Tag: Southern Food

Thunder and Lightning Salad

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn 9/11, Food, writing

Sara Bradley, who won the recent episode of  “Chopped” (a TV show competition on the food network) representing chefs from the south, served a Thunder and Lightning salad. This easy-to-make salad doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry, so I can’t show you a free-to-use photo. The judges liked it, and as they talked about it, I realized that it’s been years since I had it.

You can find recipes all over the Internet for it, most with variations from the original that, while fine for experimentation, aren’t the standard which includes several tomatoes, several cucumbers, one Bermuda onion, white vinegar (1/2 cup), and sugar (1/2 cup or a little less to taste).  I avoid recipes that include bell peppers since the pepper flavor permeates the whole shebang.  White wine, hot sauce, herbs, and Canola oil: forget it.

Traditionally, the vegetables are cut into large pieces. That is, the tomatoes are cut into wedges, and the cucumbers are peeled and cut into fat slices. The onions are sliced the way you would if you were putting them on a hamburger and cut in half. These are left large so people who don’t like raw onion can pick them out.

Mix up the vegetables and onion in a large bowl. Stir the vinegar and sugar together and then drizzle this over the salad and refrigerate overnight.

This salad goes well with minute steak, pork chops, and even barbecue–or whatever catches your fancy. I have no idea how Sara Bradley made this salad on “Chopped,” so I’ve tried to give you the most basic form. Some people swap Vidalia or other sweet onions for the Bermudas.

And, so sorry for the lack of a photo of the salad.

–Malcolm

Putting sugar in cornbread is like putting raisins in hamburgers

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Food

It just isn’t done.

Yes, the Internet is filled with arguments about cornbread with sugar and cornbread without sugar. I conducted an informal poll which showed that those who put sugar in cornbread represent the unwashed, uncultured, and wholly ignorant segment of society. In fact, they don’t even deserve to be considered part of society.

Some clowns add wheat flour to cornbread. This group is descended from a grandmother off in Peoria who got roaring drunk one morning and reached for the wrong flour sack.

Unfortunately, there are heretics everywhere. Shun them. A site called Genius Kitchen provides a recipe for Old Fashioned Southern Cornbread.  Pshaw. They list one teaspoon of sugar. Who are these people?

In my novel Eulalie and Washerwoman, Eulalie says that the people who buy homes in a new subdivision after the African Americans were run out will be the kind of people who put sugar in their cornbread. If you’re not from the South, maybe you didn’t know she was mocking the lah-tee-dah faux culture people who don’t know their butts from a hole in the ground.

You probably know that I’m a white male. What this means among other things is that these days, is that “my kind” is slandered by everybody. Being from the South adds another level of malice to that slander. So, you probably won’t believe me when I tell you that sugar in cornbread is not necessarily a “white thing.” I don’t know any Southern white people who put sugar in their cornbread unless they moved here from the North.

Cat Cora, an Iron Chef from the Food Network lists cornbread’s ingredients as 5 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus more for the pan, 3/4 cup all-purpose flour, 3/4 cup yellow cornmeal, 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, 1 cup buttermilk (shake before measuring), and 2 large eggs.  Okay, I’ll quibble about the kosher salt, but the main thing we don’t see here is SUGAR.

Most great Southern cooks–and that includes my wife–don’t need a recipe for cornbread any more than they need a recipe for real Southern biscuits. But Cat Cora’s is pretty darn close to what quality people make without a user’s manual when it comes to cornbread. I should mention that you need a cast-iron frying pan, but you can skip that if you don’t know what that is. Unfortunately, young people often need a recipe for cracklin’ bread, corn pone, johnny cakes, and hushpuppies because they weren’t brought up right when it came to kitchen skills.

(Note to my reader in England: When I say we eat hushpuppies with mullet [a tasty fish], we’re not eating baby dogs or Hush Puppies shoes.)

Here’s my advice if you want quality cornbread: The next time you’re served cornbread at a restaurant, see if it tastes sweet. If it does, shout out as loudly as you can: “Who’s the bastard who f_cked up my cornbread with sugar?”

If your parents or spouse serve you sweet cornbread, I suggest leaving our the words “bastard” and “f_cked up” while making the point that you refuse to eat that kind of swill in the future.

—Malcolm

 

 

 

 

 

 

Black-Eyed Peas and Good Luck

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Life2 Comments

When I was a kid, I hated black-eyed peas because the cooks at the high school cafeteria boiled them into a brown mush that was best used for various construction projects like mortaring bricks together. Or, low-grade library paste.

Does eating them bring good luck? The one year my mother fixed them the traditional Southern way (brown mush) something bad happened. It was so bad, I’ve blocked out what it was. I vowed to never again eat black-eyed peas that looked like mush.

Mother usually served them the way a Midwestern cook would serve regular peas. Those I liked. But nobody else in the Florida Panhandle cooked them that way. Unlike my parents, I liked a lot of traditional Southern foods: boiled peanuts, mullet, grits, rosin baked potatoes, collards, hush puppies, anything out of New Orleans, traditional Southern fried chicken, pan fry bread, sugar cane stalks to chew on, green beans cooked with bacon, plenty of gravy, catfish, and Apalachicola oysters.

Every new year, I see my Facebook friends showing pictures of their January 1 meals with heaping ladels of mushy black-eyed peas. Okay, so my parents came from the midwest and the northwest and didn’t boil peas into a road-tar like mess that could be used to resurface city streets.

No, I’m not totally Southern when it comes to black-eyed peas. Give me a sack of boiled peanuts any day.

—Malcolm

 

 

 

Are you eating collards, black-eyed peas and cornbread?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Georgia13 Comments

“Each ingredient has meaning and purpose. Black-eyed peas represent coins, collard greens represent dollar bills and cornbread represents gold. Eating each Southern staple on New Year’s Day is supposed to guarantee a prosperous year, ensuring wealth and luck. While, I do not believe in luck, I do believe in the power of tradition.”

– Amber Wilson in her blog For The Love of the South

Wikipedia Photo
Wikipedia Photo

As far as I know, I had black-eyed peas, collard greens and cornbread only once on January 1. Something bad happened in the days after that and while my parents and their friends discussed the fact that the meal wasn’t a magic charm in my case, I no longer remember what the bad thing was. Must have blocked it out.

Even though I like these things (the collards take a lot of vinegar to disguise the taste and the black-eyed peas have  to be fresh rather than baked into a brown mush like many people do), my wife doesn’t like any of them. Well, we both like cornbread and still have some left over from Christmas Day.

Why tempt fate by eating this combination again at New Year’s?

I like a lot of Southern food: boiled peanuts, mullet, fried catfish, hoppin’ John, pumpkin frybread, Vidalia onions and yellow squash, hush puppies, grits, and a ton of stuff from New Orleans. But collards never got into my top 100 things to eat. Neither did black-eyed peas, for that matter.

Maybe we’ll have steak on new year’s day along with a baked potato wrapped up in tin foil and some fake bacon bits ready to go. Of course, if you believe in the whole collards, black-eyed peas and cornbread spell, go ahead an eat it at your own discretion and maybe it will bring you luck for 2017. By the way, if you click on the link above for Amber’s blog, her recipe for this old Southern spell actually looks pretty good.

Happy new year!

—Malcolm