Reed - But Mama always put vodka in her sangria!: adventures in eating, drinking, and making merry

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For my parents, Judy and Clarke Reed

And in joyful memory of Anne Ross and Burrell McGee

Contents

Acknowledgments

This books title comes from a story involving Elizabeth McGee Cordes and her mother, Anne Ross McGee. Ive spent my entire life celebrating birthdays and Christmases and countless other occasions with Elizabeth and her sister Anne. We grew up in each others houses and when I first began spending time in New Orleans more than twenty years ago, I spent more restorative hours at Elizabeths kitchen table than in any local restaurant. I am endlessly grateful for my relationship with Elizabeth and Anne and Elizabeths 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 matterexcept 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 cant imagine anyone with whom Id 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. Martins, 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 jamn ibrico 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 Id 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 doeuvres, and went back in the kitchen to finish cooking. I swear I wasnt inside for more than twenty minutes, but when I emerged I found most of the guests in varying degrees of disarraytalking 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 normalindeed, standardaddition. 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, Anneto whom I refer in life and on these pages as McGeeAnne Ross was my mothers 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, its 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 its 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 didnt 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 Rosss hometown of Carrollton, Mississippi, they drove over, determined to meet him. After bribing a guard with a case of beer, they crept onto the seta cattle pasturedisguised 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.