by Julia Reed
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For my parents, Judy and Clarke Reed
And in joyful memory of Anne Ross and Burrell McGee
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Eating
1. The Great Leveler
2. The Society Diet
3. Dining on the Nile
4. Lady in Spain
5. Kill That Taste!
6. My Dinners with Jason
7. Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah (and Pearl and Ernestine)
8. Purple Passion
9. Burger Heaven
10. Summer on a Plate
11. The Tyranny of Summer Produce
Drinking
12. Of Pimm’s and Paris
13. Gin!
14. Men and Martinis
15. The Importance of Holiday Cheer
16. One Two Punch
17. Champagne Charlotte
18. The Yucca Flats
19. American Spirit
20. The Morning After
… And Making Merry
21. A Happy Enchilada
22. Table Talk
23. Shellfish Chic
24. Weddings, Royal and Otherwise
25. A Pilgrim’s Progress
26. Visions of Sugarplums
27. Green Day
28. Catching Summer
Index
Also by Julia Reed
About the Author
Copyright
Acknowledgments
This book’s title comes from a story involving Elizabeth McGee Cordes and her mother, Anne Ross McGee. I’ve spent my entire life celebrating birthdays and Christmases and countless other occasions with Elizabeth and her sister Anne. We grew up in each other’s houses and when I first began spending time in New Orleans more than twenty years ago, I spent more restorative hours at Elizabeth’s kitchen table than in any local restaurant. I am endlessly grateful for my relationship with Elizabeth and Anne and Elizabeth’s daughters Katie and Lizzy, as well as with the entire extended McGee clan. They have all enriched my life immeasurably.
The list of cooks and food writers, hosts and hostesses to whom I owe a great debt is far too long to mention here, but I must single out a few. Lottie Martin, Ernestine Turner, and Martha Wilhoite nurtured me in spirit and in body and taught me everything I know about the connection between cooking and caring and love. For his friendship and generosity and unparalleled way around a stove, I thank Donald Link. The life-enhancing staff at each of his restaurants also contributes mightily to my well-being.
Jon Meacham asked me to write the column in Newsweek where many of these essays were born and provides invaluable counsel on almost every matter—except for food and drink. He leaves those subjects to his wife, Keith, and me, whom he has dubbed (not without a tiny bit of derision) the “Crabmeat Caucus.” Keith is an uncommonly loyal friend, staunch running buddy, and tireless cohostess, and I can’t imagine anyone with whom I’d rather caucus.
Thanks to Elizabeth Nichols, Mary Catherine McClellan, and Mark McDonald, who asked me to be a part of Taigan.com, where some of these essays and recipes appeared in slightly different form on Fetch. I am also grateful to the great Joni Evans and my colleagues on wowowow.com, where I tried out more of what you see on these pages.
For kindnesses large and small, as well as many memorable meals and shindigs, thanks to Mary Thomas Joseph, Robert Harling, Howard Brent, Eden Brent, Taylor Haxton, Suzanne and Fred Rheinstein, Byron and Cameron Seward, Amanda and Carl Cottingham, Robert Jenkins, Mary Sferruzza, Richard and Lisa Howorth, Jason Epstein, Liz Smith, Joe Armstrong, Ben and Libby Page, Jeremiah Tower, James Villas, Annette Tapert and Joe Allen, Peter Patout, Peter Rogers, Joyce and Rod Wilson, Joe and Candy Ledbetter, Debra and Jerry Shriver, Ti Martin, Lally Brennan, Juan Luis and Jenny Hernandez, John Alexander, Bill Dunlap and Linda Burgess, Maggie Dunlap, Jay McInerney, Amanda Hesser, John Harris, Beth Biundo, Cathy and Gary Smith, Charles Modica, Florence Signa, Patrick Dunne, and Ken Smith.
This is my second book for Michael Flamini at St. Martin’s, whom I first met when he asked me to write the foreword to The New York Times Chicken Cookbook. From that first conversation I realized we were food-obsessed kindred spirits. Not only has he been my great champion, he has been a great friend and intrepid dining companion. I want to thank Amanda Urban for her friendship, her invariably wise counsel, and her seemingly bottomless patience with me. Thanks as well to the inimitable and joyous Bebe Howorth, who served as my assistant and so much more.
