by Maya Angelou
Líver and Onions
SERVES 6
1 pound bacon
5 medium onions, sliced
1 pound thinly sliced beef liver
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
¾ cup water
Fry bacon in large skillet on medium heat, and remove from heat. Do not discard grease. Place bacon on paper towels to drain.
Using same skillet, cook onions in bacon fat until golden brown. Remove from heat, and place on paper towels to drain.
Mix together flour, salt, and pepper, and dust liver with mixture. Heat oil in a large skillet, and fry lightly until browned on both sides. Remove liver and pour ¾ cup water into hot skillet. Scrape bottom of skillet. Season with salt and pepper if desired. Pour hot broth over liver. Serve at once with onions and crisp bacon.
MY GRANDMOTHER DID NOT SUBSCRIBE to the Lafayette County Democrat newspaper, saying, “It is written by white folks, about white folks, for white folks.”
We received The Chicago Defender and The Pittsburgh Courier newspapers although they were published in the far-away northern cities and arrived by mail at least a week late.
However, once a month, the Democrat published a women’s page. The page held notices of weddings, engagements, and a few recipes that were sent in by readers with their names attached. Momma knew all the names and the maids who worked for them.
On the morning when the women’s page was published, as the maids passed the store on their way to work, Momma would choose one.
“Sister Bishop, I hope you’ll be able to bring me that page this evening.”
The woman would smile, proud to have been chosen. “Yes, ma’am, Sister Henderson. Be glad to.”
The other women in the group would compliment the chosen one amid much laughter. That evening the maid would bring a folded newspaper page, and Momma would take a Babe Ruth from the icebox or a peanut patty from the candy counter.
“You know I’m not trying to pay you. Just saying thank you.”
Momma would sit down and gingerly put on her glasses. Immediately she would start tsking. (In the African American community, that gesture is called sucking your teeth.)
I would wait for her comments.
“Uh-huh-huh, these white folks. What will they stop at next?” She wagged her head. “They’re making gravy with beer. You know what beer is, Sister?” I would write, “Yes, ma’am. It’s white lightning.” “That’s right, uh-huh. You ready to start?”
We sat together under the lamplight so many nights copying recipes that I can pull a perfect image of me and Momma bending over the kitchen table, scrutinizing the news page.
Momma said, “Now, here is one for you. It’s called wilted lettuce. Don’t that beat all? I have to buy ice to make my lettuce crisp up, and here is a recipe for wilted lettuce.
“ This cook didn’t know all she had to do to make this dish is wash the lettuce and leave it on the counter. It will wilt for you in thirty minutes.”
Then she thought again. “We have some nice lettuce in the garden. I’m going to make this dish tomorrow.”
The next day we sat down to Momma’s version of wilted lettuce, and much to her surprise we all enjoyed it. I ate the silken side dish and wondered about the white woman who lived in the white part of town about a mile from the black area, which was still called the Quarters.
Would she think that a black grandmother was feeding her grandchildren the same dish she was offering to her privileged family?
Would she resent the grandmother or just shrug her shoulders and say, “Let them help themselves”?
I’d like to think she shrugged.
Wílted Lettuce
SERVES 4 TO 6
6 slices of bacon
6-8 green onions (white and green parts), sliced
1 tablespoon sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
⅓ cup vinegar
1 cup water
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 heads Boston or Bibb lettuce, leaves washed and separated
Cut bacon into small pieces, and fry in medium skillet until crisp. Remove from heat, and drain on paper towels. Add green onions, sugar, salt, vinegar, water, and pepper to bacon fat in skillet. Cook over medium heat for 5 minutes.
Put lettuce into salad bowl. Pour onion mixture over lettuce, and stir. Top with crisp bacon, and serve immediately.
IN 1903, MOMMA had been married five years and had two sons. One bright morning, her husband told her that he was leaving. He explained that he had received a call—the Call—to preach. To study and prepare for that awesome responsibility, he had to travel to Ada, Oklahoma, where an elderly preacher he had met at a conference would school him. Years later Annie Henderson found that the old Oklahoma preacher had had a beautiful and marriageable daughter and that my grandfather quickly began to court her. When it was legally possible, he married the daughter and never returned to Arkansas.
My grandmother was left with a two-room shack, a lively four-year-old who would later become my father, and a two-year-old boy who was crippled.
For most of her life Annie Henderson blamed herself for Uncle Willie’s condition. As a one-year-old he had crawled out of the house and had fallen off the porch to the ground.
No amount of doctors were able to convince my grandmother that Uncle Willie’s paralysis was caused by a neurological malady rather than by what she thought of as her neglect.
She also laid my grandfather’s departure to his displeasure at having a crippled son. So again, she was to blame.
