by Donis Casey
When one handful of meal is gone, scoop another out of the cornmeal bag and drizzle it in the same way, over and over until the mush has thickened enough for the spoon to stand in it. Lower the heat and cook and stir a bit longer until the mush begins to bubble. Be careful. The popping bubbles of cornmeal will burn! This can be eaten like a hot cereal with milk, butter, and syrup or sugar. Or as a hot side dish with gravy or butter, like rice or potatoes.
The most common way to eat cornmeal mush is to cook as above, then pour the hot mush into a loaf pan. When it is cold, slice it, dip each piece in flour and fry it in a little oil or butter, turning to brown both sides.* Alafair would have fried her mush in homemade lard, or perhaps bacon drippings. Serve hot with butter and syrup or sorghum.
*The author’s mother never served mush any way but fried.
Indian Pudding
This is a dish which everyone’s mother makes her own way. The following basic recipe is not as good as your mother’s, but it’ll give you an idea. Some people like to add raisins to the batter before baking.
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup minced fat or butter
1 cup light molasses
2 cups cold milk
4 cups whole milk
Salt to taste
1 heaping tablespoon spice
(ginger, cinnamon, and/or nutmeg, as desired)
Preheat oven to 350º F. Add the molasses to the cornmeal and beat well together. Add the cornmeal-molasses mix to the quart of boiling milk, along with salt and the desired spices. Add a cup full of minced suet or a piece of butter the size of an egg.
Butter a baking pan and pour in the pudding. Let it stand until thick. Before placing the pan into the oven, pour a pint of cold milk over it, but do not stir. Bake three hours. Serve warm with syrup, cream, or ice cream.
Blueberry Buckle
4-6 servings
Maine is famous for its blueberries, and this delicate cake is a great way to use some of the juicy, fresh berries just picked off of the bush. Since blueberries do not grow wild in Oklahoma, Holly had to use the berries Alafair had on hand. Blackberries grow wild in the eastern part of Oklahoma, so Alafair would have had several jars on hand which she would have canned the previous summer. Holly’s cake would not turn out the same as if she had used blueberries, but it would still be delicious. If using canned fruit, be sure to drain and rinse before adding the fruit to the batter.
Cake:
¼ cup butter, softened
¾ cup sugar
1 egg
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup milk
2 cups fresh blueberries
Topping:
⅔ cup sugar
½ cup all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
⅓ cup cold butter, diced
The cake: Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in egg. In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt and add to creamed mixture alternately with milk. Beat well after each addition. Fold in the fruit and pour the batter into a greased 9 by 9-inch pan.
The topping: Combine the sugar, flour, and cinnamon in a bowl, then rub in the butter with your fingers until the mixture is crumbly. Sprinkle over the cake batter in the pan.
Bake at 375° for 40-45 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean.
Red Eye Gravy
After frying several slices of country ham in butter, deglaze the skillet (a cast iron skillet is best) with a cup of strong black coffee. Use a spatula to loosen the meat bits that have stuck to the bottom of the pan. Add a cup of water and simmer the gravy until it has reduced by half. After the gravy is poured into a dish or gravy boat, the coffee and meat bits will sink to the bottom and the drippings will rise to the top. Long ago, some clever wag decided that the dark coffee under the clear grease looks like a human eye looking up from the bowl. Yum! Give it a stir before spooning the gravy onto your rice or potatoes.
Crawdads
Crayfish, or crawdads, as they are known in Alafair’s part of the world, are very common in Oklahoma. These relatives of lobsters can be found in deep ditches close to lakes, ponds and creeks. Shallow, muddy areas are the best place to catch them. They can be caught by hand if you’re quick, or in a trap baited with bacon or fish bits. Using a garden rake with chicken wire wrapped around the tines to drag the bottom of the shallows and sift through the mud works well at catching them. In Cherokee folklore, the crawdads are called “the builders of land” and are responsible for all the dry land in the world. Burrowing crawdads build up mud towers around their holes, and the Cherokees say that they have been piling up dry land since the creation of the Earth.
Bring a large pot of water to a boil, add vegetables (onions, potatoes) and seasonings if you wish (lemon juice, Cajun seasonings), but this is not mandatory. While waiting for the water to boil, rinse the crawdads in clean water. Some people add salt to the rinsing water to purge the crawdads before cooking.
When the water boils, drop the crawdads in and boil for about five minutes, until the shells turn bright red. Turn off the fire and steep the crawdads for 15-20 minutes.
Drain and serve with butter, lemon juice, or whatever dipping sauce you like. A good Southern crawdad boil often includes sausages. Great with corn on the cob, too.
How to eat a crawdad: grab the crawdad at the tail joint and break it in half with a twisting motion. Peel the shell from the tail just as you would peel a shrimp and tug out the luscious tail meat. A real aficionado will also suck the juice from the crawdad’s head.
Preserves
If you grow most of your own food, you don’t let all of that labor or any of your produce go to waste. Late in summer, farmers would place several big ripe watermelons in a tin tub filled with water and family members would sit on the porch of a sultry evening and enjoy a big slice of cool melon (as well as have a seed-spitting contest). This would leave lots of watermelon rind, which one could either feed to the pigs or use to make the most mouthwatering rind preserves to eat all year. A large truck garden with many tomato plants could yield too many tomatoes to eat fresh, so the enterprising housewife would often pull green tomatoes from the vines and preserve them in relish. The following recipes are from Miz Goggie Vincent, and passed on to the author by Miz Vincent’s great-grandson, Dr. Edmund Stump. Dr. Stump’s handwritten instructions for watermelon rind preserves are reproduced on the next page.
Watermelon Rind Preserves
Makes about 8 pints,
depending on the size of the watermelon
Cut the rind of one watermelon into chunks. Peel. Soak in salt water overnight. (5 tsp salt in enough water to cover)
Boil in alum water until easily pierced with a fork (alum the size of a marble).
Drain in colander.
Boil rind for 10-15 minutes in:
2 ½ cups sugar
1 cup vinegar (or ½ cup water and ½ cup vinegar)
1 piece cinnamon bark and ½ dozen cloves wrapped in a small mesh bag
(Footnote: may need 2 or 3 “goes” of syrup)
Put 2 cloves and 1 piece cinnamon bark in each sterilized 1 pint jar (or smaller jar if desired).
Add rind and pour boiling syrup over.
Seal jars and store for at least two weeks. Eat and enjoy.
Green Tomato Relish
Makes about 14 pints
One peck* of green tomatoes (ground)
1/2 cup of salt
Let stand overnight in a crock or enamel pot. Drain the liquid in the morning (drain well).
Add large head of cabbage (ground).
Boil in two quarts of mild vinegar for ½ hour.
Add:
6 large ground onions
&
nbsp; 3 red and 3 green sweet peppers (ground)
10 cups of sugar
2 tbsp mustard seed
2 tbsp celery seed
1 tbsp ground cinnamon or cloves (or both)
Cook all for 20-30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Drain well after cooking.
* One peck tomatoes = @ 10 pounds
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