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Back to Family Memories Index Good Old Southern CookingDid you enjoy a traditional southern New Year's dinner at your house? You know, black-eyed peas and rice, collard greens and fatback? A good collard-cooking tip was passed along to me several years ago by a home economist with the SC Department of Agriculture. Simmer the collards in chicken broth instead of water and lay wide slices of green bell pepper across the top of the greens in the pot. If you don't like cooked bell pepper just toss it out later. As the collards cook, their normally pungent odor is decreased to the point of almost unnoticeable, and the chicken broth, bell pepper combo takes some of the strong taste out, too. Really, no joke. While preparing a pot of black-eyed peas for New Year’s, I let my mind wander back to my newly-wed days. I was determined to serve all the southern dishes my husband and I were used to, just as well as our mothers could do. After all, I had all the right pots and pans, cast-iron skillets, mixing bowls and kitchen utensils. My new spouse would surely be impressed with my culinary skills. There was just one little problem. I'd never bothered to learn how to cook much of anything. Mama and Mimi had demonstrated their own tried and true methods for fixing favorite meats, vegetables and desserts, but in the back of my mind I was usually saying to myself, I'll just look it all up in the cookbook. And I had the same cookbooks they used, after all, Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School Cookbook and one from Better Homes and Gardens. How hard could it be? My first home-cooked hot breakfast would be oh, so easy. All southern breakfasts feature grits, and grits being grain would surely cook like rice, I figured. Measure water and grits, add salt, bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and thirty minutes later, delicious grits. Nobody had stressed to me that “stir occasionally” wasn't optional. Scrambled eggs and bacon were on the breakfast menu too, of course. Eggs cook faster than bacon, I knew that, so you start with frying up the old fashioned bacon in the cast-iron skillet. Thicker and wider on one end than the other, one end of the uncooperative bacon got crispy while the other end stayed chewy. Who knew you needed to turn and flip and mash bacon slices as they fry? I think Fannie Farmer assumed us newlyweds had already learned a few things from our mothers… I sliced off the chewy ends, laid the crispy ends on a plate, then quickly beat up the eggs before the skillet cooled off. I soon found out that scrambled eggs don’t need a whole skillet-full of bacon drippings. Wondering what to do about the floating eggs, I turned to check on the grits. That's when the necessity of a good stir once in a while became clear. You could almost slice the lumps in those grits. Paper towels soaked up excess bacon grease from the bowl of scrambled eggs while I spent several frantic minutes mashing the dickens out of lumpy grits. The bacon was getting cold, the eggs were getting cold, and I was getting hot and frazzled. Surely I can do toast right, I told myself. Just drop the bread into the toaster and when it pops up, spread on the margarine. Cold margarine doesn’t spread too well, did you know that? And torn toast isn't pretty. The Maxwell House did percolate without a horrible disaster, just a few loose grounds in the bottom of our coffee cups. I was thoroughly grateful. By the time we sat down to breakfast, I realized that I should have paid more attention in mama’s kitchen growing up. Some things just aren’t included in Fannie Farmer's cookbook! |