Of poets and extension cords

On Easter Sunday, when so many people were thinking of the Risen Christ, I was thinking of poets, and duct tape and extension cords.  And that’s what I like about the South.

Instead of being in church this morning, I was watching a taped program featuring Lucinda Williams.  I am fond of girls named “Lucinda” and the show was Bluegrass Underground, not because bluegrass is in any way subversive, but because the show is taped underground.  Literally underground -- in a cave in Tennessee. 

Who thought this up?  Yes, the South is filled with much entrepreneurial spirit.  It is the home of moonshine and fast cars that deliver it, which led to NASCAR.  It is a place where you can find dinner on the side the road at more barbecue joints than you can name.  The South is a place where a guy with a sombrero and spicy ginger ale can build an empire “South of the Border,” in South Carolina. And it is a place where you can put your kids through college by stringing Christmas lights and charge people to visit that old cave on your property.

Well, I don’t know who thought up Bluegrass Underground.  My guess is a Stanford MBA who knew a producer or had a granddaddy that put him through Stanford B-School with proceeds from folks visiting his cave.  Personally, I like to think it was two guys with some Bud Light and boom box.  After loosing battery power, one looks at the other and says:

“Hey, Bubba, if we taped two extension cords together we could get electricity down here for the boom box.  Maybe an amp.  We could set up some chairs and get people to come and sing in our cave, like Lucinda Williams.  Hell, we could even get on the T.V.”

For many years now, my own chicken house has been powered by a duct taped extension cord. And that’s what I like about the South. 

 So there was Lucinda Williams, in a cave.  Now I have been a huge fan, but Williams has always been a bit unsure of her own sound and often, to her detriment, she has let producers lead her music.  Her new CD reminds me the cuts I’ve heard from the Hank Williams biopic featuring Tom Hiddleston.  Hiddleston is an English actor singing Hank Williams songs the way he thinks Hank would have sung them if he had been an English actor.  When you hear them, you think, “Is that Hank Williams?” but soon you think, well maybe not. On her last CD, Lucinda Williams (no relation to Hank) sounds like an actress singing on a biopic.  It is like she listed all the words used to describe her own singing style and then tried to sing like the real Lucinda Williams.  Only, she is the real Lucinda Williams. 

Today she started out impersonating herself and I almost erased it, but I didn’t.  Then she sang Pineola.  It really doesn’t matter what she sounds like when she recites those words.  I remembered that Pineola was written about poet Frank Stanford.  Not a household name, even in the rarified circle of famous poets, but a guy with a huge cult following. 

I know a lot of poets. I cannot off the top of my head, name a one of them that actually supports themselves being a poet.  They work other jobs to be poets.  Their ideal job is to teach poetry to other people who will never make a living at it.  They go to graduate schools for writing, they go to workshops, they teach workshops, they visit artist colonies, they publish in magazines, and still, they are often insecure in their poetry.

Frank Stanford was not.  He became a poet in grade school when he won forth prize in a poetry contest.  That was all he needed to be a poet.  He was employed as a surveyor.  Stanford is most often described as charismatic, a phrase that is overused and imprecise in the world of poetry.  When he died, shy of his 30^th birthday, he was married to his second wife, or maybe his third, he was living with his mistress, and he was committed to 3 -5 other women, depending upon who tells the story.  One of those women was Lucinda Williams.  And that’s what I like about the South.

Poets were a common sight for Lucinda Williams as most of her life she lived with one, Miller Williams (blood relation: father).  She often gave her dad her lyrics to read over.  In one song, when a boy is abandoned by his mother, he is left with only a picture of her as a young woman.  It is according to Lucinda, "a girl in a faded blue dress." Miller didn’t like it.  It wasn’t exact enough.  She made a small change as “faded” became “sad” and in that simple edit made the most haunting of lyrics:

He Never Got Enough Love

His mama ran off when he was just a kid,

so he never really knew her at all.

Just a picture of a girl in a sad, blue dress

hanging beside a cross on the wall.

Not only did Miller Williams encourage the poetry in his daughter’s lyrics, he also supported other poets, including Frank Stanford and his lover, C.D. Wright.  Now philandering with a bunch of women might possibly work in New York or Los Angeles, but Pineola is another story. Frank’s wife, artist Ginny Stanford and C.D. Wright sat down with each other to sift through the numerous lies it takes to juggle so many women.  They decided to confront Frank. 

On June 3, 1978, Frank Stanford sent Lucinda Williams a bunch of flowers. She wasn’t home and Miller accepted the package for her.  Ginny and C.D. picked up Frank to take him home to talk about the untenable situation. Frank asked if they could stop by his office first to pick something up.  The women sat in the car and waited while Frank retrieved his gun.  When they got to the house, the women sat in the living room and Frank excused himself for a minute.

Ginny Stanford would later write she heard: “Pop. Oh!  Pop. Oh! Pop. Oh!”

C.D. Wright picked up the phone and called Miller Williams. 

Williams called the coroner and removed the bloody sheets.  When he returned home, he found Lucinda smiling and arranging the flowers.  She shares what happened in Pineola.

