So I've been planning this crazy in Alabama meal and forgot to post anything! There's not a huge amount of food descriptions in this book but what I did find was a great passage that describes convenience food. Young Pejoe has just moved in with he's uncle and aunt who pretty much live on ready made food, yet he's used to he's memaws traditional home cooking. Here's what he has to say about it...
"I suppose that Earlene's cooking would not have seemed as bad if I hadn't eaten at Memaws table all my life. Earlene had a thing for modern convenience foods. If it didn't come in a can, or frozen, or in a box with directions, she wasn't interested. We ate pop tarts in the morning, Boyardee ravioli at noon, Tater tots and Mrs Paul's fish sticks at night. Earlene didn't care whether we ate it or not. Once she'd heated it up and slapped it out there, she considered she had done her part. Usually Dove dined alone at the table while the rest of us sprawled in front of the TV with our plates in our laps.
This was Wiley's definition of good eating. Also Wiley had a sweet tooth and all of Earlene's meals turned out sweet one way or another, even the frozen French fries, even the Campbell's alphabet soup. I pined for Meemaw's black-eyed peas and fried chicken and the fat slices of tomato from her garden. Wiley said I was stupid, that was country food."
A great description of ready meals, no? I'm going to be honest and say that I recognise this scene from my own youth. I was bought up on a diet of fish fingers and chips with nearly everything, and I have been left with an incredibly sweet tooth.
This isn't to say that no cooking took place in my house, Every Sunday there was and still is a roast dinner. My dads roast potatoes have yet to be eclipsed by anyone Else's. He doesn't use goose fat or anything like that, plain vegetable oil in a separate pan from the roast and he basted them regularly.
I was confirmed of these potatoes superiority when I cooked them for the best cook I've ever known in my life (an exes dad, he's mum was a damn fine cook too) and they were asking how I got the potatoes that shade of golden round the edges whilst still being fluffy on the inside.
The thing was, cooking was for special occasions, the amazing birthday cakes related in the post for baking cakes in Kigali for example.
My parents could cook I knew it yet we often had the easy option, which to my mind isn't always easier anyway. Think of an omelet, easy (once you get the hang of it) and super quick and a 100 times tastier than tescos finest!
It does seem that although people can and do enjoy cooking that it's seen as something that is the domain of either people with lots of time, like the image of country folk or lots of money.
Being someone without too much of either this seems strange to me, I do night shifts and so on some days it's straight out of bed and into the kitchen for dinner.
I don't make a great deal of money, I don't bring in even a grand a month and I've found that cooking most things from scratch saves me both time and money.
Why wait for a pizza to be delivered for 45 minuets when you can make pasta with a simple sauce in the same time?
I think I'm talking about this because I also saw Jamie Oliver's American food revolution on TV last night. It's pretty scary watching to see the hostility people have towards someone trying to help your kids live longer by giving them a balanced attitude towards food which will hold them in great stead for the future.
I wonder if maybe it's guilt and a worry that teaching kids restraint will lead to an eating disorder in later life.?
Anyway, this paragraph gave me what I was going to cook for this meal, fried chicken. Or in my case, oven fried chicken as a big pot of boiling oil scares the living daylights out of me as an image of me looking like a medieval solider who tried to capture a castle runs through my head.
I found the recipe for this in the book American classics by the cooks illustrated team. It goes through all the variations to give you the best method for the home cook. I'm loving this book for American food research and couldn't believe my luck when I found it in a charity shop for 50p.
Anyway I'm off to the butchers now and I'll post the results up in the next few days hopefully.
