The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star (29 page)

Recipes

Any Southerner will tell you that the miracle of the loaves and fishes was the only church supper in history that didn’t include fried chicken.

—RICK MCDANIEL,
AN IRRESISTIBLE HISTORY OF SOUTHERN FOOD

The foods and recipes featured in this book illustrate the range of foods—traditional dishes and dishes that use more modern ingredients—that appeared on Southern tables during the early 1930s. You will notice (or perhaps you will remember) that cooks of the era used plenty of animal fat (pork was cheap and plentiful, so the fat was usually bacon grease or lard), sugar, and salt. I haven’t made any effort to substitute, but you can experiment with your own low-fat, low-sugar, low-salt substitutes. Or maybe you’ll just want to read the recipes and reflect on the way we cooked and ate before we became health-conscious. Recipes for other foods mentioned in this series may be found at www.darlingdahlias.com.

Aunt Hetty Little’s Pecan Jumbles

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “jumbles” goes back to the word “gimbal,” a doubled or twisted ring—a kind of double pretzel. The first published occurrence of it is in a recipe flavored with aniseed, published in
The English Housewife,
by Gervase Markham in 1615. An 1857 version includes cinnamon, nutmeg, and caraway seeds. By the late 1800s, cooks stopped going to the trouble of rolling the dough and pretzeling it, but the name stuck. This version uses evaporated milk, which was widely promoted in the 1920s and 30s as better-than-breast milk for baby. It appears in many recipes from t
he era.

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cup soft shortening

1 cup brown sugar

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cup white sugar

2 eggs

1 cup undiluted evaporated milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

2
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cup flour

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teaspoon soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup chopped pecans

Mix shortening, sugars, and eggs until blended and creamy. Mix milk and vanilla, and gradually stir into shortening-sugar-egg mixture. Stir in flour, soda, salt, and nuts. Drop by teaspoon on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake until set and browned.

Raylene Riggs’ Sweet Potato Meringue Pie

Meringue pies—the meringue piled high and deep, swooped and sculpted and topped with tiny brown curls—are the dessert stars of the Southern dinner table. This one features sweet potatoes (
Ipomoea batatas
), an important staple, grown in every Southern garden and making an appearance in everything from soup to dessert. The pie can be made with or without coconut, which was available in the 1930s both in canned and packaged form.

2 cups cooked, mashed sweet potatoes

3 egg yolks, well-beaten

3 tablespoons melted butter

¹
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cup sugar

1 teaspoon salt

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teaspoon ground nutmeg

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teaspoon vanilla extract

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cup shredded coconut, toasted

1 cup evaporated milk

1 unbaked 9-inch pie shell

Preheat oven to 325°F. Mix together the mashed sweet potatoes and egg yolks. Add the butter, sugar, salt, nutmeg, vanilla, coconut, and milk. Pour mixture into pie shell and bake at 325°F about 35 to 40 minutes, until the filling is set.

Meringue

3 egg whites

6 tablespoons sugar

Beat egg whites until soft peaks form. Add sugar, a tablespoon at a time, and beat until stiff peaks form. Spread meringue on hot filling, sealing to edges. Return pie to oven and bake an additional 12 to 15 minutes or until golden brown.

Grits and Sausage Casserole

Grits (also called hominy) was likely introduced to the colonists at Jamestown around 1607 by the Algonquin Indians, who called it rockahominy, meaning hulled corn—hence hominy. The word
grits
comes from the Old English grytt (bran) or greot (ground) and is usually treated as a singular noun. The colonists made it by soaking corn in lye made from wood ash until the hulls floated off, then pounding and drying it. Stone-ground grits is usually preferred to instant or quick-cook grits because the germ is still intact, but it has a shorter shelf life and is best used quickly after it is ground.

3 cups water

1 cup uncooked grits

3 tablespoons butter

1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese

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pound ground pork sausage

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cup chopped green onion tops

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cup chopped red pepper

6 eggs

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cup milk

salt and pepper to taste

2 tablespoons butter

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cup shredded Cheddar cheese

Preheat oven to 350°F. In a large saucepan, bring the water to a boil. Stir in grits. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer about 5 minutes, until liquid has been absorbed. Add butter and cheese, stirring until melted. Set aside.

In a skillet over medium-high heat, cook the sausage, onions, and pepper until the sausage is browned. Drain off all but two tablespoons of the fat. Stir the sausage mixture into the grits. Set aside.

In a bowl, beat together the eggs and milk and pour into the skillet. Lightly scramble, then mix into the grits. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Pour the grits mixture into a prepared baking dish. Dot with butter and top with cheese. Bake 30 minutes in the preheated oven, until lightly browned. Serves 6.

