{Pre-heat}
Let’s start with the rib-stickers of waist-wideners that ward off the cold lean of a belly’s grumble: back-fat and fat back, with ham hocks, and bacon grease and lard-lined pans—“to season” stews and pots full of vegetables: white acre and black-eyed peas, lima and green beans make tongues live easy and jaws clap in ovation of fill theS empty gut.
Let’s continue with leftover Thanksgiving’s turkey carcass boiled-all-day-down till its spare skeletal frame elbows the pot’s brim, and swats at and ducks from the wooden spoon. Just a spoonful of carnage helps the ingredients meld down, in the most traditional way: gumbo, gravy, étouffée, chili, barbeque, roux.
{Preparation of Main Course}
Vegetarians, like vultures, scavenge too for Earth’s tendrils: umbilical fruits, parsnips, organic algae. Southern Vegetarians’ hands handle oyster knives, cut-up okra and tomatoes, yellow squash and Spanish onions with a teat of brown sugar. Pillagers they are. Harvesters in-season.
Vegetarians shuck then fry yellow and white corn kernels, strewn with salt and black-pepper seasonings in a pan to plate right next to Jiffy cornbread baked in 9-inch cast iron skillets, coated in vegetable oil. Season-side-up, double-dipped in buttermilk, deep-fried okra drowns paper towels lined in a tinfoil cake pan.
{Dessert}
Southerners jar jelly, fill lard-laden piecrusts, hand-patted with flour, and then folded with fruit—been-out-all-week fruit ripens on countertops, like bananas, apples, and pineapples. Banana puddings, peach & blueberry cobblers, meld down with sticks of butter. Cake heaven on holidays, passport us to German Chocolate, and Italian Cream; just a slice of cream cheese pound cake, coconut or red velvet, tradition the most Southern way.
by Yolanda J. Franklin