The Arcadian School of Cookery
I
ONLY two fundamental methods of cooking have ever been devised. I have a quite clear conception of what they are, but I have trouble in finding names for them. ‘European and ‘American’ are not accurate enough; nor do ‘hotel cooking’ and ‘home cooking’ bring the matter any nearer to a point. The perfect term eludes me, but I can make myself clear if I say that the two great schools of cookery are the French and the Arcadian.
Fortunately, I have one friend who knows more than I do. I continually fall back on him when I want to handle a subject from the bottom up. So when I asked him, entirely without warning, to tell me all about the origins of French cooking, I was not surprised that he had it at his tongue’s end. He plunged into a two-hour dissertation about Asia Minor, Sybaris, nightingales’ tongues, and other learned matters which I am positively not going to inflict on my reader. I shall pause over French cooking only long enough to distinguish it from the Arcadian.
The conceptions of the two schools are radically different. French cooking takes the human sense of taste as its basis. It continually seeks to soothe or startle the jaded palate. It has no respect for the fruits of earth as such, but seeks to disguise their natural flavors by combinations of ever-increasing subtlety. This elaborate art compels a certain admiration — but even at its best it will always seem to the Arcadian a bit theatrical and meretricious. And when weakly imitated, as in the cheaper sort of American hotels and restaurants, it is simply too painful to be remembered.
Arcadian cooking cannot exist without an imaginative feeling for the things that grow on the earth — an almost mystical regard for the natural flavor of each grain and fruit. To preserve, to nourish, to bring out these flavors in their fullest beauty — that is its function.
II
Of course it was by the merest accident that my earliest training should have helped me to understand all this. My father came from the North to a farm in the Georgia hills, and found to his delight that he could still grow his apples and rhubarb, his oats, his buckwheat, and his raspberries, and at the same time add a host of things that he had never seen before — figs and okra and sorghum, collards and pimientos and peanuts. And he experimented with them. He planted peach seeds and produced new varieties — white, yellow, clingstone, freestone. He tossed black walnuts into the corners of the pasture fence, and soon we had gracious and fruitful trees to shield us from the July sun.
In like manner my mother flourished, and expanded her art. She was peculiarly free from sectional prejudice. With the utmost care she cherished her New England lore about baked beans and pumpkin pie, but she also quickly became an adept with cowpeas and candied sweet potatoes. She learned to make ’lye hominy’ by boiling shelled corn in a great iron pot with a decoction of hickory ashes from the fireplace.
Arcadian cooking may flourish in both the neat pantries of Maine and the careless kitchens of Georgia; but it is amazing how little the sections appreciate each other, and how little exchange they make of their knowledge. It is literally true that I have never tasted good corn bread or buttermilk in the North, nor good apple pie or mashed potatoes in the South.
This is sometimes due to a fundamentally different household economy, sometimes to a false vision of what the product ought to be. The first reason accounts for the lack of good buttermilk in the North. On a Southern farm, milk for churning is handled in a way quite different from that familiar in the North. The cream is not separated from the milk, but the whole milk is strained at once into the churn. This is set away to sour in a cool place — perhaps the running water of a spring house. At the proper time it is churned with an old-fashioned wooden dasher, the butter finally ‘comes,’ and the floating lumps are removed with a paddle. The buttermilk which is left is full, rich, delicious — not at all like the acrid, watery fluid which Northerners call buttermilk, and which they rightly declare they do not like.
To reverse the picture — what a disastrous vision of apple pie lies heavy on the mind of the Southerner! He is hampered and limited by it from early youth. He makes no distinction between pie crust and biscuit dough. When I solemnly assure you that at Georgia barbecues I have seen apple pies stacked six deep, like a gigantic layer cake, and that the bottom pie was standing up well under the strain, you will understand what I mean. No use to rhapsodize to the Georgian about the flaky crusts of Vermont — he would n’t take it in. But neither would the Vermonter understand the golden tenderness of Georgia fried chicken. Both dishes must be sampled on the spot.
