I don’t know a southern cook anywhere who doesn’t include spaghetti and tacos in their repertoire. I love good country southern food but I am glad we have learned that there is a bigger world out there to draw inspiration from. I don’t know what it does exactly but it’s a good trick to have in your culinary arsenal. If you fry a couple of pieces of bacon and render the fat to make a broth for the peas, they are better.Īnother trick I learned from my family was to put in a pinch of sugar along with the salt in the pot. An old lady I was not particularly fond of taught me a valuable trick in cooking peas and beans. Some people just throw in the bacon and boil it with the peas. We don’t use much bacon in the peas anyway. I am so glad that bacon has come back into fashion and we are no longer so afraid of death by cholesterol. I mentioned the smoky bacon as a seasoning for the peas. When I asked her why she said my aunt as a little girl disliked okra, so she would season the peas with it then remove it. When It was done, she would take the okra out and serve it on a separate plate, not mixing it into the peas. Would I cook the okra with the peas? I remember my grandmother would wait until the peas were almost done, then lay the okra on top to steam.
The next question is would I add in smoky bacon to season it? I would just slice them raw alongside the cornbread. I would probably not cook the tomatoes unless there were so many I could afford to make a tomato pie. I would try to find dishes that could be served with cornbread on the side. Right now, it’s summer in the deep south, so I would have to fix foods that featured garden produce like peas, tomatoes, corn and okra. If I had been on that show, I would have known what I would make. They were tasked with preparing foods with ingredients local to their area and dishes that were important to their ethnic backgrounds and families. The contestants were of varied ethnic backgrounds. They had cooks from every part of the US. Most of us are not only eating good food but learning to fix it. Maybe this is why there are so many cooking shows and channels on television. We can enjoy this creative endeavor at any time.
We don’t have to go anywhere to enjoy it. All the basic materials are available in supermarkets or the local grocery store.”Ĭooking is something we can do at home.
She said “Cooking is an art that has a great advantage over some of the fine arts we admire, for its basic tools are available to most of us. When I picked it up yesterday I was immediately struck anew by her words in the introduction. I found this cookbook as a former library discard. Of course, I have collected as many of her books as I can find on used book sites because they have been out of print for years.
It’s the kind of book that you can pick up, read a chapter and sigh with wellbeing. The essays are usually divided into seasons and months. She writes about country life and food is an integral part of that life. I discovered her through a friend in the 1970s. I picked up one in my collection yesterday by one of my favorite writers, Gladys Taber. I love to cook, I love to eat and I love to talk about food. Today we are going to talk about one of my favorite topics – food.
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