When daddy told me what happened,

I couldn’t believe what he just said.

Sonny shot himself with a 44

and they found him lyin’ on his bed.

Stanford was laid to rest in Subiaco, Arkansas.  Much of the truth about his life was obfuscated by his own tall tales and filtered through a long line of poets, priests, singers, and artists.  The body of his work, much if it by very small presses, has been too hard to come by.

Now I’m not saying that there aren’t great poets out there in the vast plains and cities and tundra, but there is something especially poetic about living in places called Pineola and Subiaco and even Sylacauga.  My friend Harry Lowe is from Opelika, Alabama.  When people ask where he is from, he tells them Opelika and secretly crosses his fingers hoping that they ask the very predictable next question, “Where is Opelika?”  When they do, Harry Lowe smiles and says, “Opelika is between Notasulga and Loachapoka.”   And that’s what I like about the South.

One day Harry Lowe and I were talking about the end of one’s life. I asked him whether or not he wanted extraordinary measures or whether he wanted me to pull the plug.  He thought for a moment and said, “Keep me plugged in.”  He thought another minute and said, “If we can’t pay the electric bill, run an extension cord to the neighbors.”  We laughed, but I can honestly say I never go into his neighborhood with checking to see who has a new outdoor plug or a cracked window.

On New Years Day, 2015, Miller Williams died. 

In April of that year, Cooper Canyon Press released a collection of Stanford’s work entitled, What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, a volume including most of his chapbooks. 

This January, C.D. Wright died in her sleep.  She was 67. 

My car is equipped with a jack, a first aid kit, a cooler, a blanket and there is always a book.  These days I keep duct tape and an extension cord, because you never know when you might need to light up a cave, or hook up an iron lung, or simply throw someone a lifeline.

We face everyday with stories of bombing, shootings, hateful politicians, sick children, injured puppies, and that’s just before breakfast.  But we still have poetry to read and music to blast in the night air. Spring is here, the jonquils are in bloom, the lilacs are budding and in the end, the world is pretty great place.

He is risen, indeed.

 

Caleb Caudle

We do love the simple things in life -- good tunes, a nice cuppa joe, a warm afternoon.  Well, two out of three ain't bad.

Yesterday, the temperature hovered just below 80.  Today we are struggling to get up to 50.  These wild swings are not conducive to health, physical or mental. 

The clear recourse is to sit at the computer flooded with the SAD light and listen to tunes.  One of our new favorites is Carolina Ghost by Caleb Caudle. It is getting a lot, lot, lot of play here at Doe Run Farm. 

Many people have reviewed Carolina Ghost and most of them have had a hard time reviewing it. Not because they didn't like it,  it has been universally heralded, but because they can't really pigeonhole it. 

It is a thoughtful, well written, slightly poppy Americana record.  Alas, in a time when there are more more Americana artists out there, there are virtually no outlets to listen to new music.  Americana is actually what country music was meant to be in the old fashioned and still relevant Hank Williams/Patsy Cline way, before "country" became some sort of "bros before music" frat party.

Since Christmas, my iTunes has been filled with not only Caleb Caudle, but Freakwater, Dori Freeman, Julien Baker, as well as Lucinda Williams and Loretta Lynn. Other than my kitchen, where are you going to hear a set featuring these guys?  Yes, we have been listening to Chris Stapleton whose a bit of a "bros" kinda guy.  We gave Rhiannon Giddens a pass to channel that Billie Holiday vibe, though we miss the Chocolate Drops.  We loved the new David Wax Museum and even got a Christmas present from Duquette Johnston.  And still, you need to be in my kitchen.

And speaking of my kitchen...and Caleb Caudle...and coffee, my favorite coffee roaster is in the little town of Sugar Grove, Virginia. Dark Hollow Roasters makes wonderful coffee.  You can buy it out in the world, but if you order it from Dark Hollow Roasters, it is roasted the day you order it. 

So Dark Hollow is also a fan of Caleb Caudle and recently they blended a coffee in honor of Carolina Ghost.  We do love a good theme. On this wintry spring day, we got a package from Dark Hollow Roasters with Caleb Caudle's blend, Coffee (and a prayer); a line from  his song, The Reddest Rose. It was roasted a mere three days ago and the post office was jealous because the package was wafting warm coffee aromas. 

This afternoon we are sitting in the kitchen listening to Carolina Ghost and drinking Coffee (and a prayer).  Even the cold weather can't get us down!

Bloody Butcher Benne Oil Cake

In the South, we have a pie called a chess pie. The joke goes that in a thick Southern accent, when a woman said "It's just pie" it came out sounding like "It's jes pie" which sounds a lot like "chess pie."  No one can swear to the origin, but I like this one so I am sticking with it.

The beauty of a chess pie comes from its simplicity as the ingredients that one needs to make it are almost always in the larder. You might not have what it takes to make chocolate cake or blackberry cobbler but on any given day, a chess pie could be whipped up in almost any kitchen.