Jessica Brent has not only served as cohostess of some wildly memorable parties with me and for me, she has been the best lifelong copilot anyone could hope for. My husband, John Pearce, supported me in this endeavor and so very much more and will forever be my favorite cohost. This book is dedicated to my parents, Judy and Clarke Reed, whose humor, warmth, and generosity of spirit (and otherwise) are impossible to exaggerate. I am so grateful that the party on Bayou Road is still going.
Introduction
Several years ago, I came back from a trip to Spain with a suitcase full of contraband jamón ibérico and a head full of at least half a dozen recipes I wanted to try. When I called to invite my friend Elizabeth McGee Cordes to the Spanish dinner party I’d decided to throw, she immediately volunteered to make the sangria. Now, I have never been a big sangria drinker or maker, so when she arrived on the designated evening with two pitchers in hand, I put them on the bar in the courtyard of the French Quarter house where I was then living, brought out a few plates of hors d’oeuvres, and went back in the kitchen to finish cooking. I swear I wasn’t inside for more than twenty minutes, but when I emerged I found most of the guests in varying degrees of disarray—talking way too loudly, touching each other far too affectionately, carrying on in ways not usually brought on by a glass or two of red wine punch. “What in the world did you put in the sangria?” I asked a still-standing Elizabeth. “Vodka,” she replied brightly, as though it were a perfectly normal—indeed, standard—addition. I knew people added a bit of Grand Marnier or Triple Sec to sangria, and sometimes brandy, too, but I had never heard of anyone pouring in an entire fifth of vodka as turned out to be the case in this instance. My jaw dropped. “Vodka??” Yes, she said, as though it were a ridiculous question. “Mama always put vodka in her sangria.”
The mama in this story is Anne Ross Gee McGee, otherwise known as “Bossy,” and who, alas, is no longer with us. In addition to being the mother of Elizabeth and her sister, Anne—to whom I refer in life and on these pages as “McGee”—Anne Ross was my mother’s closest friend and my own chief protector and confidant, taking a far more circumspect view of my adolescent shenanigans than either of my parents. Bossy had been well schooled in all points of social etiquette by her mother, “Little Anne,” but she herself was larger than life— a smart, seductive, and funny, funny woman, three parts Mame and one part Maggie the Cat. So it was that when Elizabeth explained about the vodka, I fell over laughing and told her it ought to be the title of her autobiography.
Instead, it’s the title of this book, indicative of both our mothers’
extraordinarily generous approaches not just to entertaining but to life its own self and a tribute to the expansive way in which we were lucky enough to have been brought up. And while it’s a funny line, there are countless more just like it: But Mama said it was fine to turn the attic into a grocery store; Mama said it was okay to stage The Tonight Show in the living room; of course Mama said we could sell beer at our lemonade stand (to be fair, they didn’t know what exactly we were selling until after the fact). They took us with them to movies like Reflections in a Golden Eye that we were far too young to see, and never once picked us up from school on time because they were always, um, busy. When Steve McQueen was filming The Reivers in Anne Ross’s hometown of Carrollton, Mississippi, they drove over, determined to meet him. After bribing a guard with a case of beer, they crept onto the set—a cattle pasture—“disguised” by the tree branches they held in front of them. When the unsettled cows began mooing, shooting was stopped and the scene ruined, but McQueen was so amused by these clearly crazy but good-looking women, he invited them to eat lunch with him in the commissary.
No matter what else they were up to, they found time to give us birthday parties with ponies and piñatas, and calypso parties with the outfits and instruments they brought us back from Jamaica. They gave us Easter dinner parties featuring votive candles they’d made by filling blown-out eggs with layers of pastel-colored wax; they made us homemade chefs’ hats for our cookouts. For themselves, they threw the first twist party in town, created a Mexican wedding reception for Anne Ross’s niece, and put on so many rehearsal dinners for the children of their friends they should have hung out a shingle. Anne Ross was a big proponent of back-to-back events—the house was already clean, she reasoned, and the flowers not dead yet—but mostly she and my mother took turns. Anne Ross and her husband, the beloved Burrell (aka “Teeny Bubba”—yes, we have a lot of nicknames), were in charge of the Christmas Eve party; my parents held the bash on Christmas night.