She looked around at her situation. She was a colored woman in the South at the beginning of the twentieth century. She had herself and her sons to feed, house, and clothe. She would not work as a maid, for that would mean leaving her tots, especially her crippled one, in someone else’s care. She decided to make use of the two largest employers in Stamps. They were the cotton gin, and three miles away, the lumber mill. She devised a plan that would let her make money and at the same time mostly stay at home with her “darlings.”
At night she would cook and then grind and season ham and chicken and also make a batter for her cakes. Sunrise found her kneading the dough and placing the meat in the center of each pastry. Midmorning she walked from her house, leaving a young girl to watch her boys for three hours.
Carrying her fresh raw pies, her coal pot, lard, and a fold-up chair, she would arrive at the factory. She placed herself and supplies on the ground adjacent to the door the black workers used. She would begin frying pies a half hour before noon.
She told me many times that nothing sounds as loud as the dinner bell and nothing smells as good as fresh fried pies. She had a bell that she rang seconds after the noon siren sounded.
She sold the pies hot at the cotton gin for five cents. She would wrap any leftovers in a fresh tea towel, and leaving her cooking utensils under the care of a child hired for that purpose, she would run three miles to the lumber mill and offer the tepid pies for three cents. But believing in fair play and being a good businesswoman, the establishment that received lukewarm pies on one day would be her first stop the next noon. Her customers appreciated her cooking, her promptness, and her sense of fairness.
After a few years of serving the pies in both unbreathable summer heat and bone-shaking winter cold, Momma built a little hut equidistant between the two hives of commercial activity. Then at noontime the hungry workers would run to her to get their steaming chicken and cured ham pies.
Momma told me, “Sister, the world might try to put you on a road that you don’t like. First stop and look behind you. If nothing back there makes you want to return, then look ahead. If nothing ahead beckons you enough to keep you going, then you have to step off that road and cut yourself a brand-new path.”
The hut became a store in which I grew up. It remained in use for over sixty years.
Fríed Meat Píes
SERVES 8
1 recipe Buttermilk Biscuits dough (P-41)
2 cups cooked shredded pork or chicken
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste Pinch of cinnamon
¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 cup caramelized onions (about 3 medium onions)
5 tablespoons vegetable oil
Roll out dough to ¼ inch thickness. Cut out circles, using salad plate. Season meat with salt and pepper, and add cinnamon and red pepper flakes. Place 2 tablespoons of meat off-center on dough circle. Put ½ teaspoon caramelized onions on meat. Fold dough to make a half-moon. Seal pie by pressing edges with fork tines. Refrigerate for 1 hour. Fry in 3 tablespoons oil on both sides on medium heat until golden brown.
To caramelize onions: Put 2 tablespoons of oil in frying pan, and add thinly sliced onions. Cook over medium-high heat, stirring constantly. When onions begin to brown, turn heat down. Continue to stir. Onions will become dark golden brown. Remove from heat.
MY MOTHER, VIVIAN BAXTER, was a great believer in self-reliance. Each tub should sit on its own bottom and each shoulder should be pressed to its own wheel.
My six-year-old son, Guy, and I were between addresses. That was how we described our condition when we lost one apartment and before we found another. In the meantime, of course, we went across town to my mother’s house.
When I was seventeen and Guy was two months old, we lived with my mother in her fourteen-room house on Post Street in San Francisco. Then one morning I announced my plans to move. I told her that I had found a job and two rentals with cooking privileges and that the landlady would babysit my child. She controlled her surprise and said, “All right, but when you cross over my doorsill, remember you have been raised. Throughout life you will have to make many adjustments and even some compromises, but don’t let anybody raise you. You know the difference between right and wrong. Do right. You’ve been raised.
“And remember this,” she added. “You can always come home.”
Whenever the world was too much with me late and soon, I returned to Vivian Baxter’s house. I didn’t savor not sitting on my own bottom and not putting my own shoulder to my own wheel, but I was never made uncomfortable returning to her.
She treated each return as a welcome opportunity to teach me something she had overlooked or that I had not understood. She relished one incident, which she said could only have taken place in her kitchen.
Guy sat at the kitchen table, watching her cook. He kept up a running chatter about school, his playmates, and his teachers, and he filled his conversation with his requests that his grandmother make a dessert for me.
He told her how hard I worked, how at this very moment I was probably seeing about an apartment, and how I deserved a dessert. A good dessert made for me by my mother.
Mother had had just about enough of that. “If she needs a dessert why don’t you make it for her?”
“Oh, Grandma, I’m only six years old.”
Mother said, “If you are old enough to try to bully me into making something for your mother, then you are old enough to make it yourself. Do you want to try?”
He laughed and said, “Sure.”
She said she would show him how to make a bread pudding, after he washed his hands. “Cleanliness is next to godliness” was my mother’s mantra. Mother set him on a kitchen stool so he could reach the sink.
“A good cook washes his hands ten times an hour; a great cook, twenty times.”
Each time he touched a piece of food he climbed up onto the stool and washed his hands.
She let him butter stale bread, which was then placed in the oven to toast, and she showed him how to break eggs without dropping shells into the mixing bowl.
