A Love Affair with Southern Cooking (16 page)

TIDEWATER PEANUT SOUP

MAKES
6
SERVINGS

Peanut soup, it’s said, was one of George Washington’s favorites, not surprising given the fact that Mount Vernon was in Tidewater Virginia—“peanut country.” These underground legumes grow equally well in Tidewater North Carolina, so peanut soup has long been a specialty there, too. In the old days, cooks would shell the peanuts, roast them, mash them to paste, then simmer them into soup. This modern version takes advantage of peanut butter; use your favorite brand.

2 tablespoons butter or bacon drippings (I prefer the latter)

1 large yellow onion, coarsely chopped

1 large celery rib, trimmed and coarsely chopped

1 large ripe tomato, peeled, cored, and coarsely chopped, or ½ cup tomato sauce

½ teaspoon crumbled leaf thyme

½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg or ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg

½ teaspoon salt, or to taste

¼ teaspoon black pepper, or to taste

¼ teaspoon ground hot red pepper (cayenne)

2½ cups chicken broth

1 cup firmly packed creamy-style peanut butter

¾ cup milk

¾ cup half-and-half

2 tablespoons medium-dry sherry, tawny

¾ cup firmly packed sour cream beaten until smooth with ¼ cup milk (topping)

2 tablespoons finely snipped fresh chives (garnish)

• 1.
  Melt the butter in a large, heavy, nonreactive saucepan over moderately high heat. Add the onion and celery and cook for 6 to 8 minutes, stirring occasionally, until lightly browned.
  
• 2.
  Add the tomato, thyme, nutmeg, salt, black pepper, and cayenne; reduce the heat to moderate and cook and stir for 1 to 2 minutes. Mix in the broth and peanut butter and cook
  uncovered for 10 minutes. Set off the heat and cool for 15 minutes.
  
• 3.
  Purée the mixture in two batches in a food processor or electric blender until smooth. Return to the saucepan, add the milk and half-and-half, set over moderate heat, and bring just to serving temperature, stirring often. Remove from the heat, stir in the sherry, then taste for salt and pepper and adjust as needed.
  
• 4.
  Serve hot, topping each portion with a drift of the sour cream mixture and a scattering of chives. Or, if you prefer, chill well and serve cold.
  

LIGHTLY CURRIED PEANUT BISQUE

MAKES
6
SERVINGS

Completely different from the peanut soup that precedes, this one is the creation of Lisa Ruffin Harrison, a gifted home cook whom I interviewed back in the 1980s for a
Bon Appétit
article on James River plantations. I photographed at Evelynton, where Lisa grew up. “This soup is a kind of African variation on the Virginia original,” Lisa says. “It should have a blend of spicy ethnic flavors and I prefer it with a good dose of cayenne,” she adds, explaining that she loves to update old southern recipes. “The walnuts take the candy-bar sweetness out of the peanuts.” So do pecans, which Lisa says she now prefers to walnuts.

3 tablespoons butter

2 medium celery ribs, trimmed and coarsely chopped

1 large yellow onion, coarsely chopped

1 teaspoon curry powder

½ teaspoon ground cumin

¹
/
₈
teaspoon ground coriander

¹
/
₈
teaspoon ground turmeric

¹
/
₈
teaspoon ground hot red pepper (cayenne)

¹
/
₈
teaspoon black pepper

¾ cup firmly packed chunky or creamy peanut butter

5 cups rich chicken stock or broth

½ cup coarsely chopped pecans or walnuts

½ cup heavy cream

½ teaspoon salt, or to taste

Garnishes

½ teaspoon sweet paprika

¼ cup coarsely chopped roasted unsalted peanuts

2 tablespoons finely snipped fresh chives

6 tablespoons mango chutney (optional)

• 1.
  Melt the butter in a large, heavy saucepan over moderate heat. Add the celery and onion and sauté for 8 to 10 minutes or until limp and golden. Blend in the curry powder, cumin, coriander, turmeric, cayenne, and black pepper, then cook and stir 1 minute more.
  
• 2.
  Add the peanut butter, then gradually mix in the chicken stock. Bring to a boil, adjust the heat so the soup bubbles gently, and simmer uncovered, stirring now and then, for 20 minutes or until the flavors “marry.” Add the pecans and cook, stirring occasionally, for 2 minutes more. Remove the soup from the heat and cool for 10 minutes.
  
• 3.
  Purée the soup by churning in batches in the food processor or in an electric blender at high speed. It will still be lumpy.
  Note:
  For a silky soup, force through a fine sieve.
  