In an Italian kitchen, the equivalent to the chess pie is the polenta olive oil cake. Like the chess pie, the ingredients are usually in the larder, it is easy to make, and comes through in a pinch.  In a bit of irony, the ingredients for both desserts are roughly the same.  Like a chess pie, a polenta olive oil cake can be flavored with a variety of seasonings, from vanilla to citrus to almond and most anything in between.  An olive oil polenta cake is a godsend for a canning kitchen.  It is a perfect foil for that last jar of stiff marmalade or runny jam.

Olive oil polenta cake recipes flood the Internet. Every chef and blogger has one. The ingredients are all basically the same.  One cup of the following: flour, corn meal, sugar, eggs, and oil plus baking powder and salt for leavening and a flavoring.  A cup of eggs is about 4 large eggs. Flour usually outweighs the corn meal, but these dry ingredients will still usually equal two cups, so less cornmeal (3/4 cup) with the rest being made up in the flour (1 1/4 cups).

Let us digress -- on a personal note, I love an organized pantry.

But some days...

it all goes to hell.

Recently, this was indeed the case and I ventured in to bring order from chaos. Face it, the more things I picked up, the more things I thought about cooking. Two item turned up in morass that made me start thinking about an old Italian polenta olive oil cake.  Neither of them was polenta nor olive oil.

Let us digress further -- as almost everything I do leads me back to the library.  One of my favorite books published last year was Southern Provisions by David Shields. Shields has a title so long we won't even go into it, needless to say the guy has serious chops. His passion is bringing about a revival of lost Southern foods and agricultural practises. Southern Provisions is part Southern history, part agricultural history, part mystery, part botany, part cookbook, and all around fantastic read. Every book he mentions, you want to read; every recipe, you want to cook; and every spare inch of soil, you want to plant. His work has helped revive real deal Southern cuisine, not the fictionalized romanticism of Southern food. Not to mention the man is married to a woman named, Lucinda!

In the last few years, one of the Southern crops seeing a huge revival is benne.  If you have read Southern Provisions you would know all this; if not buy yourself a copy. Benne is a type of sesame seed brought to America by African slaves. While Thomas Jefferson was trying to produce olive trees to establish a source of fine oil in America, he overlooked the oil producing benne. When Jefferson was presented with a bottle of benne oil from Georgia, he was smitten. Over the next two centuries, benne fell out of favor and production for the most part ceased.  Benne oil never became a larder staple...unless you happen to be searching in my larder.

While cleaning up my mess I ran across a bottle of benne seed oil.  Much like Thomas Jefferson, I too, received a bottle from Georgia.  Oliver Farms in Georgia is currently the only producer of benne oil. It makes a great finishing oil, drizzled over cooked vegetables, or topping a soup.  I love to take day-old cornbread, sliced thin and toasted, sprinkled with some dried fish peppers, then dipped in benne oil.  Another Appalachian favorite is a nutty pesto with ramps and  hickory nuts, bound with benne.  Then, I was gifted a couple of bottles of benne oil and it was quite a gift as the oil is quite pricey. The first gift bottle was quickly used up, but the second had languished, lost and unfinished in the clutter.

The first line in Southern Provisions reads, "Southern food, like Italian food, is a universally recognized category..." Now you are having the same "ah ha" moment that I had.  Especially when you consider that the other item I found lost and alone was less that a cup of a popular West Virgina corn variety, Bloody Butcher.  Bloody Butcher is a red dent corn grown and ground for years in West Virginia. When ground, bits of the red kernels fleck the dark, rich meal, giving it a toothy crunch. Normally, using benne oil in a cake would seem like an extravagance, but since oils will become rancid over time, and since I didn't have a lot of experience with the shelf life of benne oil, I decided it was a "use it or lose it" moment.

I checked the oil and ended up with a full cup and a touch more for one last hurrah. The corn meal was just a hair under 3/4 cup. The Bloody Butcher Benne Oil Cake was a go.

The Bloody Butcher Benne Oil Cake

3/4 cup Bloody Butcher corn meal
1 cup AP flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 cup benne oil
1 tablespoon grated orange peel

Preheat oven to 350.

Lightly oil a 9 inch spring form pan.

In a medium bowl, mix the AP flour, corn meal, baking powder and salt, whisk to mix.

In another bowl, cream the eggs and sugar, beating until light and lemony in color. Stir in the orange zest.

To the sugar/egg mixture alternate the dry ingredients and the oil using about 1/3 of the dry ingredients, then about 1/3 of the oil, so you will end with the oil.

Pour the mixture into the prepared pan, and bake for 35 minutes or until a toothpick comes out of the cake clean.

Allow the cake to rest in the pan another 10 - 20 minutes before unmolding.

Sprinkle the top with confectioners sugar.

Of course, one could make this cake with polenta and olive oil, but it loses its Appalachian/Southern cred if you do!

