The Cracker Kitchen; A Cookbook in Celebration of Cornbread-Fed, Down Home Family Stories and Cuisine

by Janis Owens; Pat Conroy

• ISBN13: 9781416594840
• ISBN10: 1416594841
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-02-10
• Publisher: Scribner

Summary

Though our roots are in the Colonial South, we Crackers are essentially just another American fusion culture, and our table and our stories are constantly expanding -- nearly as fast as our waistlines. We aren't ashamed of either, and we're always delighted with the prospect of company: someone to feed and make laugh, to listen to our hundred thousand stories of food and family and our long American past. Crackers, rednecks, hillbillies, and country boys have long been the brunt of many jokes, yet this old Southern culture is a rich and vibrant part of American history. InThe Cracker Kitchen, Janis Owens traces the root of the word Cracker back to its origins in Shakespeare's Elizabethan England -- when it meant braggart or big shot -- through its proliferation in America, where it became a derogatory term to describe poor and working-class Southerners. This compelling anthropological exploration peels back the historic misconceptions connected with the word to reveal a breed of proud, fiercely independent Americans with a deep love of their families, their country, their stories, and, most important, their food. With 150 recipes from over twenty different seasonal menus, The Cracker Kitchenoffers a full year's worth of eating and rejoicing: from spring's Easter Dinner -- which includes recipes for Easter Ham, Green Bean Bundles, and, of course, Cracklin' Cornbread -- to summer's Fish Frys, fall's Tailgate Parties, and winter's In Celebration of Soul, honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. Recounted in Owens's delightful and hilarious voice, the family legends accompanying each of these menus leap off the page. We meet Uncle Kelly, the Prince of the Funny Funeral Story, who has family and friends howling with laughter at otherwise solemn occasions. We spend a morning with Janis and her friends at a Christmas Cookie Brunch as they bake delectable gifts for everyone on their holiday lists. And Janis's own father donates his famous fundamentalist biscuit recipe; truly a foretaste of glory divine. The Cracker Kitchenis a charming, irresistible celebration of family, storytelling, and good old-fashioned eating sure to appeal to anyone with an appreciation of Americana.

Excerpts

INTRODUCTIONPat ConroyIt was my great friend Doug Marlette who first brought me news of the amazing Florida novelist Janis Owens. He had met her at a book festival when he was publishing his first novel,The Bridge, and called to tell me he had found a new best friend for both of us. He was reading her first novel,My Brother Michael, and he didn't understand why Janis Owens wasn't famous.When I asked what was so great about her, Doug mentioned her pure authenticity, her comfortableness in her own skin, and her amazing gifts at storytelling. As Doug knew, I have a primordial attraction to the storytellers of the world. I ordered her three novels that night, and by the time I met Janis, I had readMy Brother Michael,Myra Sims, andThe Schooling of Claybird Catts. The three novels were an astonishment and a dilemma for me. She wrote about the hookwormed, xenophobic redneck South that has received such incessant ridicule in the literature of the South (including my own works) and in Hollywood movies that shiver with pleasure when their villains speak with those phony Southern accents. Janis used the termCrackerwith affection and great understanding, and as I read her, I understood that she was awakening ghosts in my own kingdom that I would sooner or later have to interrogate if I was ever to understand the reign of both beauty and confusion in the life of my own mother, Peg Conroy.When I finished reading the three books, I called Doug Marlette and echoed his question: "Why isn't Janis Owens world famous?"When I read her cookbook, it was a revelation. She would refer to herself and her family as Crackers and Rednecks with pride and affection and a great tenderness. If I had ever called my family or my cousins rednecks, I think it doubtful that my mother would have talked to me again. Though my mother hailed from an Alabama family whose Cracker credentials were in perfect order, she spent much of her energy and all of her life in denial of this unassailable fact. She became a brilliant historian of her own life, and almost nothing she said about herself was true.After my mother readGone With the Wind, and after her total immersion in the character of Scarlett O'Hara, my mother reinvented herself. The young girl who had previously answered to the name of Frances changed her middle name to Margaret and ordered her family to call her Peggy, after her new heroine Margaret "Peggy" Mitchell. I learned this story on the day we buried my mother in the Beaufort National Cemetery. It was the same day my grieving stepfather, Dr. John Egan, said between sobs that it was "such an honor to be married to a Southern aristocrat." My mother was an open-field runner against her past. Because I adored everything about her, I think I let her turn me into the same thing.Janis Owens's cookbook is a love letter written to celebrate the poor white people of the American South who were my mother's people and my own. Since Janis is incapable of writing a bad sentence, her cookbook is a joy to read and a pleasure to return to again and again. She has produced a Cracker Escoffier, or a White-Trash Julia Child, that is hilarious and charming. Her tour of Southern food seems definitive to me. She does not gussy up any of her recipes for stylistic or culinary reasons. It makes you hungry just to flip through the pages of this high-spirited and userfriendly book. It also took me to long-forgotten memories of my past.I've often written about my mother's failure as a Southern cook. As a housewife in the fifties, my mother discovered the labor-saving pleasures of frozen food. Even today, I cannot pass a frozen chicken-pot pie without becoming bulimic. My brother Mike has a freezer full of them and eats them with relish whenever he feels nostalgic for Mom. Frozen macaroni and cheese is an abomination unto the Lord to me.When I escaped my mother's