• 4.
  Return the soup to the pan, add the cream and salt, set over moderate heat, and bring to a simmer. Taste for salt and adjust as needed. Or, if you prefer, refrigerate the soup for up to two days. When ready to serve, reheat the soup or serve cold.
  
• 5.
  Ladle into heated (or chilled) soup plates, and sprinkle each portion with paprika, peanuts, and chives. Then, if you like, top with the mango chutney.
  

ROYAL SWEET POTATO SOUP

MAKES
6
SERVINGS

“Royal” doesn’t refer to “royalty” but to Alabama-born Walter Royal, one of the South’s most dedicated chefs. Barely out of graduate school, Royal headed to North Carolina’s Fearrington House near Chapel Hill to work with his idol, Edna Lewis. He later became sous chef at Ben and Karen Barker’s Magnolia Grill in Durham, and he is now executive chef at the Angus Barn, an immensely popular restaurant near Raleigh. Royal likes to improvise with what the South grows best, in this case sweet potatoes. For the North Carolina SweetPotato Commission, he created a soup that’s both silky and savory. No sugar and spice here—nor in my adaptation below.

3 slices hickory-smoked bacon, cut crosswise into strips ½ inch wide

2½ pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and diced

1 medium Granny Smith apple, peeled, cored, and coarsely chopped

1 medium yellow onion, coarsely chopped

1 large carrot, peeled and coarsely chopped

1 medium celery rib, trimmed and coarsely chopped (include a few leaves)

1 large shallot, finely chopped

1 large garlic clove, finely chopped

½ teaspoon dried leaf basil, crumbled

½ teaspoon dried leaf oregano, crumbled

¼ teaspoon dried leaf thyme, crumbled

¹
/
₃
cup unsifted all-purpose flour

8 cups (2 quarts) rich chicken stock or broth

1½ teaspoons salt, or to taste

½ teaspoon black pepper, or to taste

¼ teaspoon hot red pepper sauce, or to taste

1 cup heavy cream

Garnishes

Sour cream or crème fraîche

Reserved cooked bacon

6 sprigs of fresh lemon thyme

• 1.
  Fry the bacon in a large, heavy soup kettle over moderate heat for 10 to 12 minutes or until the drippings cook out and only crisp brown bits remain. Scoop the bacon to paper toweling and reserve.
  
• 2.
  Add the sweet potatoes, apple, onion, carrot, celery, shallot, and garlic to the kettle and sauté in the drippings for 8 to 10 minutes over moderate heat or until golden. Blend in the basil, oregano, thyme, and flour and cook and stir for 2 to 3 minutes.
  
• 3.
  Add the chicken stock slowly, stirring all the while, then mix in the salt, pepper, and hot pepper sauce. Continue stirring until the mixture boils, turn the heat to low, and simmer uncovered, stirring now and then, for about 20 minutes or until the vegetables are soft. Set off the heat and cool for 20 minutes, stirring often.
  
• 4.
  Purée the soup mixture in batches in the food processor, then return to the kettle. Add the cream and bring slowly to serving temperature. Taste for salt, pepper, and hot pepper sauce and adjust as needed.
  
• 5.
  To serve, ladle into heated soup plates, and garnish each portion with a dollop of sour cream, a scattering of the reserved bacon, and a sprig of lemon thyme. Or, if you prefer, chill well and serve cold, thinning the soup, if needed, with a little cold milk or broth.
  

If anything could be called the national dish of the South, perhaps barbecue, even more so than fried chicken, would be it.

Damon Lee Fowler,
Classical Southern Cooking

L
eaf through almost any early southern cookbook and you’ll discover an extraordinary variety of meat, fish, and fowl as well as some unexpectedly sophisticated recipes.

In Mary Randolph’s
Virginia House-wife
(1824), I find sweetbreads, saddle of mutton, black sausage, and goose. Game bird, rabbit, and venison recipes abound in Lettice Bryan’s
Kentucky Housewife
(1839); she even offers a few ways to prepare beef cheeks. A glance, moreover, at Sarah Rutledge’s
Carolina Housewife
(1847) turns up turtle, terrapin, and mullet roes in addition to more familiar fare. Not even Mrs. Dull’s
Southern Cooking
(1928) neglects calf’s brains, sweetbreads, goose, duck, rabbit, or possum.

Why, then, have so many of these fallen from favor for the home cook? Times change, tastes change. The Civil War killed the planter aristocracy and now the self-sufficient family farm is “going with the wind,” thanks to our increasingly ravenous agro-business. Supermarkets proliferate, driving the mom-and-pop grocery and family butcher out of business; stricter hunting and fishing laws, not to mention better protection of endangered species, make wild game and fish less readily available. Finally, the big food companies have wooed and won home cooks with a staggering array of convenience foods. I find this particularly dismaying down south because Southerners have always taken pride in their distinctly regional cuisine. Old family recipes were cherished and preserved from generation to generation.

