Identifying People by Food

          As Marcel Proust so famously demonstrated, we can revisit entire eras of our lives by eating or merely smelling particular foods. For instance, for decades all the biscuits I have ever eaten

Making Bertha's biscuits

have in their imperfection reminded me of my grandmother. No one could make biscuits like hers—light, crusty, piping hot, and butter-flaky, like the Kentucky version of fine French croissants. Good with butter and jam, they surpassed even that perfection when coupled with my grandmother's second specialty, redeye gravy, made, for those of you not familiar with country vernacular, from the baking juices of home-cured ham.

          Though my mother preferred painting to cooking, she had a few kitchen specialties. She always had a pot of beef stew, made because she knew I liked it, sitting on the stove whenever I came home from college. As I walked through the kitchen with my suitcase, I would lift the lid of the pot to breathe in the rich, tomato-beef smell that evoked eighteen years of a happy childhood and good parenting. My mother could also make a good peach cobbler

Coogle peach cobbler

and a good pineapple upside-down cake, and even if she was thinking about that tin box she had been painting, sitting unfinished on the sunporch table, she still spent time in the kitchen whipping up a batch of chocolate chip cookies with her children. Whenever I make a peach cobbler or chocolate chip cookies, I feel my mother in every beat of the spoon.

          Though it was my mother who made spoonbread, it's my father's image that arises when I pull a dish of steaming hot, beautifully puffed, ready-for-butter spoonbread from the oven. Dad is sitting in his usual place at the round dinner table, his large family in their usual places around him. Mom has already served the spoonbread, but he has reached for the empty dish and is scraping it to pull up the thin, hard, browned layer that sticks to the buttered sides of the dish. He is proclaiming to doubting children, "This is the best part." I don't really believe him. Spoonbread crust is too much like the hard crust of toast, skin on hot chocolate, and other undesirable extras on good things;. Now that I am older, I know he was right.

Recipes from this post
          Bertha's biscuits
          Diana's favorite beef stew
          The Coogle cobbler, with peaches
          Mom's pineapple upside-down cake
          Southern spoonbread
Next week: Identifying People by Food, cont.


BERTHA'S BISCUITS

yield: 12

Ingredients
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon sugar
2 teaspoons baking pwder
1/2 teaspoon salt
10 tablespoons (1 1/4 sticks) butter
2/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon buttermilk
Preparation
Cut the butter into small pieces. Have both the butter and the buttermilk very cold. Flour a working surface and a rolling pin. Preheat the oven to 375º.
To make
Sift the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt into a large bowl. Add the butter and rub it in with your fingertips until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. Gradually add the buttermilk, tossing the mixture with a fork, until large, moist clumps form. At that point, gather the dough into a ball and put it on the floured surface. Roll it out quickly and lightly into a 1/2-inch thick round. With a biscuit cutter, cut the dough into small rounds. Transfer the rounds to an uncreased baking sheet, leaving plenty of room between them. Gather the leftover dough, knead it just to make it adhere, then cut more biscuits out of it. Simply shape the last of the dough into a rough biscuit, which will look unseemly but still be good to eat. Bake the biscuits till done, about 15 minutes. A tester stuck into the center of a biscuit should come out dry, even though the biscuits will still be pale. Eat at once.




DIANA'S FAVORITE BEEF STEW

This isn't my mother's recipe. I have no idea what she put in her stew. This is my own version, and the one I like best.

Ingredients
1 pound good quality stew beef
1 large onion
1/2 pound mushrooms
2-3 cloves garlic
Eggplant
Green beans
Corn (frozen, or scraped off the cob in season)
One large can whole tomatoes, fire-roasted
One box beef broth (or chicken)
Two tablespoons (or more) tomato paste
Basil
Oregano
Marjoram
Bay leaf
Salt and pepper

Preparation
Slice or chop the onion. Chop the garlic. Slice mushrooms. Chop green beans in large pieces. Scrape the corn off the cob. Cut eggplant into 1/2-inch chunks.
To make
Brown the beef in a large pot. turning till brown on all sides. Remove from pan with slotted spoon.
Sauté onion in grease left in pot from the beef. Add garlic and cook until aromatic. Add mushrooms; sauté till done. Then return beef to pan along with tomatoes, broth, and herbs. Cook slowly for 1 hour. Add eggplant, green beans, corn, and tomato paste, and cook till vgeetables are just tender, about 30 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste.



THE COOGLE COBBLER, WITH PEACHES

serves 6-8
This is a wonderful winter recipe using home-canned peaches from the summer before. I amended the family cobbler recipe to use honey instead of sugar back in the days when I wasn't eating refined sugar, until the day a chemist friend told me that when it came to what the body did with sugar and with honey, there was no difference. From that time on, I cooked with sugar again. The original recipe, using sugar is given below the honey version. The honey version is a little gooier than the other.

The honey cobbler
Ingredients
1 stick butter
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 cup honey
1/2 cup milk
1 can peaches, preferably home canned (or 5 or 6 fresh peaches)
Preparation
Preheat the oven to 400º. Peel and pit fresh peaches, if using. Open the jar, if using home-canned.
To make
Put the butter in a 9x13-inch pan and let it melt in the oven while the oven is preheating. In the meantime, mix together the flour and baking powder, and, in another bowl, the milk and honey. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and beat smooth. Pour this batter over the melted butter in the pan. Place the peaches over the batter. (A little juice is good, too.) Bake at 400º for 30 minutes.

The sugar cobbler

Ingredients
1 stick butter
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup milk
1 can peaches, preferably home canned (or 5-6 fresh peaches)
To make
Mix the sugar with the other dry ingredients. Stir in the milk. Include the juice from the canned peaches when you pour the peaches over the batter. Otherwise, the directions are the same as above.

MOM'S PINEAPPLE UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE
serves 6

Ingredients
1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/3 cup butter, mileted
2/3 cup milk
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 fresh pineapple or 1 can sliced pineapple
Preparation
Preheat oven to 350º. Melt butter. Cut rind and eyes off pineapple and slice. Or open the can of pineapple slices. (That's the way Mom did it.) Grease a 9" square pan.
To make
Combine flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder in medium bowl. Beat butter, milk, and egg together and add to dry ingredients. Beat to blend. Stir in vanilla. Drain half the juice from the can of sliced pineapple, if using. Place pineapple rounds, with remaining juice, on bottom of prepared pan. Pour batter over pineapple. Bake 20 minutes or until done.



SOUTHERN SPOONBREAD

serves 6-8

Ingredients
1 cup white cornmeal (or fine-grained yellow)
3 cups milk
1 teaspoon butter
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3 eggs
Preparation
Separate the egg yolks from the whites. Beat the yolks till thick and the whites till stiff. Grease a deep baking dish. Preheat the oven to 350º.
To make
Scald 2 cups of milk. Mix together the rest of the milk and the cornmeal. Gradually add the cornmeal mixture to the hot milk and cook 5 minutes over medium heat, stirring constantly. Cool slightly and add the butter, sugar, and salt, and mix. Add the beaten egg yolks, then fold in the stiff whites. Pour the batter into the deep dish and bake at 350º about 45 minutes. Serve hot from the baking dish with plenty of butter.