The Southerner's Handbook

Editors of Garden and Gun

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780062242426
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culinary Arts

Whether you live below the Mason Dixon Line or just wish you did, The Southerner's Handbook is your guide to living the good life. Curated by the editors of the award-winning Garden & Gun magazine, this compilation of more than 100 instructional and narrative essays offers a comprehensive tutorial to modern-day life in the South.

From Food and Drink to Sporting & Adventure; Home & Garden to Style, Arts & Culture, you'll discover essential skills and unique insight from some of the South's finest writers, chefs, and craftsmen—including the secretto perfect biscuits, how to wear seersucker, and to the right way to fall off of a horse.

You'll also find: Roy Blount Jr. on telling a great story; Julia Reed on the secrets of throwing a great party; Jonathan Miles on drinking like a Southerner; Jack Hitt on the beauty of cooking a whole hog; John T Edge on why Southern food matters; and much more.

As flavorful, authentic, and irresistible as the land and the people who inspire it, The Southerner's Handbook is the ultimate guide to being a Southerner (no matter where you live).

Part One

FOOD

WHY SOUTHERN FOOD MATTERS (SO MUCH)

BY JOHN T. EDGE

THE REST OF THE COUNTRY HAS LONG WANTED WHAT SOUTHERNERS HAVE. THEY COVET OUR STONE-GROUND GRITS AND SKILLET-FRIED OKRA. THEY THIRST FOR OUR WHISKEY. THEY WANT OUR HAM, A CHEF FRIEND ONCE TOLD ME, AS WE LEANED AGAINST HIS TRUCK, SWIGGING A BOTTLE OF BOURBON. AND THEY WANT OUR HISTORY.

America wants a lot out of Southern food and drink. When Americans go for a snootful, they reach for Kentucky bourbon. When they seek diversion and abandon, they travel to New Orleans, our papal city of gastronomy, where brackish gumbos bob with crab and sausage and Sazeracs brim with rye and bitters.

A supper of braised pork neck bones and pepper-vinegar-spiked collard greens, served in a cinder-block diner on Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue, offers soul-food passage to urban black life. In an age when molecular cuisine is in the vanguard, North Carolina whole-hog barbecue, pulled from a carcass in vinegar-gilded ropes, offers a primal answer to pilgrims in search of honesty and authenticity.

As the nation urbanizes, as strip malls, cul-de-sacs, and other nowheres spread, the South appears the region where farm-to-table eating is a way of life, not a marketing concept, and food carries the weight of history. At a time when multinationals build pseudo crab shacks and barbecue joints in Walmart parking lots, the South seems a culinary redoubt, where honest cooks stand tall in back-alley kitchens, spearing drumsticks from lard-roiled cast-iron cauldrons. In the midst of an ongoing American nostalgia movement, the South promises the past, preserved in amber, ready to be consumed in the present.

From the 1880s, when Atlanta newspaperman Henry Grady sold the North on a New South, to the 2010s, when every chef and writer in New York City seems to take a summer road trip to New Orleans in search of the secret to the fried chicken at Willie Mae’s Scotch House, Southern foods and Southern cooks have captured the attention of outlanders—and insiders like me.

Born in Georgia, in the home of a Confederate brigadier general, I began grade school during the last days of the civil rights movement, as Martin Luther King, Jr., refocused his efforts on feeding our less fortunate brothers and sisters. I now live and work in Mississippi, the state that birthed novelist William Faulkner. My son plays in the pasture where Faulkner gamboled as a boy, and my wife cooks weekday dinners of salmon croquettes, following the recipe on the back of the can, just as the Nobel laureate did.

I love my region. Deeply. I’m proud of what our people have wrought, despite and because of our peculiar history. I balance that love, however, with questions. About who we are and how we got here. About who cooks, who cleans, and who gets to take a seat at the welcome table.

To glean answers to those questions, I’ve sipped iced tea with former Klansmen and present-day civil rights leaders. I’ve eaten cheeseburgers and fried okra with an Elvis impersonator. I’ve talked harvest techniques with a black man who converted his farmland from pesticide-dependent tobacco to organic heirloom collards. I’ve talked animal husbandry with a white man who tried to convince the rest of the region that possum was the next other white meat.

During those conversations, I learned that food offers entrée to talk of big-picture issues. Like race and class, gender and justice. Through the years, when I tried to tackle those matters head-on, I often lost an audience. But at tables piled high with country ham, buttermilk biscuits, and redeye gravy, I’ve marveled as all have leaned in close to eat, to talk, to listen. I’ve come to believe that time at table offers our best chance for all—for black and white, rich and poor—to acknowledge our past and celebrate our future in a spirit of reconciliation.

In a region bound by a tragic past, we Southerners find common purpose in shared creations. Like music. Like art. Like food. In a region where our relationships to various symbols have long been problematic, our beloved provincial dishes—from pulled-pork barbecue to fried chicken drizzled with honey, from hoppin’ John capped with chowchow to blue-crab gumbo thickened with dried sassafras—serve as unifying totems of people and place.

Our relationship to food is complicated here. Agriculture is one of the reasons people left the region during the Great Migration of the early and mid-twentieth century. For many poor whites and blacks of previous generations, farm life meant toil, poverty, and penury. Now our agricultural legacies and the strength of our honest farm-to-table bonds are drawing people back to the region.