He whisked milk and then sugar into the eggs. He put raisins in warm water so they could plump.
There was an undeniable air of secret happenings when I entered the house that night. I looked at Mother, and her smile was like a promising but sealed envelope, and Guy was about to explode. I had to give them their due.
“What’s going on? What have you people been doing?”
Mother said, “Ask your son.”
“Well, Guy? What’s the news?”
“Mom, well… I can’t tell you until after dinner. Are you ready to eat right now? We can sit down and have dinner. Then we can have dessert. Oooo-weee.” He spoke so fast he hardly had time to breathe.
He could not sit still at the dinner table.
Mother finally told him the dessert was cool enough and he could bring it out.
The baked bread pudding was puffed up and toasty brown, but I only had eyes for Guy. He strutted and preened. Pride and self-congratulations were his shoulder pads, and he nearly had to put both hands over his mouth to keep from blurting out his achievement.
When Mother placed the bread pudding in front of her to serve it, he could hold off no longer.
“I cooked this for her, Grandmother. My mother should serve it.” Vivian Baxter agreed and slid the dessert over to me. Guy asked, “Is it good, is it good? I made it myself.”
I had not tasted one bite, but I answered, “My son, this is the best bread pudding in the world.”
It was true then, and even as you read about it today it is still the best bread pudding in the world.
Bread Pudding
SERVES 6
1 loaf stale sliced white bread
4 tablespoons (½ stick) butter
½ cup golden raisins
1 cup sugar
3 large eggs, beaten
2 cups milk
2 tablespoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease with butter 3-quart casserole dish.
Butter both sides of bread slices, place on tin foil, and put into oven. Toast slices on both sides.
Place raisins in bowl of hot water to plump. Cover, soak for 20 minutes, and drain.
Combine sugar, eggs, milk, vanilla extract, and cinnamon. Mix well. Break up toasted bread, and put in casserole dish. Add drained raisins. Pour egg mixture over bread, and stir.
Bake 40 minutes. Serve hot or cold.
MY TEN-YEAR-OLD SON had a huge appetite and I had a very slim wallet. We lived in a small two-room apartment in a San Francisco Victorian. Our building provided cooking privileges for all tenants in a large kitchen down the hall.
I adored my brother, Bailey, and he was coming for dinner. I wanted to delight him by creating a new recipe. I would at the same time satisfy my always-hungry son.
Bailey was two years older than I and seven inches shorter, but he made it very clear all my life that he was my big brother. He was a good cook, and occasionally brilliance would overtake him at the stove and his culinary efforts would bedazzle. Our mother, who was the best and most adventurous cook in our family, encouraged us to be daring in creating recipes and bold in competing with each other.
I couldn’t afford the ham Bailey loved, so I bought three smoked pork chops instead, which I planned to sauté and then bake with cooked apples, pineapples, and brown sugar, and I would serve braised cabbage with ginger as a side dish. I had just placed the pork chops in the skillet over a medium fire when the doorbell rang.
Bailey entered carrying a shopping bag. He was early and full of laughter. He said, “I brought dinner and I’m going to cook it.” I said, “Well, I was going to cook pork chops and cabbage.” He laughed and said, “Look in the shopping bag.”
I emptied the contents onto the counter. There were three fresh pork chops, a head of cabbage, a green bell pepper, and a pound of bacon. He said, “I presume you have milk and another skillet.”
I said, “Yes.”
He said, “Let’s cook together. I’m going to make a dish that will feed you and Guy for a week.” He used half of the stove and I the other, and we shared a bottle of Mateus rosé wine for the next hour. He asked me to cook the rice since I make no-fail rice, and he expected that we would
finish our dishes at the same time.
My son’s eyes enlarged when he looked at the food-loaded table. My pork chops with the apple and pineapple were on one platter. Bailey’s pork chops with bacon and a cream sauce were on the other. The molded rice towered in the middle of the table. I had served gingered cabbage and Bailey had made cabbage with celery and water chestnuts.
As he opened the door to leave, Bailey said, “Split one pork chop down to the bone, serve it with gravy, a piece of bacon, and rice—that would be one dinner. The next night serve just bacon and gravy and rice with a salad. There’s another meal. Wait a couple of days and use another half pork chop, serve with spinach, rice, and gravy, or make some great biscuits, and that will be yet another dinner. Make a green salad in between. Do that and you’ll be okay for a week.”
As he started down the steps, he said, “If I had a million dollars, you would never have to wonder how you were going to feed my nephew. Since I don’t have even a thousand dollars, a big brother can teach his little sister how she can save pennies and still keep her little crumb crusher from starving.”
I shouted, “He is not a crumb crusher.”
Bailey laughed and started around the building. I was yelling at the night air.
Baíley’s Smothered
Pork Chops
SERVES 6
6 thick slices bacon
1 large Spanish onion, sliced