III
But the inner spirit of Arcadian cooking has nothing to do with sectional differences. It lies in simplicity — an inspired simplicity. I will give you an instance. On the farm we always raised a few acres of wheat, and after the threshing machine with its slow-footed oxen had gone, we had fifty or sixty bushels stowed away in bins. Not a crop to sell, but there was always enough for our own bread. The mill was only a few miles away on the nearest creek. The machinery was primitive, but it produced a flour warm and cream-tinted, and a still more delectable whole-wheat flour with all the bran left in.
Mother invented a bread which I have always considered an imaginative triumph — perhaps because of the very austerity of its restraint. It consisted solely of whole-wheat flour and a bit of salt, mixed with water to a stiff batter. This was spread thin in heavy iron muffin pans heated very hot. Since there was no yeast or other leavening agent, the result was a flat wafer with a crust which seemed both tough and crisp.
But the flavor was surpassingly delicious — the very soul of the wheat, that noblest of the grasses. When I remember it, and then look through shop windows at that strange, pale substance which the American people call bread, I can only weep for them. Somewhere between the time that the golden wheat leaves the field and the time it gets inside the grocer’s waxed paper, something terrible happens to it.
Of course this was not our usual sort of bread — the making of that was a high ritual. It was still made with whole-wheat flour, however; we all looked on white flour as an effeminate delicacy, suitable only for biscuits and cake. Mother had begun with a tradition from her mother, and then had built upon it, step by step. She was never able fully to communicate it, for no one else has been able to reproduce her bread. So much depended on the state of the yeast, the temperature of the air, the direction of the wind. (For did n’t the wind affect the drawing of the chimney and the heat of the stove?) Two days were taken up in the process; the ‘sponge’ must rise three times, be kneaded twice. On cold nights the stone crock which held the dough would be lovingly swathed in flannel and set near the warm ashes on the fireplace hearth.
When the brown loaves finally came out of the oven and the top crust was lightly dredged with melted butter, then the whole kitchen glowed with the savor. We all rushed in to see, to smell, to eat a bit of broken crust. Mother was happy, relieved, and innocently proud. For, although she almost never made a failure, with the humility of the true artist she always suffered from the fear that she might. As a special concession, one loaf would be eaten hot, for supper. The rest must wait until to-morrow. For there was a grim old New England tradition in our family that hot bread was practically fatal to the human stomach. As time went on, this tradition met and became strangely blended with the Southern tradition that no bread but hot bread is fit for human food. Mother continued to insist that ‘light bread’ (loaf bread to the Southerners) must be eaten cold; but little by little she accepted the delectable hot biscuit and steaming corn bread of Georgia, and neither her logic nor our digestions seemed to falter.
IV
Have I talked too much about bread? Not if I have encouraged the art of Arcadian cooking. But I must move on to the deeper aspects of my subject. My learned friend, of whom I have already spoken, long ago pointed out that it was quite in keeping with the Arcadian spirit to explore the possibilities of both native and exotic foods. He sends me seeds from all over the world, and I send him seeds from Georgia. Nothing delights him more than to see how a Georgia seed will behave when placed under the arctic circle. And it was in connection with this practice that he wrote his beautiful, satisfying essay on okra. I must, however, make myself clear from the beginning.
Okra is one of the most treasured vegetables of Southern gardens. Its growth is so rank that it beats the weeds at their own game. Productive all summer long, it keeps shooting out its tender pods until frost. The thousand kinds of fierce insects that cut short the lives of other plants never seem to touch it. And it is delicious — succulent as green corn, dainty as asparagus.
In gray-skied Bavaria my friend heard about okra and wrote to me for seed. ‘Please send to Atlanta,’ he pleaded, ‘and get me all the kinds there are. I want the long green kind whose portrait is in the catalogue, and the sort called white velvet, and the dwarf variety. If there are any other kinds, send them at once.’ Needless to say, okra seed were soon speeding across the water.
As my own garden shot up to meet the July sun, I clipped off a huge okra leaf and sent it, between sheets of cardboard, to Bavaria. It was sixteen inches across, and I was proud of it. Not until three weeks later, when the reply came, did I realize that I had done a cruel thing.