Rural Studio

I'll be honest, I could never come up with a good reason say anything nice about Auburn. Then, Samuel Mockbee  co-founded Rural Studio at Auburn, and I must admit, it has been pretty great. Under Mockbee's guidance, the architecture students created affordable housing for some of the poorest residents of Hale County, Alabama.  After his death, Rural Studio continued to innovate and thrive.

Lately, Rural Studio has been working to take all their innovations and combine them into a simple house that is attractive, livable, and affordable.  By affordable, I don't mean $200,000, I mean a tenth of that -- a $20,000 house.

The first houses of this commercial endeavor were built at a development called Serenbe in Georgia.  The houses are used as artists residences.  There have been numerous articles about these two houses, but the best is by Adele Peters in Co-Exist.  It explains a lot of the problems such a good idea faces.

Sambo would be so proud!

Here's to working out all those problems. 

By the way I have some land...

Famous Food Friday -- Zora Neale Hurston

Hurston in Eau Gallie

Today's Famous Food Friday features Zora Neale Hurston.  Hurston was so much more than a novelist; she was a writer, folklorist, activist, and anthropologist. Most people might remember Hurston from reading Their Eyes Were Watching God in school, but know little else. If one were ask Hurston, she would have said she was born and raised in Eatonville, Florida, but in truth, she is an Alabama girl, born in Notasulga.  Since she was just a child when the family moved to Eatonville, she probably had little memory of Alabama. Her favorite spot may have been Eau Gallie, Florida where she wrote to friend,  "Somehow this one spot on earth feels like home for me. I have always intended to come back here. That is why I'm doing so much to make a go of it."

For Hurston, home was Florida.  In his book, Zora Neale Hurston on Florida Food, Professor Fred Opie delves into Hurston's early twentieth-century ethnographic research to examine the food of Florida that appears in her writing.  A graduate in anthropology, Hurston conducted ethnographic research with Franz Boas and worked with both Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead.  After her death, Hurston's papers were ordered to be burned, but a friend happened to pass by the house and stopped, put out the fire and saved the collection.

Fred Opie has studied Hurston's ethnographic research and her literary works to look specifically through the lens of food. The book is loaded with historical photos that bring the period to life. There are fields of collards, enormous barbecue pits, chicken frying, church picnic, and advertising encouraging the consumption of lots of corn.

He augments Hurston's writings on food with a collection of recipes belonging to Hurston and to the African-American community from traditionally black newspapers and other period cookbooks. Opie spends special attention to the descriptions of how foods were cooked whether braised or barbecued, smoked or fried. There is also an emphasis on traditional ingredients such as cornmeal, fish, and rice and peas along with folk remedies Hurston collected. Many of the farm laborers and sawmill workers had little or no access to doctors or medical attention so plant based cures were common among workers.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog and his mind deteriorates from the infection. He needs a doctor but the closest one is in Palm Beach and there is no way for Tea Cake to be saved.  In her research, Hurston came across a remedy for "Loss of Mind."

Loss of Mind Remedy

Sheep weed leaves
Bay leaf
Fig leaf
Poison oak
Sarsaparilla root
2 cups water

Take the bark and cut it all up fine. Make a tea. Take one tablespoon and put in two cups of water and strain and sweeten.  You drink some and give some to the patient. Put a fig leaf and poison oak in show.  (Get fig leaves off a tree that hasn't borne fruit.  Stem them so that nobody will know.)

 We may make a big jug of this and keep it handy!

We collect cookbooks not just for a collection of recipes, but because they root us in a specific time and place. What we eat is embedded in our lives and history.  It reveals who we are.  Zora Neale Hurston's life can be found in the food of her beloved Florida.  We might never have known that if not for Fred Opie.

No Food Like Southern Food

My mother's family in Alabama believed there was no food in the north. It does seem counter intuitive, perhaps they believed there was no GOOD food in the north. They were always sending food stuff to my mother. On one rather calamitous trip to Alabama, where I got sick, my mother got sick, and my father was forced to come and rescue us, food from the South became a big issue. 

Since my mother wouldn't fly, my father came to get us and take us back to the cold, cold north on the train. He was not happy that his presence was required to get his family home, but it seems that every time we went to Alabama, there was some sort of conspiracy to keep us there. My father bundled us up and there was a big ol' caravan to take us to the train station in Birmingham. We got on the train and all was well, until it wasn't.  Our train was delayed, which required an unexpected train change and a short timeline.

My father got the bags and was somewhat dismayed at the sheer weight of two bags.  I was  still a bit sick and whiny, complaining about the train change and the cold weather in Chicago.  My father set down the bags a bit too forcefully and soon it became clear why they weighed so much. My great-aunts had stuffed them with canned beans, tomatoes, pickles, and jams.  It was a quart of bean that broke in the bag, soaking the contents with bean juice, beans, not to mention the chunks of broken Ball jars.

He got mad, mother cried, then I cried.  There was no way to simply abandon the bags.  We made it home but we never again traveled to Alabama without my father and we never went on the train, again.

