Paula Deen
Page 20
My mother was great too. She has always been very open to my dad’s remarriage, and she’s helped me to accept it. There were times when I heard myself be so downright nasty to Paula that I didn’t know who was saying the words coming from my mouth. Never saw that girl before. I think back on some of those things and whoa!
But here’s the thing: Paula never stopped loving me, never shut me out; she only shut out the meanness coming from me. She just opened up her arms to me and wanted to know about my day. She never quit trying.
That’s when our relationship started developing as more of a friendship than as my dad’s wife. Honestly, I don’t even consider us a blended family anymore. We’re all one natural family. We love to be together and there was a time I would have never thought it would happen.
I’m engaged to be married now, but when all the trouble with Paula started, my fiancé, Daniel, and I bought a house about a mile from here. Now, I know that even though I have my own house, there’s always room for me here in Paula and my dad’s home. It’s no different from what it used to be with my daddy. It’s just that there are more people around the table now.
Paula has been helping me plan my wedding as if I were her own child, which now I am. It’s been a stressful time, but having her be able to share in my happiness and help me plan things has been so helpful.
My big wedding crisis came when I was figuring out how my two moms would walk down the aisle. I wanted Paula to have just as much a place in this wedding as my own mom.
The wedding coordinator said, “Your own mom needs to go down the aisle first.”
And I said, “You don’t understand. I’ve got two mothers. At this point, my feelings are no different about Paula than about my natural mom.”
So, we worked it out; I think Anthony will go get Mom and hold her arm on one side and then go get Paula and hold her on the other, and they—Anthony and my two moms—will walk down my weddin’ aisle together. And then my daddy will give me away.
That’s how I want it.
It’s me again, Paula. There are no guarantees, but I think the Groovers and the Deens stand more than a fair chance of being close forever. We’ll always have to work at it. We know that. I feel that so much of our future togetherness is my responsibility because, frankly, as my business success grows, I find that my words hold even more weight than they ever did. It’s only fair, now that I think of it: after all, next to Aunt Peggy, I’m the matriarch (although she’d tell you she’s still the queen and I’m only the princess). It’s true that I seem to have the strongest ability to hurt or to set the togetherness tone.
I’m plannin’ on togetherness.
The Best Damn Blueberry MuffinYou’ll Ever Eat
Here in Savannah, we love our muffins, and I especially love these delicately blended, delicious blueberry babies. This is my fa-vorite blueberry muffin recipe.
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ cup sugar
1 stick unsalted butter, melted
1 egg, slightly beaten
¾ cup whole milk
1½ cups fresh blueberries
½ cup granulated brown sugar or white sugar
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease and flour 12 muffins cups.
In a bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and the ½ cup sugar. In another bowl, combine the butter, egg, and milk and blend well. Pour the wet ingredients into the flour mixture and, with a spatula, stir until just combined. Do not beat or over-mix; it’s okay if there are lumps in the batter. Gently fold the blueberries into the batter.
Spoon the batter into the muffin cups, filling each cup about two-thirds full. Bake for 10 minutes and remove from the oven. Sprinkle the tops of the muffins with the granulated brown or white sugar and return the muffins to the oven to bake for an additional 10 to 20 minutes, until the tops are golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean. Cool for about 10 minutes in the pan before turning the muffins out.
Makes 12 muffins
Chapter 15
FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD, SOUTHERN STYLE
I’m not yo’ nurse, I’m yo’ cook.
After Michael and I got married and Michelle and I ironed out our problems, it was back to real life and work. I’d lie awake nights thinking more and more about the philosophy of Southern cooking, my cooking, my momma’s and my Grandmomma Paul’s cooking—in short, how Southerners have cooked since the stars first fell on Alabama. I wanted the food in my restaurant to be authentic. I wanted to give my customers the best of the South. For years I’d been taking for granted what my momma and her momma did in their kitchens, but now that I was a professional, it was important that I understood the culture and the heritage of the cooking I understood and loved, so that I could faithfully dispense it. Southern plantation cuisine was my style. Country cookin’ makes you good-lookin’ was my motto.
For starters, y’all, I knew there are but four ingredients that signify Southern cooking: the pig and all its parts, butter, mayo, and cream cheese.
For years I’d been hearing every now and then that those four ingredients so close to my spiritual and emotional heart were likely to hurt my physical heart, not to mention my breasts and my colon (one body part to which I can honestly say I’d not paid too much attention). Once, I got real testy when one of those food police asked me why I didn’t cook healthier, and I told him I was his cook, not his nurse.
Not one Southerner I know threw her butter out the window when we heard our food was going to send us all to an early grave. As the diet gurus threatened early death to Southern cooking lovers, the old Georgia farmers who put cream in their cereal instead of milk continued to live to a hundred muttering, “The fat makes mah arteries so slick, the blood glides right on through.”