My friend’s letter was brave, but sad. It told the story of Georgia okra seed held down by a brutal climate. He had done his best. He had planted the seed in March, each seed in a little flower pot which was placed between the great German stove and the feather bed. By mid-June the seeds had germinated, and each had thrust a tiny leaf above the soil. Then the plants were transferred to the south side of the house, where the stone wall would catch the heat of the sun. But by midsummer they were only three inches tall, and each one had put forth a sickly blossom, fated never to bear fruit. Then came my gigantic leaf, with its mute testimony as to what okra ought to be.
As soon as I had read the letter I knew that the situation was grave. I could think of no parallel case where so strong an okra-growing impulse had been so completely thwarted. I was worried — but I had not counted on my friend’s remarkable powers of sublimation.
When he saw that his okra really was a failure, that the Alpine winds had been too keen for it, he wasted no time in useless sorrow. He boarded the train for Munich, fifty miles away, and buried himself for two weeks in its great library. When he came out, he was the world’s greatest authority on okra. As a preliminary result, he wrote me a fifty-page essay (later to be expanded into a volume) on okra in all its aspects. He treated it botanically, historically, and philologically. I learned how okra — a close relative of the cotton, the hibiscus, and the hollyhock — had once been a weed in the jungles of the Congo; how its seed had been carried by captive slaves to the West Indies; how French planters had learned of its value; and how it had finally been brought to America, where relatively few people have learned to appreciate its superlative excellence. When I got this essay, I not only realized that my friend was out of danger, but I also was stimulated to concoct three new okra recipes of purest Arcadian flavor, which, in their own quiet way, I hope may be worthy to stand beside my friend’s great work.
In some such spirit as this, we collaborate to perfect our natives and our exotics. Of plants native to Georgia, I hope to make known the possibilities of the persimmon, which hangs on the tree until midwinter, growing sweeter with each frost; of the scuppernong and the muscadine, the chinquapin and the wild crab apple. The black walnut has been devastated for its lumber, but it has never come into its own as the richest and most distinctive of our nuts.
V
But the thought of all these things to be cooked has led me far from the cooking itself. I must get back. And first to answer a question put to me by a trembling young novice, to whom I was imparting wisdom. ‘What part, sir, does the cookbook have in your philosophy of cooking?’ The cookbook should not be wholly scorned, but its place is subordinate. Never should a cookbook be regarded as more than the stepping-stone to some higher thing. The soul of good cooking is not quite transferable to print.
My mother’s old green-backed cookbook is one of my most treasured volumes. It was privately published more than fifty years ago by the Presbyterian Church ladies of an Ohio village. Many an Arcadian dish is outlined in its pages. But the best part of it is in my mother’s penciled notes, of which the margins are filled. In her clear, untroubled writing she tells of her own improvements and inventions. She never needed to ask the cookbook how much salt or sugar to put in. Her own vision of what she was making told her.
And of course the supreme ingredient of Arcadian cookery is poetic imagination. My mother showed it in everything she touched. In the last summer of her life we went up on the mountain where our cabin stood. She had a longing to make blackberry jelly, and we went into one of those little coves, high and remote, where millions of blackberries hide themselves in brambly thickets. Mother was nearing eighty, but she could scramble between the briers as nimbly as I could, and pick the berries faster. She helped me rout a rattlesnake from under a chestnut log.
I shall never forget our serene and happy talk. She told me of her long-distant girlhood in West Virginia; then of her own mother, who had come the long wilderness journey from Massachusetts, had fought the wolves away from the sheep, had borne ten children, and had lived to be ninety-eight years old.
‘You will live to be ninety-eight, too,’ I said — and believed it.
Mother lifted her eyes to the sunlight that lay on the tangled grapevines, and smiled. ’Oh, I love this country!’ she cried. ‘At first I was homesick, but now that forty years have passed I love it better than West Virginia. I want to go on forever, planting gardens, and wandering by the wild streams.’
She paused, and then added quietly: ‘But I shall not live to be ninety-eight — I am too tired.’