I am no better.  Back when White Lily Flour was still milled in the South and still hard to find way up north, I would bring back bags of flour from my visits.  After one visit, a friend of mine, who was also a chef, walked into the kitchen and asked if I was thinking of opening a bakery.  Last year, returning from Charleston, SC my car held two cases of Blenheim ginger ale, ten pounds of Carolina Gold rice, and five pounds of sea island red peas.

This trip South was no different. It was a perfect time to stock the larder with Southern delicacies. Where to begin?  Let's begin with bourbon in Kentucky -- Bourbon Barrel Foods. They began in 2006 as a soy sauce microbrewery.  Exactly!  They were the only one in America.  Now they have moved on into Worcestershire sauce, salts and vanilla.  With Woodford Reserve^® they are making bitters, spice blends, and Woodford Reserve^® Bourbon Cherries.  

In Tennessee, we made an almost religious pilgrimage to Benton's for bacon and country 
ham.  The James Beard Foundation is naming Allan Benton to it's 2015 Who's Who of Food & Beverage in America and no one deserves it more. While we were waiting on some county ham, one of the butchers asked me if I cooked dried bean. I said I did and he tucked and enormous ham hock into by bag!  It that wasn't great enough, we also picked up some Cruze Buttermilk.  Why carry buttermilk from Tennessee to West Virginia?  Cruze buttermilk is ACTUAL buttermilk.  That stuff you get in groceries is cheap milk with cheap additives.  The is no butter there.  Cruze is the real thing.  We also grabbed a couple of bars of Olive & Sinclair Chocolate.

While we never quite crossed into North Carolina, we couldn't resist a jar of Big Spoon Roasters Peanut Sorghum Butter.  We did nick a corner or Georgia, so we picked up some olive oil from Georgia Olive Farms. Who needs Italy!

Of course, the biggest haul came from Alabama.  We headed up to Elkmont on a Sunday, knowing that Belle Chevre would be closed, but we wanted to do a drive-by.  We wrote about owner Tasis Malakasis' first cookbook here.  Glad to see another one on the way.

We wrote about Susan McEwen McIntosh's cookbook Glorious Grits here. Some of the most glorious grits are from McEwen & Sons in Wilsonville, Alabama.  They have excellent corn meal, too. We have written about Big Bob Gibson's BBQ Book here. Big Bob's is the home of white barbecue sauce, and while I often make it fresh, we picked up a couple of bottles to have on hand.

We went to a party at Good People Brewing Company, who let us party in the midst of expansion. We grabbed some Snake Handler on tap, but it was scarce as... well, snake handlers.  Fortunately, my goddaughter knew a place in north Alabama and we found some to bring home.

The first thing I cooked when unloaded the loot was a pot of beans with my ham hock from Benton's.  They had cut it in four nice pieces, so there was plenty to spare.  I made a skillet of cornbread with McEwen's meal and Cruze buttermilk.  As soon as the cornbread was ready, I cut a piece and spread it with Belle Chevre Pimento cheese.

They say the next big food area is Appalachia.  If that's true, this is best we can offer.

With all the turmoil and bad things that happened in March, we can honestly say, the larder is in great shape!

A Long Day at the End of the World

A while back, I became a bit disinterested in fiction.  It just seemed to me that real life was far more interesting.  Case in point -- A Long Day at the End of the World.  Brent Hendricks' memoir reads like the most exquisite piece of fiction.  If fact, his story is so downright preposterous that one might think it was fiction.  News reports prove the truth and noting but the truth; what there is of the truth, anyway.

Hendricks tells the story of the Tri-State Crematory.   Back in 2002, hundreds of abandoned and decayed corpses were discovered in a small town in Georgia.  It was the the largest mass desecration of remains in modern American history.  There were 339 bodies resting in various states of disarray around the Tri-State Crematory.  When the investigation concluded only 226 of the bodies were identified.

Brent Marsh had taken over the family business.  He plead guilty and is serving 12 years.  The guilty plea offered no explanation into why Marsh cremated some of the remains and simply dumped others.

One of the bodies dumped was Brent Hendricks' father.  He had been dead for many years when he was sent to the Tri-State Crematory.  Hendricks' mother wanted her husband's body disinterred from his burial plot and cremated.  Her children went along with the plan and five years later, found that the cremains sitting on their mother's mantel were not their father, but bits of cement and animal bone.

Hendricks heads out on the back roads of the deep South to find out exactly what happened to his father.  Most reviewers call this book "Southern Gothic" but in the South were refer to it as Tuesday.  Truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction.   A Long Day at the End of the World is a lamentation of the bond between parents and children, a mystery with no end, a exploration of death, and a damn fine read.

In fact, R.E.M.'s Peter Buck and Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers were so moved by the book that wrote a song, Roswell.  Give it a listen.

Paprika Southern

Yesterday we posted about the cool new game, Lords and Ladies.   Today we thought we might tell you where we fist heard about the game -- in the pages of Paprika Southern. Paprika Southern is a digital magazine originating in Savannah, Georgia. 

