavoring
Blend, but avoid overworking the batter.
Place in a greased and floured Bundt pan.
Bake at 325° until the cake separates from the pan—about 1 hour.
Let cool for 10 minutes and remove from pan.
½ cup sugar
¼ cup water
Boil and stir until thickened.
Add 1 teaspoon almond extract. Brush glaze on cake.
Our friend Hebe Randolph’s family followed the custom of classically educated Southerners of former times in using names from Greek and Roman mythology. We only hope the first Hebe, the cupbearer to the immortals on Mount Olympus, had half as many china cups as our own Hebe, who is the umpteenth Hebe in her line. There are probably very few Yankees named Hebe (pronounced he-be). Hebe’s niece did not marry a Yankee. But the niece lives in New York, and so a lot of the wedding guests had not previously visited the Mississippi Delta. We wanted them to get a real taste of the Delta.
We like to think they were impressed by the bonfires Hebe’s brother built to help them find their way to the plantation (we also like to think our Delta bonfires are just like the ones they had in England when Prince Charles and Lady Di got hitched). Hebe lives on Deer Creek in Leland, Mississippi, about twelve miles from Greenville, and it is the perfect setting for a brunch for out-of-town guests. Disaster struck, however, when the caterer took sick. Bland Shackelford and Gayden jumped in at the last minute and saved the day. The wedding brunch was held the day of the wedding, which was an eight in the evening affair.
Girls from the Delta love to use their stuff, and do they ever have the stuff. Gayden had two huge clamshells, together weighing in at four hundred pounds, in her backyard. She had taken a fancy to these clamshells and had them brought up from Florida. They were so heavy, the car listed. Not content with the damage done to one automobile, Gayden transported her enormous clamshells to Hebe’s: the freshly shucked oysters and shrimp looked so pretty in their clamshells. (Please do not call this a raw bar.) The shells quickly sank into the gumbo (that’s Delta for dirt). It looked like an oyster bar for a midget, not that we have anything against midgets, as long as they are refined. Finally, the table on which the clamshells sat had to be shored up with a plywood and brick base. Lemon halves were tied up with satin ribbons in little bags—of course, the lemons had been seeded first. Bland turned up her nose at the notion of red sauce at a wedding breakfast. But most of us have loved red sauce since we ate it on crackers as children. Still, a tasty white sauce or a pink, pink being perfect for a wedding breakfast, seemed more appropriate for a wedding brunch. The white sauce is simply homemade mayonnaise—which we pronounce mi-naise. (The clamshells were subsequently turned into birdbaths, and so we feel certain it was their last Delta wedding.)
People in the Delta just love anchovies. Our friend Josie Winn used to call them “minnows.” At the most famous restaurant in town, Doe’s, the owner brings out a separate bowl of them for us to add to the salads. Lillo’s, a popular restaurant a few miles from Greenville, is always obliged to add extra anchovies to their salads. They have a delicious pizza baked with lots of minnows. Not recommended for the bride within a week or two of the big day!
1 cup homemade mayonnaise
¾ cup bottled chili sauce
1 teaspoon anchovy paste
12 drops Tabasco
2 tablespoons tarragon vinegar
Mix all ingredients and chill one day before serving. Taste and adjust seasonings.
Makes about two cups.
A purist prefers a generous squeeze of lemon because it doesn’t interfere with the taste of the oyster. This sauce, reflecting our deep and abiding love of mi-naise, is not for purists.
½ cup Durkee Famous Sauce
2 tablespoons Creole mustard
3 tablespoons chopped green onions
2 tablespoons horseradish (the jar variety found in the cooler section of the grocery)
1 tablespoon Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce
Juice of 1 lemon
1 teaspoon white pepper
Salt and Tabasco to taste
Combine all ingredients and chill overnight. Correct seasonings.
Makes one and a half cups.
Cheese straws are served at almost any occasion in the Delta. There are innumerable recipes, but this is the one that was used at Hebe’s wedding brunch.
8 ounces sharp or extra-sharp Cheddar cheese
1 stick or little more butter, softened
2 scant cups sifted flour
1 teaspoon salt
Cayenne pepper to taste.
Preheat the oven to 375°.
Grate cheese in processor. Let sit until room temp, add butter. Mix in flour, salt, and cayenne to taste depending on how hot and spicy you want the cheese straws to be. Hot and spicy is best. Fill cookie press fitted with ribbon disk and press onto cookie sheet. Bake at 375° for about 12 minutes.