The South was once the nation’s number-one economic problem. Families went without food. Babies from Appalachia and the Delta, with distended bellies and listless eyes, were television poster children for the Great Society poverty initiatives of the 1960s. Now the South is the nation’s number-one obesity problem. And many families, raised on a diet of double-crust freezer-case pizzas, take in too much of the wrong kind of food.

Our attitudes about Southern foodways are not static. Like all expressions of culture, they evolve.

Insiders and outsiders alike long dismissed Southern food as grits, greens, and grease. “Southern cooking has been perverted by slatterns with a greasy skillet,” wrote Atlantan Ralph McGill back in the 1940s. Singer Bette Midler once told a Charleston, South Carolina, audience in the 1980s that grits tasted like “buttered kitty litter.” And both were, to a certain degree, right.

Southern cookery went off the tracks for a while. We bought into the faster-cheaper-better industrial-food mantra. We ditched lard-frizzled wedges of cornbread in favor of slices of bagged white bread with the texture of a wasp nest. We quit putting up our own summer peaches and began buying canned freestones from the West Coast.

But a correction is afoot. A slow and steady return to the old ways and the old truths, filtered through new imperatives. Over the past several decades, writers like Virginia’s Edna Lewis and Tennessee’s John Egerton, along with chefs like Alabama’s Frank Stitt and North Carolina’s Ben Barker, have shaped a New Southern Cuisine, reliant on local farmers and artisans, dependent on traditional methods and practices, reflective of all contributors to the canon, especially the peoples of African descent who previously got short shrift.

Southern food has emerged as our pan-national cuisine. Hipsters from Brooklyn now descend on our mountain precincts in search of chocolate gravy, an Appalachian dish now falling out of favor in Kentucky, where it was once a Saturday-morning standard. Hippies from Berkeley now go questing for the last fish muddle in eastern North Carolina, hoping against hope to meet the old codger who still cooks his onions down in rendered salt pork. Emboldened by the views of outlanders, Southerners have begun to see the value in their own cookery, to comprehend that polenta is just grits with a mellifluous Italian accent.

After a long fallow period, the South is reclaiming its culinary heritage, paying down debts of pleasure that have accrued over generations. We now celebrate the pit masters who have long stoked our fires and flipped our hogs. We now honor the farmers who began saving our seeds long before we began referring to certain vegetables as heirlooms.

Southern food, as we know it today, is the potlikker and pone of enslaved Africans and their progeny. It’s the ham-shawled guinea hen of plantation gentry and their country-club dynasts. It’s the cracker-topped and canned-soup-thickened casserole served by working-class cooks and their sires. It’s the okra-threaded gumbo, once stirred in back-of-town cottages by Creoles of color, now served by white-toqued chefs in tony restaurants.

The state of the Southern Food Nation is good. Our cookery is vital and progressive. Our best meals, our most rewarding times at table, lie ahead.

CAST-IRON CARE

ACROSS THE SOUTH, one piece of cookware reigns supreme: the almighty cast-iron skillet, so good at conducting and distributing heat that you can bake, braise, sear, fry, stew, or roast in it with equal success. Walk into any Southern kitchen, and you’ll often find one front and center on the stove. But if you’re new to cast iron, don’t overlook one essential step: Before you get cooking, you’ve got to season it.

Seasoning a skillet has nothing to do with spices. Because the surface of a new cast-iron skillet is porous, fat has to be baked into those crevices, filling them up to make a smooth cooking surface—a natural version of the modern “nonstick” pan. Most instructions these days recommend seasoning a new skillet with vegetable oil, which can leave a gummy film. Purists prefer a more traditional method. “The only tried-and-true way to season a cast-iron skillet is with lard,” says Southern-food historian John Martin Taylor, author of Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking and The New Southern Cook.

With its gorgeous shiny-black patina, a properly seasoned cast-iron skillet is durable enough to last several lifetimes. Taylor owns skillets handed down from his mother and grandmothers. “Both of my grandmothers, from either end of Tennessee—McNairy County on the Tennessee River and Sevier County in Appalachia—cooked every day in cast iron,” he says. “Mind you, these women could not have been more different. The South is a big place, and there are hundreds of miles and hundreds of years of diverging histories between folks in the Mississippi Delta and those in the Smokies. Tennessee is long, but cast iron is one common denominator.”

SKILLET SEASONING

1. WASH a new skillet with warm soapy water once to remove the thin coating of wax applied at the factory. That’s the last time you should ever wash it with soap.

2. HAVE the butcher grind enough fresh pork fat to nearly fill the skillet. Place a thin layer of water (about ⅛ inch) in the bottom, and then add the fat. Put the skillet in the oven set to 225 degrees or on top of the stove over very low heat.

3. MELT the fat slowly; it can take an hour or more. When the solid matter (called cracklings) turns brown and sinks to the bottom, strain the fat into a glass jar with a tight-fitting lid and wipe out the skillet. After the fat has cooled, cover it and store in the refrigerator. You now have rendered lard for biscuits and piecrusts—and a seasoned skillet.

4. AFTER each use, rub the inside of the skillet with bacon grease and...