Programs like issuu have made it possible for anyone to be their own digital publisher, much like the Polaroid camera made everyone a photographer.   If you have ever seen old Polaroids, you know that just because you can take a picture, doesn't mean you should.   All of you creative types out there probably have at least one good magazine in you.   But publishing a magazine is hard work.  Doing it on a consistent basis and doing it well is tough.  After one or two sporadic issues, most would-be publishers abandon the idea.   Paprika Southern just published their fifth issue and it looks like nothing will be stopping them.

 In the 1950's savvy young women intent on publishing took the bus to New York City, stayed at the Barbizon and wore gloves to work.  Ten years ago, savvy young women flew to New York City, found a third floor walk-up in Chelsea and wore flip-flops to work.   Now days, savvy young women can find a place they love, live in affordable housing, and start their own magazines in their pajamas if they are so inclined.

Sharing a third floor walk-up in New York City,  Siobhan Egan and Bevin Valentine would probably be getting coffee for a senior editor, or running errands, or supervising an occasional photo shoot.  Instead, they are producing a lifestyle magazine with a Southern flair that is regional without being provincial.

Seamlessly integrated in the pages of Paprika Southern the reader will find fashion and farming, beer and opera, art and commerce, and much more.  You will be missing out if you don't take a look at Paprika Southern.

PS:  If there is a problem it lies with issuu which is rather slow at loading the pages.  This had always been an issue with issuu, so don't let this slow you down.

Happy Birthday Zelda

Self-Portrait by Zelda Fitzgerald

In honor of Zelda Fitzgerald's birthday, we urge you to read her one and only novel.  Regardless of what one might have been told, Save Me the Waltz is a beautiful book and well worth a read.  For a view of Zelda's paintings, check out  Zelda: An Illustrated Life: The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald, published in 1996.  It features many of her whimsical paintings like The Mad Tea Party.

Country Living

Rarely does one pick up a magazine and read an article that features so many of one's favorite things.  Well miracles do happen.  I got the new Country Living which featured an article about a sprawling,

down on the farm party in Elkmont, Alabama.  Here are the 5 "W's" of great journalism.

WHO:  

Tasia Malakasis, one of my favorite cookbook writers and cheesemakers (Tasia's Table: Cooking With The Artisan Cheesemaker at Belle Chèvre).

WHAT:  

A big party on the farm with great food.

WHEN: 

When I opened the magazine! And shortly after the release of the self-titled CD by one of favorite bands, The Great Book of John, who happened to be part of the "WHO" at the party.

WHERE:  

In Alabama!

WHY:  

Seriously, you had to ask, "Why?"  


Somehow my invitation must have gotten lost in the mail --Damn USPS.  Still, reading about it just might be the next best thing.  Check out Malakasis' cookbook at Cookbook Of The Day.

10 Things To Think About Re: Paula Deen

Guys at the Camellia Grill from Kitchy Cooking

 1. Paula Deen is nearly 70 years old and raised in the deep South.  One would be hard pressed to find a 70-year-old Southerner (or 60 or 50 or 40 for that matter) who hasn't used a racial slur in some form or another.  (It is not right, but it is a fact.)

2.  All week "brand" consultants said Deen should have just lied under oath.  (That is the kind of brand one wants, the kind that lies under oath.  Though most Southerners would be inclined to lie about it.)

3. The woman who caused Deen to be deposed offered to drop her harassment suit... if Deen would pay her 12 million dollars.  (Who's harassing who?)

4. While Deen was being dropped by the Food Network, Gordon Ramsay, Joe Bastianich, and Graham Elliot, the three judges on Masterchef were accused by several female contestants of sexual harassment.  This was not featured on CNN.  P.S. Masterchef is thinking of dropping the segment that it filmed with Paula Deen.  (As an aside, Masterchef is show about home cooks.  Most of the people on the show are like Paula Deen, they are trying to find a way to improve life for their family.  Many are single parents.  Recently, Joe Bastianich stood next to his mother and threw food at one of the contestants because he didn't like his pasta.  (If Bobby Deen had thrown food at someone, I'll just bet his Mama would have slapped him!)

5.  Speaking of the Food Network, it seems a bit ironic that they are "horrified" by a racist comment but rarely feature African-American chefs on any of their shows.  Only one of their regular programs is hosted by African Americans.  As Mama might say... Deeds not words.

6.  The Camellia Grill in New Orleans has all male, predominately African-American waiters.  The dress code is white jackets and black bow ties.  Hooters employs and all female waitstaff who are required to wear short shorts and skintight Hooters shirts.

7.  Edward Lee spoke out about Deen.  He had filmed a show for her and was not glad that it would not air.   He said of Paula Deen,

"In my infinite innocence, I was excited for it. I was flattered that Mrs. Deen would even ask me on her show. I felt like we connected the Old and New Southern values through a dialogue of food – albeit in light-hearted and sugar-coated cooking skits. I dare say, I felt proud. In light of all the noise that surfaced this week, I realize there is still a deep ravine between the two and the opinions of many this week was an exercise in tearing apart rather than building bridges. Mrs. Deen was gracious, friendly and funny. Unfortunately, none of those qualities trumps racism."