Makes about six dozen.
At the brunch, these were served with a celery stalk garnish.
2½ cans (28 ounces) V8 juice
Juice of 2 limes and 2 lemons (lemons optional)
2 heaping tablespoons horseradish
1 teaspoon celery salt
¼ cup Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce
2 teaspoons Tabasco
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 teaspoon Cavender’s Greek seasoning 2 cloves crushed garlic
1 beef boullion cube dissolved in ¼ cup water
Vodka—not less than a fifth, but Deltans prefer a liter.
Mix all ingredients and stir.
Makes one gallon.
This was an unusual treat for visitors from New York—and for us. “I had never had this dish until my sister-in-law, Martha Green, brought it up here from South Louisiana,” recalls Bland. “I was having a dear friend who lives in England for brunch and wanted to serve something local. My husband, Johnny, had a freezer full of venison hams and so began the experiment. After consulting lots of books, we found a recipe we liked, and tinkered with it.” Grillades, by the way, is a stew with a fancy French name. Like a pot roast, grillades can be cooked forever to good advantage. Served over grits (recipe below).
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper
1 teaspoon cayenne
Mix in a bowl and put aside.
4 pounds venison ham
6 or more tablespoons bacon fat
2 cups chopped scallions
¾ cup chopped celery
2 sliced red bell peppers
2 or 3 large cloves fresh garlic
4 cups beef stock
1½ cups red wine
3 tablespoons tomato paste 3 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon Tabasco
3 bay leaves
6 sprigs fresh thyme
6 sprigs fresh parsley
Tie the bouquet garni ingredients in a bundle.
Preheat the oven to 350°.
Cut the meat in large strips, about three inches long and about an inch wide. Season the flour with salt. Dip strips in flour, but do not dip all at once, as they will get soggy. Heat a Dutch oven until hot. Add the bacon grease. Start with the meat that is ready, and brown. Keep going until all the meat is done. Lift the meat out of the Dutch oven and put it in a bowl. Scrape the Dutch oven, and add the vegetables. Cook, stirring, until the onions are clear. Put the meat back into the Dutch oven, adding the stock, wine, tomato paste, and bouquet garni. Place a piece of parchment paper between the lid and the pan for a perfect seal and then put the Dutch oven into the oven and heat at 350° for 2 hours. Check, and if the meat is not falling apart, put it back for another hour. Do this until it is fork-tender. Adjust the seasonings and season to taste with Tabasco. This is better after a day in the icebox (as we call the refrigerator). Bland and Gayden highly recommend that you lift the fat if it has been refrigerated.
Serves twenty.
Please do not think of the grits as just something to put under the grillades. There is a Southern mystique about grits. “Here is what I know to be true about grits,” says Bland, who goes all Brillat-Savarin on us when the sacred subject of grits is broached. “DO NOT BUY, no matter what anyone says, instant or quick cooking grits. You are doomed to failure if you buy these abominations. Delta Grind, Arrowhead, or any stone-ground grits are what you are after. You can safely follow the recipe on the package. If you like, you can cook grits well ahead and put them in a bain marie [or water bath]—put the container of grits in a larger container filled halfway with hot water. This will keep the grits warm until they are served. Put them in the water bath, stick a fork in about a tablespoon of butter, and run that butter all over the surface of the grits. This prevents a skin from forming. A skin on grits is entirely unacceptable. You can spray some Saran Wrap with Pam and put it on top of the butter if it is going to be a really long time. If they get too thick while you are waiting to serve, whisk in some really hot water until they are the right consistency. Start with a cup of water if you have a really big pot.
“Always, always, always put the salt in the water first. You can never get the salt right if you do not. You come out with much less salt than if you try to fix it at the end.
“Being a grits purist, I cook them in water, but I am told you can use chicken stock, beef stock, or add milk or cream at the end.”
Southerners love butter. We think that the three main food groups are sugar, salt, and fat. We love any heart-healthy dish that blends all three. If we didn’t stop him, Harley Metcalfe IV ate butter like a Popsicle when he was a child. We call this naked butter. But we thought that an elegant butter mold would be better for a wedding brunch. We use Land O Lakes (unsalted) because that is the best butter available down here. A self-confessed food snob, Bland makes jaunts to Little Rock to procure finer brands, but Land O Lakes works very well.
Soften 2 pounds of unsalted butter and then process it in your food processor until it is smooth. Pack it in a mold, being careful not to leave air pockets, and put it in the icebox. To unmold, run a hot knife around the sides of the mold and put a warm dish towel on the top—it will slide right out and be lovely. We used a heart-shaped mold.