Slow-Cooked Pulled Pork with White Sauce

In the South, the meat of choice has always been pork and there isn’t much of the pig that hasn’t made its way onto the breakfast and dinner tables. Pigs were easy to keep and cheap to feed, and piglets born in spring were fair-sized porkers by the first freeze, when butchering usually occurred. The animal produced roasts, hams, bacon, chops, and ribs, as well as fatback, headcheese (from the head, feet, and ears), and liver—not to mention sausage from the leftover bits, lard from the fat, and chitterlings from the . . . well, intestines. Brains were fried with eggs, the tail was cooked with rice. Everything that wasn’t eaten fresh was dried, pickled, salt-cured, and/or smoked.

Pulled pork was usually made with fresh pork, cooked (barbequed or simmered) long and slowly enough so that it “pulls to pieces” and is easily shredded. It may be served over rice or noodles or in a bun, as a sandwich. In some regions, the meat is topped with a tomato-based sauce. In Alabama, the sauce most often used is a tangy mayonnaise-horseradish-vinegar sauce. This recipe uses a slow cooker.

2 pounds pork shoulder (also called pork butt, Boston butt, shoulder roast)

³
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cup apple cider vinegar

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cup water

3 tablespoons brown sugar

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon onion powder

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teaspoon dry mustard

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teaspoon ground red pepper

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teaspoon chili powder

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teaspoon garlic powder

Place the meat in a slow cooker. Mix the remaining ingredients in a nonreactive saucepan and bring to a boil. Pour over the pork, cover, and cook on low for 4 to 5 hours, or until the meat is tender. Remove and shred, pulling apart with two forks. Return to the slow cooker and keep warm until serving. To serve with rice or noodles, place pork in a serving dish and pour cooking liquid over it. Alternatively, serve with a dish of white sauce. To serve as a sandwich, pile meat on a lightly toasted bun, topped with white sauce (not too much—you don’t want to drown it).

White Sauce

¹
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cup mayonnaise

2 tablespoons white vinegar

1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

1–2 teaspoons grated horseradish

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teaspoon pepper

Dash salt

Combine ingredients. Refrigerate unused sauce.

Cheese Custard Pie, Served at
Mildred Kilgore’s Party

In 1931, Mrs. Irma von Starkloff Rombauer was newly widowed and in need of money. The celebrated St. Louis hostess struck on the idea of turning her personal recipes and cooking techniques into a book and self-published
The Joy of Cooking: A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat
. The rest, as they say, is history.

Rombauer’s recipe for Cheese Custard Pie (p. 60 in the 1931 edition) may be the first published recipe for a quiche to appear in an American cookbook. The recipe, she writes in a note, comes from a “vile-tempered cook named Marguerite” that the family employed in Switzerland. The Cheese Custard Pie was “always served in solitary state,” its flavors varying with “Marguerite’s moods and her supply of cheese.” This is Raylene Riggs’ heartier version, which will be more familiar to us.

1 deep-dish
pie crust

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pound ground pork sausage

¹
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cup chopped onion

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cup chopped red bell pepper

1
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cup grated sharp Cheddar cheese

1 tablespoon flour

3 eggs, beaten

1 cup evaporated milk

1 tablespoon minced parsley

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teaspoon salt

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teaspoon garlic

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teaspoon pepper

Paprika

Heat oven to 350ºF. Pre-bake the pie shell for about 10 to 12 minutes. Cool. Reduce oven to 325ºF. In a skillet, brown the sausage, breaking it up into small pieces. Drain, except for 1 tablespoon fat. In the same skillet, in the reserved fat, sauté onion and pepper. Drain. Combine cheese and flour. Stir in sausage, onion, and pepper. Spread on the bottom of the pre-baked crust. Combine remaining ingredients and pour over sausage mixture. Bake 45 minutes. Let cool about 10 minutes before slicing.

Resources

Here are a few of the many books I have found useful in my research for the Darling Dahlias series:

Around the Southern Table
,
by Sarah Belk. The recipes are modern; the book is valuable for its historical notes.

Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet Potato Pie
,
by Bill Neal. The Southern heritage of breads and sweets, with historical commentary.

Daily Life in the United States 1920–1940,
by David E. Kyvig. How Americans lived in the Roaring Twenties, the Depression era.

Dry Goods
,
Butler Brothers 1934 general merchandise catalog. What people were wearing and using during the early thirties.

Everyday Fashions of the Thirties, As Pictured in Sears Catalogs
, edited by Stella Blum. Helpful period descriptions of clothing styles, fabrics, materials.

The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes
,
by Lauren Kessler. Barnes was a barnstormer, racer, cross-country flier, Hollywood stunt pilot, and the “fastest woman on earth.” She was a model for Lily Dare.

Month-by-Month Gardening in Alabama
, by Bob Polomski. What Alabama gardeners might be doing at different seasons of the year.

On the Wing: Jessie Woods and the Flying Aces Air Circus
,
by Ann L. Cooper. The real-life account of a woman wingwalker and owner of a flying circus in the 1930s.