Such brave spirits ought to live forever. But when the frosts of that autumn came she had gone. And as I looked at the neat rows of blackberry jelly on the pantry shelf I knew that the jars glowed with more than the warmth of summer sunlight, that they imprisoned more than the fragrance of a summer day.
VI
I am reluctant to stop. There is so much that I have not been able to tell.
I should like, for instance, to give a word of gentle advice to Southerners, that they should learn to like parsnips and asparagus — toward which they are scornful and indifferent. And to Northerners, that they should investigate the possibilities of cowpeas and turnip greens — toward which they are haughty and supercilious. Also, I find to my horror that I have not given you a single actual recipe. That, perhaps, is as it should be — for I would emphasize not the letter but the spirit.
I do not have the heart, however, to disappoint you entirely. As a special concession, as a delicately given confidence, I shall tell you about my own two favorite dishes — the ones of which I am master. It is my humble claim that I can make cottage cheese (a Northern dish) and cracklin’ bread (which is pure Georgia) better than I have known anyone else to make them. Of course there may be persons living . . . but I have not met them.
Cottage cheese at its best surpasses every other dairy product, and in its delicate simplicity partakes of the very essence of Arcadia. Yet nine tenths of the cottage cheese that one encounters has been grossly, palpably mishandled. The two great errors are to heat it too much, which makes it tough, and not to heat it at all, which leaves it flabby and tasteless. I know that there are sincere artists who put the unheated sour milk into a cheesecloth bag and simply let it drain. But they have fallen into a grave heresy.
The only way to make cottage cheese is to brood over it, long and tenderly. The thick clabber, taken at just the right stage of its sourness and poured into a shallow pan, is put far back on the stove in a mellow heat. Soon the bottom will be heated, and whey will begin to appear. Then is the time to take a large spoon and gently fold the curds from top to bottom, evenly distributing the heat. When the whole mass has reached the temperature of a moderately warm shower bath — which may be ascertained by inserting the finger — it is taken from the stove and poured into a colander with coarse holes. If it has been properly handled, only the whey will go through. After it is thoroughly cooled and drained it should be salted, put into a dish, and a cupful of rich sour cream or rich sweet cream (according to your taste) should be folded in. The secret of the whole thing lies in delicate manipulation. Neither watery nor too dry — not heavy nor sodden, but light and flaky — that is your true cottage cheese! Battles have been fought as to whether a final dusting of black pepper should be added.
It was thus that my mother made cottage cheese, and after years of observation I ventured to compete with her. I have had two proud moments in my life. One of them was when, as an undergraduate at Harvard,
I made an A in Professor Kittredge’s Shakespeare course; the second was when my mother declared that my cottage cheese was better than hers.
The making of cracklin’ bread requires a wholly different mood. Cottage cheese must be made in solitude, behind locked doors; but cracklin’ bread calls for human companionship and the open sky. I like about sixpeople — it does n’t matter who they are, so long as they have a sympathetic understanding of cracklin’ bread and all its ways.
I take a heavy iron Dutch oven — with a long handle, three legs, and a lid — to the woods or the corner of some pasture, and build a small fire of oak and hickory sticks. While the oven is heating, I get in order and combine in a large yellow mixing bowl my corn meal, my buttermilk and soda, my eggs, my salt — and the cracklings. These, of course, are the crisp, delicious residue which remains at the bottom of the kettle after lard has been ’tried out.’ They are plentiful in Georgia at hog-killin’ time, and taste exactly like the dainty left ear of that roast piglet which gave Charles Lamb such delight.
The cracklings are the soul of the bread. No other corn bread is like it — especially when baked in a great thick loaf, with coals on the lid of the Dutch oven. It would do no good to give the measurements — they vary with the number of people and the size of the oven. The spoonfuls of soda cannot be counted — they depend on the sourness of the buttermilk. The making of cracklin’ bread is partly an art and partly an instinct. It is incommunicable.
And so I leave with you Arcadian cookery. It is hardly a remedy for national ills — perhaps it can flourish only in Arcadia. But at least it has preserved me — so far — from the necessity of playing bridge, and from the obligation of pretending to like golf.