We garnished the butter mold with this. It makes a nice tart butter… accompaniment for grits and grillades.
1 cup sultanas (raisins)
½ cup bourbon
3 twelve-ounce bags (fresh) cranberries
2¼ cups sugar
1½ navel oranges, thinly sliced and seeded
½ lemon, thinly sliced and seeded
½ cup water
1 two-inch piece fresh ginger, peeled and chopped
2 cloves chopped garlic
1 cinnamon stick
Soak sultanas in bourbon until plumped, or for at least thirty minutes. Cook cranberries, plumped sultanas (and any leftover bourbon), sugar, orange slices, and lemon slices in the water until cranberries begin to pop. Add ginger, garlic, and cinnamon stick to the mixture. Stir, put lid on pan, and let the chutney rest: The flavors will become friendly.
Makes six half-pint jars.
1 box (1 pound) cofectioners’ sugar
4 tablespoons vanilla
1 gallon milk
1 fifth bourbon
Freshly ground nutmeg
Add the sugar and vanilla to the milk. Stir in bourbon (after having a sip or two to be sure it’s good bourbon).
Freeze overnight and thaw a bit the next morning so that the consistency is slushy.
Sprinkle with nutmeg.
Serves twenty-five.
At either end of the dining room table, there were matching silver trays. The salad was served on one (a flat surface is outstanding for such a beautiful salad). The other tray held two chafing dishes, one for grits and the other for grillades. One must never put a chafing dish on a table without a tray! Sterno doesn’t bring out the best in wood.
Mixed greens
Fresh grapefruit segments
Fresh orange segments
Pomegranate seeds
Avocado slices
¾ cup good olive oil
2 to 3 tablespoons fresh grapefruit juice
Splash of balsamic vinegar
½ teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper
We composed the greens and gently incorporated the fruit. The dressing was lightly tossed into the salad.
We used a silver biscuit box—that wasn’t a great idea because Dorothy’s biscuits are so delicious, we had to refill the smallish box constantly. But form over function. The table was lovely!
One more important note on biscuits: Smaller is better. These are small and fluffy, and you can add a dash of cream of tartar to make them even fluffier. Big chunky biscuits are called cat head biscuits. Think of these as fingerling biscuits.
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons sugar
4 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoons cream of tartar
5 heaping tablespoons shortening
1 cup whole milk
Preheat the oven to 400°.
Mix dry ingredients, cut in shortening with a fork, stir in milk. Roll out on floured surface ½ inch thick. Cut with small (1½-inch diameter) biscuit cutter with fluted edge. Place on ungreased cookie sheet, and prick tops gently three times with a fork. Bake at 400° about 18–20 minutes or until lightly browned. If necessary, you may brown quickly under the broiler.
Makes about thirty-five biscuits.
Adapted from A Cook’s Tour of Shreveport, the cookbook of the Junior League of Shreveport, Louisiana, this recipe was selected as the perfect Southern dessert to serve to invaders from the north.
3 ounces cream cheese
½ cup butter
1¼ cup sifted flour
¾ cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon soft butter
1 teaspoon grated orange peel
½ teaspoon orange extract
Dash salt
1 egg, beaten
cup coarsely broken pecans
Put flour in food processor, mix in cream cheese and butter until dough ball forms. Shape into a disk, wrap in plastic, and chill at least 1 hour. Pinch off small pieces of dough, flatten in the palm of your hand, and press into ungreased mini muffin cups. It should fill 24 cups.
Mix together all the filling ingredients except the pecans. Divide half the pecans among the pastry-lined cups, add 1 teaspoon of the egg mixture and top with the remaining pecans. Bake at 350° for 25 minutes or until filling is set. Cool and remove from pans. They may be frozen or made ahead.
Makes twenty-four.
This planter’s punch is from a privately published cookbook by the aforementioned Louise B. Mayhall, whose name was synonymous with weddings. Mrs. Mayhall was famous for making a blue garter, the something blue, for brides—but only for brides who got good placement in the newspaper. Just kidding.
1 tablespoon confectioners’ sugar
Juice of one lemon
½ ounce rum
½ ounce bourbon whisky
1 ounce brandy
Carbonated water
Shake all ingredients except water with ice and stir in a julep cup with ice cubes. Fill with carbonated water and stir.
This is the recipe for one good drink—and it’s not for sissies.