Butter and cream are not killing us off like flies. How could all that good stuff be bad for y’all? Sure, fatty foods are fattening and it isn’t a good idea to be obese, but the point, it seems to me, is to give up gettin’ nerves whenever you see butter. The point is to find a way good-tastin’ food fits into your life. Don’t live scared of food pleasure. I guarantee, y’all, one of these days the health police will finally stop wringing their hands over butter and bacon. One thing I’ve always known is that food is not supposed to be measured out in dry and boring increments. Food is meant to be enjoyed because science changes its mind every five minutes about what’s best for us. In the meantime, I continue to follow my own advice that two sticks of butter is good, and three probably better. Now, you puritans who’ve been eating mostly granola and lettuce, you’ll be sorry, one day, that y’all missed my butterscotch delight cake made with three cups of heavy cream all these years.
Back in the early nineties, when I started thinking through the concept of Southern food, first I decided I never wanted to be in competition with other chefs and what they were doing all across the country. A gourmet chef is not what I wanted to be, and I didn’t have no worries there: it was certainly true that down-home Southern cooking is not what’s ever called “gourmet” cooking. It’s poor man’s food. It’s what you grew up with if you grew up in Memphis or Charleston or Atlanta or Albany, Georgia. Kids don’t have to acquire a taste for it—they’re born lovin’ it. Cooking memories are part of everyone’s life, the common denominator among people. If you’re Jewish or Baptist, French or American, the food of your childhood usually makes you feel safe, and as far as I’m concerned, Southern cooking makes you feel safest. It has little to do with health or diet: it’s just down-home good eatin’.
In my neck of the woods, food connects us to others. For some reason, at almost every party, everyone usually congregates in the kitchen. In the South, people spend a whole lot of time in the kitchen sharing recipes, passing down traditions. Food brings everyone to the table. Perhaps at a hoity-toity dinner party in Los Angeles or New York, people gather at the table to talk about the fascinating ways of the world, maybe they stare at the trendy foods in front of t
hem to try to figure out what’s happening on that plate, but in the South, you have your mashed potatoes and your butter beans and your fried chicken, and you’re not talking about the food or the politics—it’s all about coming together to have a conversation about your day, and, by the way, to eat mighty good.
Southern cooking is nothing but Southern—we don’t fly in our ingredients or menus from distant points in the world. What’s in our pots and on our plates is all home-grown. You won’t find kiwi fruit or foie gras at a Georgia table, but you will see peaches and pork chops and fresh shrimp. You don’t need a trained, sophisticated palate to love fried chicken, which has turned out to be the key to my past, my present, and my future, God willing.
Southern dishes don’t need split-second timing, either: a few extra minutes in the oven isn’t going to hurt that macaroni and cheese. And although our plates look pretty when they’re brought to the table, we’re not about to turn our food into towers. We just heap that shrimp and grits, those buttermilk biscuits, that tomato aspic with cottage cheese dip, right plunk on the plate.
Look, I know that some things I cook will make a French chef roll his eyes—like the way I make red-eye gravy with the drippings from country ham fried in a skillet, water, and strong coffee, but if that French chef takes a chance and tastes my gravy with one of my biscuits, he’ll be asking for seconds real quick.
Fact is that people come from very far away for down-home Southern cooking: it’s the food to try before you die.
There are four main kinds of Southern cooking.
COMFORT FOOD
Something comforting and tasty, something to make you feel safe—if only for a moment.
Comfort food is the kind of food people most associate with the South. You don’t even have to be hungry to eat comfort food; most people dive into the praline cookies, the leftover macaroni and cheese or pork butt roast, the hot grits or potato soup, not because we’re starving but because it satisfies more than our physical hunger.
A lot of people say that when they’re stressed they can’t eat, but there are definitely more people like me than the ones who don’t eat. I have never been in a situation that’s been so bad I couldn’t eat; I do whatever I have to do to help the hurt, fill the emptiness inside me, and that, girl, is always eatin’. Give me food that warms me up, like chicken and dumplings, which was my daddy’s favorite meal and which my grandmother made for me when I said I needed a nerve pill. Or cookies hot out of the oven, which I ate endlessly when my daddy died.
Nora Ephron writes in her book Heartburn, “I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most, but never the potatoes that went with them.” Oh, Lord, that’s me. Truest thing I ever heard.
I never want to get so uppity that I forget who I am and where I came from. I’ll always crave real, honest country food, and that means grits, grits, and grits. Banana pudding, spoon bread, creamed corn, a perfectly baked potato—and preferably eaten in the kitchen—that’s the food with my name on it. Collard greens, fried chicken, mashed sweet potatoes. Food that is rooted in Southern history, food that Stonewall Jackson’s momma might have given him. That’s what I want to serve my family and friends.
I heard the greatest thing. A Chicago critic reporting on the latest culinary finds told his readers that grits and fried chicken were not only cool but worth sixty bucks a plate at the newest, fashionable “Southern” restaurant in the Windy City.
The highest compliment for comfort food in a Southern restaurant is that it’s almost as good as home.
FUNERAL FOOD
It’s Death Warmed Over—maybe with a little cream of mushroom soup.
Southern funeral food is down-home food but prepared with company in mind. Funeral food is really serious business in the South. Although I’m sure funerals are pretty serious in other places as well, I’m not so sure the food plays such a big part.