So what do southern supermarkets sell today? Sealed-in-plastic hamburger, steaks,
and roasts precut half a continent away; packaged poultry parts; canned or frozen seafood. Most southern meat departments, furthermore, are devoted to pork: chops, ribs, roasts, country ham slices as well as big pink packing-house hams, side meat, salt pork, bacon, and fresh-daily local sausages—hot or sagey links, patties, or one-pound blocks. Anything else is a “special order” and good luck with that. Fortunately, farmer’s markets, food co-ops, and specialty groceries are beginning to fill the void in many parts of the South.

The scent of sausage frying spins me back to my childhood. Not to my mother’s kitchen but to, of all places, the local car pool. I was a little girl during World War Two and to save on gas, neighbors took turns driving four or five of us kids to school, one of whom always smelled of freshly fried sausage. We got a good whiff the instant she slipped into the car.

Sausage for breakfast sounded wonderful compared to the oatmeal, orange juice, and rich Jersey milk I downed every morning (along with a tablespoon of mint-flavored cod liver oil).

My midwestern mother never fried sausage or chicken or pork chops or any of the other things Southerners automatically dropped into hot fat. She was a good meat-and-potatoes cook but the meats she chose confounded my southern friends: leg of lamb, breast of veal, rabbit, beef heart and tongue, calf’s liver. There were husky goulashes, pot roasts, even Wiener schnitzel, which I adored because it tasted like fried chicken.

Although Mother occasionally baked a ham, I don’t remember her ever cooking fresh pork. To be honest, I don’t know whether it was rationed during World War Two or not (I was too young to pay much attention). I do remember, however, that roast beef and steaks were strictly rationed and reserved for special occasions. Also that beef heart and tongue, and rabbit required few of the precious “red points” in my mother’s ration book. Perhaps none at all. And with chickens in the backyard, we never ran out of meat or eggs.

For Mother, chicken was something to stuff and roast like turkey, something to stew, fricassee, or bubble into a massive pot of Country Captain (a southern recipe obtained from a friend). Still, chicken never hit the skillet in Mother’s kitchen, much as I begged her to fry it.

For that reason, I loved going home from school with chums;
their
mothers might be frying chicken for supper and I might be asked to stay.

As for fish, Mother made a mean oyster stew (which I couldn’t eat—I’m allergic to oysters), a fairly classic salmon loaf, and tuna salad. But boiled crabs were my favorite. Using pieces of string tied to safety pins threaded with bacon, my brother and I would catch crabs right in front of our summer cottage on Chesapeake Bay. Mother would drop them into a huge cauldron of sea water bubbling on the old wood stove—
just like the local salt who had taught her the Virginia way to cook live-and-kicking blue crabs.

Most of what Mother prepared, however, came out of her Illinois background, her college days at Wellesley, or her early married years in Vienna, where my father had been teaching. Exotic stuff in our devoutly southern neighborhood. The kids liked to make fun of the “Yankee” food my family ate and I didn’t like that. Today I’m proud that my mother had the courage to be “different.”

Back then, however, I yearned for the pork chops, fried chicken, barbecue, and sausages my friends’ mothers served. They were more to my liking and in many ways still are, thus I’ve spent a lifetime learning to cook them as Southerners seem almost genetically programmed to do.

I have no idea why I’ve always been so in love with southern food. If I were Shirley MacLaine, I’d swear that I’d been southern in an earlier life.

So what you’ll find in this chapter are hefty helpings of the old-fashioned southern meat, fish, and fowl dishes I adored as a child along with imaginative improvisations by some of the New South’s best young chefs. Dig in.

Brunswick stew is what happens when small mammals carrying ears of corn fall into barbecue pits.

—
ROY BLOUNT, JR
.

APPLE AND BOURBON–BASTED PORK LOIN

MAKES
6
SERVINGS

To keep pork roasts moist, Southerners baste them with everything from orange juice to Coca-Cola. Bourbon is an old favorite; so is apple juice or cider and I’ve combined the two here. With pork leaner than ever, keeping it moist is doubly difficult. It helps, I find, to use more artisanal pork such as that produced by Niman Ranch and to roast it at a high temperature for a short period of time so the heat sears the outside of the meat and seals in the juices. Finally, roasting pork to a lower internal temperature (145° to 150° F.) makes it more succulent. Although tinged with pink, this pork is perfectly safe to eat; the microbes that cause trichinosis are killed at 140° F. Indeed trichinosis, prevalent when hogs were slopped with kitchen scraps, is a thing of the past. Still, if like many Southerners you prefer well-done pork, give the roast another 15 to 20 minutes in the oven. Note:
It’s important that the pork loin be wrapped in a thin layer of fat—this, too, increases the roast’s succulence.