At both holiday events we were not only dressed up and in attendance, we were given sparkling Catawba juice in champagne flutes until we were old enough to imbibe the real thing with the grown-ups. When I was sixteen, I helped Anne Ross throw my father’s fiftieth birthday party; nine years later we cohosted my mother’s surprise bash complete with a Queen for a Day theme and a rattan “throne” bedecked with flowers. It was that intergenerational nature of almost every gathering that made them so special—and so edifying to us—and it’s a tradition Elizabeth and I try to maintain to this day. At my father’s enormous sixtieth birthday shindig, for example, part of the entertainment was a performance by the Satin Dolls, a girl group comprised of my friends and me who performed a rewritten version of our namesake song (“Silver-haired cool cat, he slays me…”); at his more intimate eightieth, held at the ‘21’ Club twenty years later, Elizabeth’s daughter Katie filled in for a missing Doll. The latter event became the subject of a Wall Street Journal column by Peggy Noonan lamenting “the end of placeness,” in which she cited our birthday group as the exception. “Most of the people there were from the South, different ages and generations but Southerners—the men grounded and courteous in a certain way, the women sleeveless and sexy in a certain way,” she wrote. “There was a lot of singing and toasting and drinking, and this was the thing: Even as an outsider, you knew them. They were Mississippi Delta people—Mizz-izz-DEHLT people—and the sense of placeness they brought into the room with them was sweet to me.”
It was sweet of Peggy to pen such a tribute to our raucous crowd, but the truth is that I’ve long known how blessed I am to have come from such a place, a place populated with extraordinary people like my parents and the McGee clan and filled with all the action they were forever getting up to. It was a place that gave me all the stuff I needed for venturing out into the wider world, and when I got there I was lucky enough to gain even more mentors in both the kitchen and the dining room, ranging from Susan Mary Alsop to Jason Epstein, who is the subject of one of these essays.
Still, no one could have matched my original mentors Anne Ross and my mother, Judy, from whom Elizabeth and McGee and I learned the fine art of entertaining not just other folks but ourselves as well. Putting vodka in the sangria is as good a place as any to start, I suppose, and, as it turns out, it’s not so crazy as it sounds. In his excellent drinks book Mix Shake Stir, Danny Meyer adds both rum and gin to his version. Below, I add rum to Anne Ross’s version and slack off just a tad on the vodka. It’s good enough to have made a sangria convert out of me and every time I drink it I make a silent toast to the much-missed Bossy.
MCGEE MEMORIAL SANGRIA
( Yield: About 3 quarts )
2 bottles Rioja, or any other full-bodied, dry red wine
1 cup simple syrup
1 cup brandy
½ cup Grand Marnier
½ cup orange juice
½ cup pineapple juice
½ cup white rum, preferably Bacardi
½ cup vodka
2 green apples, quartered, cored, and sliced
2 oranges, sliced
2 lemons, sliced
2 limes, sliced
1 pineapple, peeled, quartered lengthwise, cored and sliced crosswise
Ice
Combine all ingredients except ice in a large pitcher and refrigerate, tightly covered, for at least 12 hours. Serve with ice.
EATING
1
The Great Leveler
I have been trying really hard to think of something new to say about Southern food, a subject that I (along with a host of other people) have written a whole lot about.
I have written about funeral food and pimiento cheese factions and George Jones versus Jimmy Dean sausage. I have attempted to prove the superiority of Southern cuisine by the all-too-easy comparison of our Junior League cookbooks with those from the North (Talk About Good! versus Posh Pantry; Aunt Margie’s Better than Sex Cake versus Grape Nuts Pudding). And I am still trying to prove the existence of the lone Mexican who introduced the hot tamale to the Mississippi Delta, where I grew up.
