March 7 — Share a favorite recipe from your mother or grandmother’s kitchen. Why is this dish your favorite? If you don’t have one that’s been passed down, describe a favorite holiday or other meal you shared with your family.
You may have noticed that I'm not following Lisa Alzo's Fearless Females Blogging Prompts exactly. I feel more inspired by looking at the options and picking one that appeals to me. For this blog, I'm going back to an earlier suggestion.
The women in my family are good cooks, at least all of the ones I've known personally and at whose table I've been fortunate to sit. When I began to think about the recipes I could include here, it occurred to me that none of the food I remember so well from my childhood have what most think of as a traditional recipe...words written down on a piece of paper or a note card. They were passed on as the younger generation stood at the elbow of the ones that came before them and watched.
My mama's food was the first Southern cooking I can remember. She made white meal corn bread for supper almost every day with coarse ground corn meal and buttermilk. During the summer, she canned (later froze) vegetable soup using what was ripe and picked from our garden that day. Mixing and matching as the different crops ripened on their own schedules, no two batches were likely to be exactly the same in a season. The recipe started with a tomato base with corn, okra, black-eyed and purple hull peas, butter beans, green beans, cabbage, potatoes and any other odd vegetables thrown in as they were ready. During the canning years, everything was stirred together in large pans to heat and blanch, then poured into hot jars before going into the pressure canner. I remember distinctly the whistle of the pressure valve as it jiggled atop the canner, releasing steam so that we didn't all die in an explosion; a common childhood fear at the time.
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| Cornbread with beans |
My maternal grandma Gladys will always be associated in my mind with crackling cornbread. In the years when I was a young child, the family would "butcher a hog" in the fall that had been fattened up over the spring and summer for this purpose. I vaguely remember my mama going over to help but don't recall being there myself. Cracklings are made from pork fat back or skin with the hair scraped off that has been thoroughly cooked to render the lard. Usually the pork was put in a black pot resembling a Halloween cauldron and cooked over an open fire outside. When the lard is strained the bits that remain are the cracklings. I didn't care much for the skin, but the smaller pieces that my grandma stirred into her cornbread and served along with a pork tenderloin roast were pretty tasty.
My aunt, Myrtle Uptain Kilgore, sister of my paternal grandmother Delia Uptain Brewer, made "cat head" biscuits. At least, that's what I remember my daddy calling them. My siblings and I would sometimes spend a week or so with Aunt Myrt in the summers when we were out of school. Being something of a "lie-abed," I never actually saw her make them. They would simply be waiting for me when I finally got up, sitting on a plate next to a jar of Golden Eagle Syrup. If there wasn't syrup, there would be a mound of sugar with a pat of butter she had churned on the plate next to the biscuit, or maybe canned peaches. I've thought about Aunt Myrt's biscuits over the years. I think she must have made the dough but instead of rolling it out and using a round cutter, she pinched off pieces of dough and rolled it between her hands to form the biscuits. Maybe she put them in a round cake pan or a cast iron skillet, all touching, because they were more trapezoid shaped than round like we see today when they came out of the oven.
I don't cook today like my ancestors did, though I still love cornbread (I haven't had cracklings in decades) and homemade vegetable soup. What I wouldn't give for a cat head biscuit!
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