One 2¾-to 3-pound boned and rolled pork loin (see Note above)

½ teaspoon black pepper

1 cup apple juice (I use an organic Gravenstein juice that has deep apple flavor)

¼ cup bourbon

2 tablespoons spicy brown mustard

1¾ cups chicken broth

½ cup half-and-half

5 tablespoons all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon salt, or to taste

• 1.
  Preheat the oven to 425° F. Rub the pork well with the pepper and place in a medium-size shallow roasting pan.
  
• 2.
  Whisk the apple juice, bourbon, and mustard until smooth, then brush generously all over the pork roast. Let stand at room temperature for 30 minutes.
  
• 3.
  Brush the pork again with the bourbon mixture and roast uncovered on the middle oven rack for about 45 minutes or until an instant-read meat thermometer, thrust into the center, registers 145° to 150° F. As the pork roasts, baste generously every 10 minutes with the bourbon mixture (this keeps the drippings from charring on the pan bottom). Transfer the finished roast to a heated platter and let stand while you prepare the gravy.
  
• 4.
  Pour the remaining bourbon mixture (you should have ½ to
  ²
  /
  ₃
  cup) into the roasting pan, set over moderate heat, and deglaze the pan by scraping up the browned bits.
  
• 5.
  Pour the deglazing liquid into a small saucepan and boil uncovered over high heat for about 2 minutes, stirring often, until as thick and dark as molasses. Stir in 1¼ cups of the chicken broth and the half-and-half. Quickly blend the remaining ½ cup of broth with the flour and salt, add to the pan, and cook, stirring constantly, for 3 to 5 minutes or until the gravy thickens and no raw floury taste lingers.
  
• 6.
  To serve, slice the pork about ½ inch thick and top each portion with plenty of gravy. Accompany with boiled rice or mashed potatoes and smother these with gravy, too.
  

SPICY GRILLED PORK TENDERLOIN

MAKES
4
TO
6
SERVINGS

I hesitate to call this “barbecue” although some people might. It’s unlike any barbecue I’ve eaten; still it’s a popular way to prepare pork tenderloin down south. Note:
If you have no gas or charcoal grill, roast the tenderloins in the oven following the directions below.

2 large whole garlic cloves

4 large scallions, trimmed and chunked (white part only)

¾ cup pineapple juice

½ cup cider vinegar

One 8-ounce can tomato sauce

2 tablespoons tomato ketchup

2 tablespoons molasses (not too dark)

2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

1 tablespoon packed light brown sugar

1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

½ to 1 teaspoon hot red pepper sauce (depending on how “hot” you like things)

Two 1-pound pork tenderloins

2 tablespoons cold butter, diced

• 1.
  Whiz the garlic, scallions, pineapple juice, and vinegar in an electric blender at high speed until smooth. Pour into a jumbo-size plastic zipper bag, add all remaining ingredients except the pork and butter, seal, and shake well to combine.
  
• 2.
  Add the pork tenderloins to the bag and reseal. Refrigerate overnight, turning the bag from time to time so the pork marinates evenly.
  
• 3.
  When ready to proceed, pour
  ¹
  /
  ₃
  cup of the marinade into a measuring cup and reserve. Pour the balance into a heavy, nonreactive saucepan and set aside. Preheat the grill to moderate heat (375° F.).
  Note:
  If you have no grill, preheat the oven to 400° F.
  
• 4.
  Grill the tenderloins with the lid up, turning and brushing now and then with the reserved
  ¹
  /
  ₃
  cup marinade, for 25 to 30 minutes or until an instant-read thermometer, thrust into the center of a tenderloin, reads 150° F.
  Note:
  If you have no grill, roast the tenderloins on a rack in a shallow roasting pan on the middle oven shelf for about 35 minutes or to an internal temperature of 150° F., turning and brushing or basting occasionally.
  
• 5.
  Meanwhile, bring the pan of marinade to a boil over moderately high heat, reduce the heat to its lowest point, set the lid on the pan askew, and keep the sauce warm while the tenderloins grill.
  
• 6.
  Transfer the tenderloins to a carving board, tent with foil, and let stand for 5 minutes. Add any leftover basting marinade to that in the saucepan and simmer uncovered while the tenderloins rest. Just before serving, add the diced butter to the hot marinade bit by bit and whisk until smooth.
  
• 7.
  To serve, slice the tenderloins ½ inch thick, slightly on the bias. Fan out on heated dinner plates and top each portion with some of the hot marinade.