Whether or not this mythic figure ever actually roamed these parts is immaterial. The existence of the Delta tamale itself proves what I have long known, that Southern food is the Great Leveler. Hot tamales are beloved by rich and poor, black and white, and they are easily accessible at roadside stands, cafes, and restaurants. A dozen hots wrapped in shucks at either Scott’s Hot Tamales in Greenville or the White Front Café in Rosedale sells for eight dollars. The ones wrapped in paper at Greenville’s Doe’s Eat Place (my own personal favorites and the first solid food I ever ate) sell for a little more than ten dollars. But then, pretty much all great Southern food is cheap. Wyatt Cooper, the late, Mississippi-born husband of Gloria Vanderbilt and father of Anderson Cooper, once wrote that, “The best French restaurants in the world are wasted on me. All I want is a few ham hocks fried in bacon grease, a little mess of turnips with sowbelly, and a hunk of cornbread and I’m happy.”
If this was Cooper’s menu of choice, then he was not only happy, but rich—even without Gloria. On my last trip to France, I dined at two of “the best French restaurants,” L’Oustau de Baumanière in Les Baux and Le Grand Véfour in Paris, and the bill for four people at each place put me in mind of what my father once said about a particularly pricey family ski trip to Aspen: “Next year, we don’t even have to go—I can get the same effect standing in a cold shower burning up thousand-dollar bills.” France in July might not have been as chilly, but each l’addition was considerably more than the entire tab for a brunch I gave for a New Orleans debutante the weekend after I returned home. The deb in question was Lizzy Cordes, the daughter of my friend Elizabeth, and her special menu request was for an hors d’oeuvre I make consisting of a piece of bacon wrapped around a watermelon pickle and broiled. I was delighted to comply—these little bundles are not only inexpensive, they are salty and sweet and pair extremely well with the ham biscuits and pimiento cheese sandwiches I also passed around.
The main course, 250 pieces of excellent fried chicken from McHardy’s Chicken & Fixin’ on Broad Street, cost me exactly $240.90. Lizzy and her fellow debs had just been introduced to what passes for high society in my adopted city, but they seemed not just content but really, really happy to be munching away on some crispy chicken that cost less than a dollar per piece, and all the thank-you notes mentioned the food.
If Southern cuisine acts as a leveler by reducing the differences between race and class, the culture itself reduces the differences between—or the distinctness of—other cuisines introduced into our midst. Those Delta hot tamales bear little resemblance to Mexican hots, which, I’m pretty sure, are not bound together by lard and beef suet and, in the case of Doe’s, porterhouse steak drippings. Just as deep-fried, bacon-wrapped, butterflied shrimp drenched in hot pink sweet-and-sour sauce on top of a ton of sautéed onions bears absolutely no resemblance to authentic Chinese cuisine. That particular item was my favorite thing on the menu at Henry Wong’s How Joy, another Greenville mecca, and it was what I thought Chinese food tasted like until I left home for school at sixteen. Morris Lewis, a prominent wholesale grocer from Indianola, Mississippi, not only left home, he was invited to China on a trade visit just after Richard Nixon opened up the place, but he was still convinced that How Joy was the real—or at least the tastier—deal. Upon his return, Lewis said, “I’ve been all the way to China and I’ve still never tasted Chinese food as good as Henry Wong’s.”
Sadly, neither Henry Wong nor his shrimp is still with us, but almost all of my other favorites are very much around. And a lifetime of eating and cooking them has enabled me to come up with at least a few new things to say. For example, Southerners who put sugar in cornbread are impostors, or criminals, or both. I love skillet cornbread, fried hot water cornbread, and cornbread muffins, but to add sugar to any of them is an abomination. Which does not mean that I am a purist. I also love “Mexican Cornbread,” which, much like our tamales, does not come from anywhere near Mexico, but from a cookbook called Bayou Cuisine put together by the Episcopal churchwomen of Indianola, Mississippi. Among its ingredients are canned cream corn, marinated cherry peppers, Wesson oil, and shredded Kraft sharp cheddar.
