A Home-Grown Elegance

By Michael Demurest

If you like dishes made out of a

piece of lettuce and ground up

peanuts and a maraschino

cherry and marshmallow

whip and a banana

You mil not get them in Savannah,

But if you seek something headier

than nectar and tastier than

ambrosia and more

palatable than manna,

Set your teeth, I beg you, in one

of these specialites de

Savannah.

Everybody has the right to think

whose food is the most

gorgeous,

And I nominate Georgia's.

--Ogden Nash

Southern cookery has inspired more versification, disputation and calumniation than gin, politics or pulchritude. Senior Writer Michael Demarest, a deep-fry gourmet of the Ogden Nash School, reports.

Southerners quite possibly devote more time to the preparation and consumption of breakfast, lunch and dinner than any other society since Augustan Rome. Drawing from the world's most abundant living larder, from the fish and flesh, fruit, root and leaf on their doorsteps and jetties, they have codified a cuisine that, for variety and piquancy, ranks with anything served in Florence or Provence. Southern cooking is essentially regional, indigenous and inventive, a long frypan throw from the elegantly stylized haute cuisine of Paris or Rome. To the educated palate a Southern meal, at its diverse best, is worth the price of a ticket to Marseille or Milan.

Cooking by Ear. Southern cuisine arrived by ship or afoot from many climes. Slaves came from Africa bearing benne (sesame seed), okra, yams and remembered formulas that were to become the masterworks of Southern cuisine. Frenchmen marched ashore to reincarnate such classic dishes as bouillabaisse, which is a culinary cousin of gumbo, a permissive potpourri that can include chicken, turkey, ham, crab, oyster, shrimp or anything else on hand. While New Englanders learned--belatedly--to raise beef and sheep, Southerners derived sustenance from the wild game and pigs and chickens that were raised almost as members of the family.

From its rivers, lakes and offshore waters, Southerners have developed a piscine cuisine of staggering diversity. Snapper and pompano are the aristocrats of fishdom. The Gulf Coast's pearly shrimp, eaten raw or smothered in the fiery remoulade sauce of a New Orleans restaurant, are as memorable as Proustian madeleines. No other cuisine in the world has so amply shared or sherried a dish like Southern crawfish bisque. Inland, Southern hams and bacons are unrivaled in the Western world.

Any list of the world's great foods would have to include such Southern elegances as she-crab soup, terrapin stew, jambalaya, black-bottom pie, gumbo or pompano en papillote.

Southern cuisine is an imprecise, ad hoc art that relies largely on instinct (a little of this, a little of that), memory (Mama said "Salt later") and the availability of ingredients (okra, salad greens, fresh shrimp). It is further complicated by the fact that many great Southern cooks have traditionally been black women who spurned the written word or, for that matter, any kind of regulation. The celebrated Mme. Bouligny, one of the last grandes dames of New Orleans society, had a Haitian cook who seasoned her gumbo with a voodoo prayer. "Getting directions from colored cooks," Harriet Ross Colquitt wrote in The Savannah Cookbook, "is rather like trying to write down the music to the spirituals which they sing --for all good oldtimers (and newtimers too) cook 'by ear.' "

Lak Religion. As a consequence, there are few definitive Southern cookbooks. Most of the classic recipes (or receipts, as they are sometimes called in the South) are passed down in the spidery handwriting of ancestresses or in the slim, prim, printed compendiums that are still put out by local ladies to raise funds for church or charity. They are worth their weight in saffron. Sarah Rutledge's The Carolina Housewife, published in 1874, is an incomparable guide to Southern cuisine that is available today only in underground Xerox print.

Where Northerners grill, broil and boil, Southerners barbecue and fry and bake. No delicacies are more prized for lunch, breakfast or supper than Southern breads--spoon bread, crackling bread, corn bread, beaten biscuits or any other combination of corn meal and love. Hominy grits, served with eggs at breakfast or within any other meal are a guarantor of beauty, nutrition and happy days, you-all. In all the world there are no desserts more elegant than key lime pie, black bottom pie, pecan pie and fresh Georgia peach ice cream. Or, to wash it down, the pungent coffee of New Orleans or its famed, flamed cognac-laced consort, cafe brulot.

Southern fried chicken can be prepared in endless ways; at its best it has a fine and crispy crust and is cooked so that inside it is moist to the bone. For chicken, ham, breads, jams or jellies there is no strict rule or regulation:

'Cause cookin' lak religion is

Some's 'lected and some ain 't,

An'rules don 'no mo'mek a cook

Den sermons make a mount.

One of the most beguiling--and authoritative--books on the subject is The Taste of Country Cooking (Knopf), by Edna Lewis, a black gourmande of some 50 years, whose recipes are marinated in memory and deep-fried in philosophy. If there is a single definitive guide to Southern cookery, it is American Cooking: Southern Style (TIME-LIFE Books), by Eugene Walter. It is often quoted by gourmets steeped in Southern lore and victuals.

In few places in the world are the principles and formulas of food and drink so passionately disputed as they are in the South. Though the basic cuisine has remained virtually unchanged for two centuries, its exponents argue loudly and stubbornly over the proper methods of its preparations. New Yorker George Lang, a famed international restaurateur and culinary scholar, lists 28 distinct and acceptable methods of making Southern fried chicken. A mint julep may seem a simple thing to prepare, but arguments rage hotly (usually after two of them) that the mint should be a) mashed, or b) lightly bruised, or c) inserted in the chilled silver mug as a virginal sprig intacta.

Good food and drink and entertainment are dearer and closer to life in the South than almost anywhere else. Thomas Jefferson, the most elegant American cultivator of foreign customs, brought back from Paris many great and glorious recipes that inspired good cookery in every section of this blessed and food-loving land. The legacy survives. So does the disputation. So does the food.

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