I am sure Lee is in no way innocent.  He learned to cook from a Korean grandmother and if he is honest, he heard some pretty racist things in his kitchen.  Clearly instead of gracious, funny, friendly, Deen should have shouted obscenity at Lee and thrown pasta at him.  Then maybe she would be respected.

8.  If the "N" word is the most horrific pejorative in the English language, why do people in their teens, 20's, 30's use it so often?  For weeks I hear Kanye West and Jay-Z sing Niggas in Paris. At the 55th Grammy Awards the song won best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song.  Perhaps if the word is so offensive EVERYONE should stop using it.   (I do understand the intellectual argument for reclaiming, but Jay-Z wins a Grammy?)

9. In case you missed it because you were too busy watching Paula Deen, the United States Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Provision and sent Affirmative Action back to the lower court.  Chief Justice John Roberts will, however, keep his job.

10.  There is no dialogue about race in America because no one wants to be called a racists. Because it easier to fire someone from the Food Network (who admits to telling the truth) than it is to look at the racial makeup of the Food Network. Because using the "N" word can get you fired or win you a Grammy.  Because the South is hotbed of lingering racist behavior if you cook there, but if you vote there, it is one big melting pot devoid of any racism.

The Score:

Fired

Paula Deen

Still Working

Gordon Ramsay

Joe Bastianich

Graham Elliot

John Roberts

Antonin Scalia

Anthony Kennedy

Clarence Thomas

Samuel Alito

Coming Home

We have been waiting patiently for Coming Home: The Southern Vernacular House it finally see covers.
The book showcases James Lowell Strickland and Historical Concepts, the Atlanta firm founded in 1982. They have a bit of a speciality in creating community and civic projects, but they do a great deal of residential work. The title is self-explanatory: Strickland loves the Southern vernacular. It seems he has never seen a barn he didn't love...or have an idea for improving.

This book is filled with porches and foyers and sleeping areas tucked away with eloquence. No one is better at taking a series structures and linking them into a cohesive, thoughtful statement, individual and still the same.

This South Carolina compound features eclectic buildings including a residence, guest house, and carriage house sitting comfortably around an oak tree.


Zelda Fitzgerald wrote: "...it’s very difficult to be two simple people at once, one who wants to have a law to itself and the other who wants to keep all the nice old things and be loved and safe and protected."

Strickland has found a way to traverse this difficulty with great style and flair. He manages to keep all the nice old things while providing a modern spin: an almost optical illusion of of a shiny, new, old penny.


When is a porch so much more? Historical Concepts was joined by the Susan Sully who wrote the text for the book. Sully is one of the best architectural writers working today. This is her third or fourth book this year, it's so hard to keep track! She authored one of last years favorites, The Home Within Us, with Bobby McAlpine. There were so many posts on Sully's The Southern Cosmopolitan, that adding another one would have been redundant.

Coming Home was well worth the wait.

Famous Food Friday -- Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier Williams by Alfred Eisenstaedt

Let's just get this right of the way -- I am not fond of cookbooks that take a famous person of event and then just throws together recipes claiming to be a cookbook. So I was quite skeptical about Dinner With Tennessee Williams. Drinks with Tennessee Williams might have been another story...



Still, if you were going to do a Tennessee Williams cookbook, this one was done in the right way. First, there was rhyme to their reason. Every year New Orleans has a Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. This cookbook grew out of a love of Tennessee William's New Orleans. Chef Greg Picolo had cooked for the Literary Festival on occasion. Troy Gilbert had written a cookbook or two. Throw in Dr. Kenneth Holditch, a noted Williams scholar, and you have a fine cookbook, one even Tennessee Williams would have been proud of.

I lived in New Orleans for a year. I gained forty pounds! Seriously, I GAINED forty pounds. Even the crappiest food in New Orleans is about ten times better than the BEST food in most places. Southerners love to sit around an talk and eat. And talk and eat and tell you about what they ate and how their grandma cooked it and how that differed from the way Mama cooked it and how they cook it and what restaurant has a good approximation. New Orleans is one of those cities where people can talk poetically and passionately about food and spend their entire life having never set foot in a kitchen!

Gilbert and Picolo do a great job of translating Dr. Holditch's scholarship about the food in the plays of Tennessee Williams into actual food on a plate. Here is a pork chop fit to serve the overbearing and "big" Big Daddy from Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Note they are not just pork chops but double-cut pork chops cooked in Coca-cola, bourbon and molasses the real "holy trinity" of Southern cooking.

Big Daddy's Braised Double-Cut Pork Chops With Coca-Cola, Bourbon, Molasses, and Granny Smith Apples

6 double-cut pork chops
Salt and pepper
2 cups flour, seasoned
1/2 cup olive oil
1 large onion, sliced
2 cups bourbon
4 cups Coca-Cola
2 cups apple juice
1 tablespoon minced garlic
3 tablespoons lite soy sauce
2 tablespoons Steen's Molasses
2 teaspoons Tabasco or Crystal Hot Sauce
2 cups demi-glace
2 tablespoons chopped fresh thyme
1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary
1 cup beef stock, if needed
5 Granny Smith apples, cored, quartered

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

Season chops with salt and pepper and then dust in seasoned flour. Sear chops in hot oil in an ovenproof pan until light brown, about 2 minutes on each side and remove to a plate. Carefully pour off excess oil, then add onion and saute 2 minutes. Return chops to pan and deglaze with the bourbon, allowing the pot liquor to reduce by two-thirds.

