Recipes

Recipes for food that can be served at book club meetings for Blue Highways

Kirk crossed the street to the Exxon station and came back with three Cokes and a Kickapoo Joy Juice. “Ran flat out of Coke,” he said.
There was a discussion over who had to drink the “Injun piss.” “I’ve never had it,” I said. “Let me try it.”

I pulled makings for a sandwich from my haversack: Muenster cheese, a collop of hard salami, sourdough bread, horseradish. I cut a sprig of watercress and laid it on, then ate slowly, letting the gurgle in the water and the guttural trilling of red-winged blackbirds do the talking. A noisy, whizzing gnat that couldn’t decide whether to eat on my sandwich or ear joined me.

By a row of windows opening to the water, a woman dipped river perch in cornmeal batter and dropped them, crackling, into a skillet.

Rosemary Hammond, a jolly woman, used to be a schoolteacher, but she was now a librarian in Danville.
She set out baked chicken, mashed potatoes, radishes, pickles, hot tea.

Good Friday, I was on my way to eat breakfast in the Trustees’ Hall of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, a colony of charitable people known somewhat whimsically as “Shakers.”

I took a sideboard breakfast of scrambled eggs, thick-cut bacon, sausage, grits, peaches, figs, grapefruit, tomato juice, milk, and pumpkin muffins. An inappropriate place for gluttony, but I lost my restraint. From my table I looked through long windows onto a tomato patch from the year before; a meadowlark let loose a piece of plaintive song in the mist, and a recognition moved in my memory as if I’d been here before.

One time I found a six-calendar cafe in the Ozarks, which served fried chicken, peach pie, and chocolate malts, that left me searching for another ever since.

“Thurmond, get the boy a piece of buttermilk pie afore he goes on.

Making sausage from scratch..

Hilda pulled food off the woodstove in the backroom: home-butchered and canned whole-hog sausage, home-canned June apples, turnip greens, cole slaw, potatoes, stuffing,

hot cornbread. All delicious.

What happened next came about because of an obese child eating a Hi-Ho cracker in the back of an overloaded stationwagon. She gave me a baleful stare. As I passed, the driver, an obese woman eating a Hi-Ho, gave me a baleful stare, Ah, genetics! Oh, blood!

The Duchess went back to the kitchen, and the waitress set out my platter of fried fresh fish, grilled potatoes, and slaw. Basic food, tasty without expertise, prepared by the Duchess and her daughter personally.

. . . Brother Francis called me to lunch. The meal was a strange combination of monastic spareness and a Little League picnic: on a plain white plate, boiled cabbage, a boiled potato, figs, rye bread, and hotdog; raspberry Kool-Aid to drink.

(at the monastery) The evening meal was vegetable soup, peas, rice, bread, vanilla pudding. Again, just enough.

The Cajun Fried Chicken stand in Monroe (accent the first syllable), where I’d stopped for gas, determined the direction of the next several days.

Now, I’ve eaten my share of gumbo, but never had I tasted anything like that gumbo: the oysters were fresh and fat, the shrimp succulent, the spiced sausage meaty, okra sweet, rice soft, and the roux — the essence — the roux was right. We could almost stand our spoons on end in it.

She brought a metal beer tray piled with boiled, whole crawfish glowing the color of Louisiana hot sauce. I worked my way down through the stack. The meat was soft and piquant, sweeter than shrimp, but I had no stomach for the buttery, yellow fat the Cajuns were sucking from the shells.
The waitress said “Did they eat lovely like mortal sin?” and winked a lacy eyelid. “You know, the Cajun, he sometime call them ‘mudbugs.’ But I never tell a customer that until he all full inside. But the crawfish, he live smilin’ in the mud, he do.”

On the walk at Black’s Oyster Bar a chalk sign: FRESH TOPLESS SALTY OYSTERS. Inside next to a stuffed baby alligator, hung an autographed photo of Paul Newman, who had brought the cast of The Drowning Pool to Black’s while filming near Lafayette. Considering that a recommendation, I ordered a dozen topless (“on the half shell”) and a fried oyster loaf (oysters and hot pepper garnish heaped between slices of French bread). Good enough to require a shrimp loaf for the road.

I called my cousin again, got directions, and drove up to her house. The sun was gone when the family sat down to dinner. A pair of heavy moths bumped the screen, and we took barbecued chicken from the platter. It had been a long time since I’ve eaten among faces I’d seen before, and I knew it would be hard leaving.

At the counter I drank a Royal Crown; the waitress dropped my quarter into you the cash register, a King Edward cigarbox. It was too much. I ordered a dinner.

She set down a long plate of ham, beans, beets, and brown gravy. I seasoned everything with hot peppers in vinegar. From the partition came a thump-thump like an empty beer bottles rapping on a table. The waitress pulled two Lone Stars from the faded cooler, foam trickling over her fingers as she carried them back. In all the time I was there, I heard a voice from the rear only once. “I’m tellin’ you, he can flat out throw that ball.”

The desert gave me an appetite that would have made carrion crow stuffed with saltbush taste good. I found a Mexican Café of adobe, with a whitewashed log ceiling, creek stone fireplace, and jukebox pumping out mirarchi music. It was like a bunkhouse. I ate burritos, chile rellenos, and pinto beans, all ladled over with a fine incendiary sauce the color of sludge from an old steel drum.

I finished the tortillas when she sat down huevos rancheros with chopped (prickly pear), rice, and a gringo glass of milk to extinguish the combustibles.

Ten thousand taco stands pedal concoctions cooked by some guy who pronounces the l’s in tortilla, and, in the Southwest, cafés like the Manhattan serve a good but basic fair; yet, only a few places turn out the dishes that put a concinero in a class with the chef: squash blossom and Chilada, chicken in green pumpkin-seed sauce, tortilla soup, drunken octopus, sweet tamales, shrimp marinated in jalapeños,

lime soup, chicken breast pudding, chicken-in-a-shirt.