Martha Hall Foose - Screen Doors and Sweet Tea: Recipes and Tales from a Southern Cook

Copyright 2008
by Martha Foose
Photographs copyright 2008
by Ben Fink

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States
by Clarkson Potter/Publishers,
an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House,
Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com

Clarkson N. Potter
is a trademark and Potter
and colophon are
registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Foose, Martha Hall.
Screen doors and sweet tea :
recipes and tales from a Southern
cook /
Martha Hall Foose. 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Cookery, AmericanSouthern
style. II. Title.
TX715.2.S68F65 2008
641.5975dc22 2007031646

eISBN: 978-0-307-88555-5

v3.1

M AILBOX H APPY H OUR
and Pick-Up Party Food

S OME PEOPLE MIGHT SAY I GOT WHAT I DESERVE, ENDING UP RIGHT BACK WHERE I STARTED, HERE IN MISSISSIPPIS DELTA. Growing up in and around Yazoo City, Mississippi, I spent a lot of time daydreaming about how to get out of here. Oh, we had fun, mind you. But there was the whole wide world out there, and not much of it seemed to pass down Highway 49. Food always offered a ticket to adventure for me all my life. Some of those first experiences were visits to New Orleans, a city that still fascinates me with its unique flavors and mysterious tales. I remember sneaking into Tipitinas kitchen back door with my uncle to hear the Neville Brothers. I ate my way through the food tents with alligator po boys and other exotic fare at Jazz Fest each spring break and had my first dress-up white-linen-tableclothed dinner at Antoines. Other revelations about the world came by way of the occasional appearance of recipes brought back home as souvenirs by traveling relatives. Friends with family ties to faraway homelands informed and intrigued me with exotic spices.

Books offered alternative adventures to me as I grew up amid the kudzu. Mrs. Wilburn would read aloud to our fourth-grade class each morning from Willie Morriss books. We hung on every word, sending up a sorrowful awww when she would leave us hanging until the next day. For the first time I realized that a book could be about where you were from. Until then they had been about fairy-tale kingdoms or tales of old or distant places covered by National Geographic. Later the lovely Bea Donnelly, Dean of Girls at my high school, introduced me to Faulkners story The Bear, and my love of books about the South became firmly rooted.

I went to work right out of high school in Oxford, Mississippi, upstairs in the caf at Square Books, which sparked a love of cookbooks. Legendary local cookbooks Bayou Cuisine and Gourmet of the Delta never left my kitchen and were referenced until dog-eared. As I grew up a bit more, food service offered employment to a girl looking for her first taste of independence. Jobs from Austin to Aspen, Burlington to Los Angeles, and New Orleans to Minneapolis allowed me to take the ride on the ticket.

When I went off to cooking school in France, I quickly found out that to some people, being from the Mississippi Delta was exoticas different as my fellow students provenances were to me. It slowly came to light that when most of these folks thought of America, they thought of the South. To many of my new acquaintances it appeared that American music meant rhythm n blues and jazz; tales of America were learned from Miss Eudora Welty; and when it came to food, fried chicken was for dinner. This sentiment seemed to echo throughout all my travelsanywhere from Africa to South Americaand was even expressed by my tuk-tuk driver in Thailand.

I moved back home to the Delta about five years ago to our familys place, Pluto Plantation, and into the home I inherited from my grandmother. Homesickness brought me back. But what has kept me here is a love and appreciation for the land and its people. The hardscrabble life of hill-country Mississippi rolls down to the genteel seas of loam in the Delta and spreads out to a straight-lined horizon. Bordered by bayous, this place, described by Richard Ford as the Souths south, is in a constant state of change. The maneuverings of rivers change its borders, and migrations of people change its population. Still, folks hold on, conceivably out of hard-headedness, or perhaps because there is a unique bond here between the people of the Mississippi Delta and the alluvian plain on which they live.

All in all, this book is about my home, and I know no better way to tell its stories than through food. Recipes for collard greens and black-eyed peas capture our superstitions, but trust passes them along. Recipes like crisp, golden-rimmed tea cakes scented with nutmeg conjure dimly lit homes of elderly relations. The smell of a skillet bread browning on the stovetop transports me back in time to when this land was cleared at the end of the century before last. The slow simmering of my gumbos mimics the pace of our speech down here. The unadorned perfection of home-grown tomatoes paired with delicate lady peas is just one way for me to explain this placeand I guess myself, too.

I hope this album of recipes and memories imbues you with a sense of this extraordinary place as it lays bare the deep, rich textures, colors, rhythms, and flavors of my home. My wish is that you feel inspired to re-create them in your own home for a little taste of what life is like down South.

M C C ARTY P OTTERY J ULEPS
Cool Clay Marked with the River

M AILBOX C OCKTAIL
Fold Down Door, Set Down Drink

B LOODIES
With Pickled Snap Beans

C ANTALOUPE D AIQUIRIS
A Courtyard Concoction

M ILK P UNCH
Please, Whatever You Do

S WEET T EA
Voted Best in the Delta, with Crooked-Neck Spoons

B LACKBERRY L IMEADE
Amethyst Elixir

C HERRY -V ANILLA C REAM S ODA
Fizzing Drink

R OASTED P ECANS
Deeply Darkened

B UTTERMILK B ACON P RALINES
Sweet, Salty, Ridiculous

Y AZOO C HEESE S TRAWS
Aged and Sharp

S OLD M Y S OUL TO THE D EVIL-ED E GGS
Cooking to the Blues