Add Coca-Cola, apple juice, garlic, soy sauce, molasses, Tabasco, demi-glace, thyme, rosemary, and salt and pepper. While cooking, take a brush and baste the chops every 5 minutes or so. Braise in an oven, uncovered, at 450 degrees F for 8 minutes. If needed, add stock or water if the pot-liquor reduces too quickly. Reduce heat and cook at 350 - 400 degrees F for 20 minutes; turn the chops. Cook for an additional 20 minutes then turn again. Add apples and cook an additional 20--40 minutes, until the meat is almost falling off the bone. Serve .

Another reason to feature this cookbook is to take a look back at some of the fine actresses that have given life to the complex women of Tennessee Williams' imagination.

Carroll Baker

Baby Doll

Elizabeth Taylor
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Anika Noni Rose
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Vivien Leigh
A Streetcar Named Desire




Sarah Paulson and Jessica Lange
The Glass Menagerie


Zoe Wanamaker
The Rose Tattoo


Blythe Danner
Suddenly Last Summer

Frankly, this is the "short list" ...we could go on and on... Check out more actresses at Cookbook Of The Day.

Famous Food Friday – The Duchess of Windsor

“I have been very happy to help carry some of the well-known
dishes of my nativeland to other countries, and especially to have
served on my table Southern dishes which appeal to the Duke.”

The Duchess of Windsor

Today is Wallis Warfield Simpson’s birthday. How lovely of her to have her birthday fall on a Friday so we could feature her cookbook. You probably didn’t know that The Duchess of Windsor, in addition to being the only woman to have a king abdicate for her, wrote a cookbook: Some Favorite Southern Recipes of the Duchess of Windsor.

She had an ulterior motive – she was raising money for the British War Relief. As a favor, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote the introduction where she noted:

“…the real improvements in American living and health has been the discarding of the elaborate and extravagant menus which marked our entertaining as recently as the General Grant period…This tendency toward more healthful simplicity and especially toward the more scientific preparations of food is, I believe, one of the outstanding contributions which the people of the United States have made toward modern eating habits.”

I find it hard to imagine The Duke and Duchess of Windsor prattling around their kitchen in the South of France; her making Cabbage and canned shrimp and the Duke drying the dishes! No doubt the “recipes” were handed off to their chef. Just to make sure the Duchess was no flash in the culinary pan, the Home Institute of the New York Herald Tribune tested each recipe.


Poor Wallis, you make one little mistake like getting a King to give up his crown and no one trusts you! I am far more inclined to eat with the Duchess than the New York Herald Tribune.

For today’s royal, though not queenly, birthday celebration, I chose a favorite cake of The Duchess of Windsor. Is it lemon chiffon cake? Devil’s food cake? A light an airy coconut cake? A rich spicy pork cake?

Did you guess? Did you guess Pork Cake?

The Duchess of Windsor’s Pork Cake

1/2 pound fat salt pork, ground
3/4 cup boiling water
3/4 cup molasses
1/2 cup of firmly packed brown sugar
2 cups raisins
1 cup currants, washed and dried
3 1/2 cups sifted flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoon cloves
1 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg


Place pork in a mixing bowl and add boiling water. Add molasses, brown sugar, raisins and currants and cool. Mix and sift the flour, baking soda and spices together three times. Add to the molasses mixture and beat until smooth. Turn into long narrow bar pan (10 X 4 X 3 inches) and bake in a slow oven (325 F.) 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Rarely does one find a cake recipe that begins with the 1/2 pound of fat salt pork. Pork Cakes are a Southern invention – you know in the South, when it comes to pork we eat everything but the squeal! Who knew we had such fine ideas for porky desserts.

Pork Cake shows up in a few Southern cookbooks from the early 1900’s but doesn’t seem to have caught on or survived. Such a cake is not mentioned in Mrs. Dull’s Southern Cooking, considered to be one of the most comprehensive chronicles of Southern tradition. The recipe appears in Southern Living’s encyclopedic, Southern Heritage series culled from The Williamsburg Art of Cookery. In her introduction, The Duchess of Windsor says,

“Few housekeepers owned recipe books, the first American cookbook being printed at Williamsburg in 1742. Recipes, instead, were written by hand, and passed on, as treasured gifts…”

Since she was familiar with Helen Bullock’s Williamsburg recipes, one can speculate that her recipe for Pork Cake was adapted from that volume.

Next time you want to bake a cake for the family, don’t forget the pork! And if you bake it on June 19th, stick a candle in it...

Happy Birthday, Wallis!

Simultaneous post at Cookbook of the Day.