Blog

I was confiding in a dear friend about my woes in the lonely heart department, and how writing about them only made me feel worse and even more lonely.  Her advice was to write about food, knowing that, while not a gourmet cook, I am an accomplished Southern cook.  Comfort food, the kind that sticks to your ribs and makes you feel good inside is my specialty.  Not exactly in vogue these days, but as much as I am an artist in the creative way, I am a cook in the creative, Crisco shortening kind of  way.  

I make "drop" biscuits that are crispy on the outside and soft and yummy on the inside. I cook them in muffin pans to exploit the crispy outside to its maximum. We joke that they are more Crisco than anything else and border on fried bread, but oh, they are good when done well. Cornbread is cooked in a seasoned cast iron skillet, heated in the oven prior to filling with a rich, Martha White version of that staple. Mix the cornbread and biscuits together, adding a few more ingredients and you have sage holiday turkey dressing.  My fried chicken is dusted in spices and batter, and is good hot, warm or cold.  I can cook a pork loin that falls apart and cuts with a fork, full of flavor, and served with a dash of barbecue flavor, with leftovers going into my recipe of brunswick stew. (Now that I live in the North, brunswick stew is a strange and wonderful food that they know not of! Oh, you ill advised souls! Nothing like a good brunswick stew, full of whatever you have on hand, chicken, pork and/or beef, creamed corn, lima beans, tomato sauce, a splash of barbecue sauce, maybe another bean or so.) Slow cooked green beans, with bacon and paprika, or fried okra cooked within an inch of losing any vitamin benefit are in my toolbox.  Black eyed peas, with the required bacon strips, pepper and salt are a staple -- cooked to the edge of disintegration.  Country fried steak, soaked in milk and then tossed in my favorite mix of flour, spices, pepper and salt, slowly cooked to golden brownish-ness and tender.  Peach cobbler from peaches you "put up" in their prime, and now as spring begins to take the stage, come out of the freezer to blossom into sweet deliciousness with a thick sauce and crusty top that will make you want to leap for joy.  Strawberries, also in frozen suspension, join sliced fresh apples for a fruity pie.  Pecan pie, cooked to perfection, with foil on the edges of the crust to keep them from getting too brown while the pie congeals in the oven heat. Sugar, sugar everywhere.  Though we have good cooks here, they never use enough sugar to Southern standards. We were raised to embrace diabetes as adults, a high price paid for a diet determined before our extremely health conscious society made it a mark of Cain.

A favorite I haven't cooked in a long time is banana pudding, the kind that has the recipe on the box of the real vanilla wafers.  Cooked pudding, layers of bananas and wafers, then pudding again.  Topped with a sweet layer of whipped egg whites, tipped in brown toastiness in that last few minutes of baking in the oven.  As a society, we have lost the everyday skill of banana pudding.  Store bought mix has made it too easy to make the pudding, throw in a banana and cookie, then put whipped cream from a tub on the top. Generations are growing up without the utmost pleasure of a warm serving of banana pudding straight from the oven.  Southern grandmothers who rest peacefully in the churchyard can be still, knowing they produced something that was so perfect, so memorable, that they will never be truly forgotten. Never mind that their offspring are losing the skills they honed daily.  Never mind that their recipes are fading into smells, textures, tastes so unique they are now part of our DNA.  They did their best, they cooked with their hearts, and the world was changed in their hands.

As an artist who creates in a number of mediums one DOESN'T consume, my work may last longer, change hands, be admired and loved, but they will never match the true ecstasy of that precious bowl of food for the gods, banana pudding.  Now where is that recipe? I have a few bananas ready for transformation. And don't get me started on my momma's chocolate pound cake!