In my neck of the woods, after the service and the cemetery, family and friends arrive at a deceased’s house. This is not a party but a get-together after the burial when people reminisce and say nice things about the deceased. People bring food so that the family doesn’t have to feed their guests and worry about meals after losing a loved one. Funeral meals are meant to show off the cooks’ creations even as they help gentle the grief of the survivors. Mourners who are exhausted and grief-stricken by bereavement and having taken care of the deceased in the last days need nourishment; it also makes them feel good to know that their friends and family cared enough to prepare their best dishes. Funeral food is also meant to celebrate life: nothing says you’re alive more than eating. Sometimes, after a funeral, I’ll go into the house, and my heart breaks when I see potato salad that’s been bought in a grocery store and some greasy chicken that’s been picked up at a fast-food barbecue joint. Then, praise the Lord, I’ll see a pot of butter beans that someone has taken the time to cook just perfect, and all’s right with the world. I’m not no dummy; I know we live in a fast-paced world and we don’t have the time or even the inclination to spend so much time in our kitchens like our mommas did. But there’s no excuse for store-bought potato salad.
Here’s the way it used to be, and still is in many communities. When someone you know passes on, after the viewing you send over to the house your best dish filled with your best recipe. If you’re planning to go to the burial, you bring it over afterward, when all the food that’s been brought over for the family is put out. Now, when I say your best dish, honey, I mean your best cooking on your finest plate—not those throwaway aluminum pans. This is the final act of respect you can offer the deceased, so you want it to be your very, very prettiest china, polished silver, or cut-glass dish. Plus, your name is always put on the bottom of your dish and you don’t want an ugly dish with your name on it, ’cause everyone will know it’s yours when it’s washed and returned to you.
Some women I know even keep a casserole ready in the freezer, just in case. And it better not have soggy instant rice as a base. Soggy rice is unfit for the family and for the deceased.
That’s how it is.
So, if it’s like the old days, after a funeral there’ll be some fried chicken in a beautiful dish, maybe a sweet potato pie and a baked ham so good you can’t hardly stand it. You don’t hardly see it much anymore, but a funeral dish with real roots is a tomato aspic.
In the South, when you go to a funeral you’re sad, but when it comes time to eat, you get happier. Today, when a friend or family member or a loved customer passes, I’ll get up a buffet at the restaurant—macaroni and cheese, biscuits, fried chicken, and corn bread, and I never forget the hoe cakes. Those buffets, I might add, do come in plain old aluminum dishes, ’cause they’re comin’ straight from the restaurant. No one seems to mind. Just a month ago, I lost my Aunt Jessie, my dear little aunt who lived in Eagle Lake, Florida, next to Winter Haven. We all loaded up to go down to the funeral, but I couldn’t take any food because I was traveling eight hours to get there. I knew the church ladies would do right by my Aunt Jessie.
Oh, my goodness, that food was so good! One little lady made chicken and dumplings and I thought I was gonna hurt myself on them. There was creamed corn and a huge blue bowl of cheese grits. There was black-eyed peas, fried chicken, broccoli casserole, and there was a potato salad. There was even praline pie and pickled okra, without which, it’s said, you can’t be buried in that area. And yes, I spotted a beautiful plate filled with traditional deviled eggs, real funeral cooking.
It was a grand funeral for Aunt Jessie. Somewhere she was smiling with pride, because she always brought the best dishes.
CELEBRATION FOOD
My ideal celebration would be sitting in the middle of the floor with a T-shirt on and a bushel of Baltimore crabs, extra jumbo male, gettin’ my crab on.
—PATTI LABELLE
You go, Patti.
In the South, a celebration can be a party to honor the arrival of a major celebrity, but more likely, it’s a family get-together. We just lov
e to be in touchin’ range of each other, and when we are, we’re usually celebratin’ by eatin’ because we’re so happy to be gathered around the table at the same time. Families coming together are a cause for celebration as much as is a wedding or a christening. These family get-togethers can be called pretty spontaneously for almost any old occasion—a graduation lunch, a New Year’s Day good-luck meal, a Sunday-afternoon football party, or an I Just Got My Engagement Ring tea. The food that’s served at these shindigs can be simple, but they usually have a note of festivity inserted in the food. For example, my own boys always loved a baked potato bar at their special events. I’d put out big bowls of crispy-skin baked potatoes with a dozen different toppings to choose from and those boys would love to shovel giant helpin’s of creamed seafood, chicken à la king, crumbled bacon, or steak and mushrooms on top of their potatoes. The trick is to remember that celebration food for families is usually jolly food that makes your people feel prized and pleasured! Family is precious to me and equally precious is me seeing that everyone goes home satisfied.
When our own family gets together, we often serve a Low Country Boil (pronounced bawl for all of you not born in Georgia). This is about the most celebratory dish you could ever hope for. Everything goes in one pot—the crab boil, the red potatoes, the sausage, the shrimp, and the corn. Sometimes, if we’re lucky enough to have been out crabbin’, we’ll throw some blue crabs in there too, which is just fabulous. With a French bread, a green salad, and some coleslaw, we have an honest-to-goodness celebration feast.