Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties: An Entertaining Life (with Recipes)

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Introduction

Several years ago, in my former apartment in Manhattan, I threw a going-away party for my close friend and editor Michael Boodro, who was leaving Vogue to become editor-in-chief of Garden Design magazine. It was spring, and in honor of the occasion I was mindful that a horticultural theme should be more or less in play. But in the end, except for covering a cake with brightly colored flowers, I did what I always do for big parties. I passed silver trays of ham biscuits (hot buttered Marshall’s biscuits with a thin slice of ham, country or otherwise, tucked inside), along with pimento cheese sandwiches (on Pepperidge Farm Very Thin wheat, cut into strips), watercress sandwiches (rolled, with sprigs sticking out of one end), and cucumber sandwiches (on rounds of regular Pepperidge Farm white with homemade mayonnaise). On the dining table there were: platters piled with crabmeat maison ( jumbo lump crabmeat mixed with homemade mayonnaise, capers, and thinly sliced scallions) accompanied by toast points; steamed asparagus spears with bright yellow curry dip; deviled eggs (I use my friend Rick Ellis’s recipe, which boasts both butter and mayonnaise); and thickish slices of rare beef tenderloin with horseradish sauce and Sister Schubert’s yeast rolls. Sometimes I substitute lamb or pork for the beef (and a chutney mayonnaise for the horseradish sauce), and occasionally I will also add a platter of smoked salmon with brown bread and dill butter. I can’t remember if I did the latter for this particular gathering; what I do know is that people went crazy.

Now at this point I had lived in New York for more than a decade. My own friends were used to the transplanted Southern specialties I always had on offer, but this group was mostly made up of Michael’s friends, and they had clearly never dipped an asparagus spear into a bowl of curry dip or bitten into a hot ham biscuit in their lives. In a city where "hors d’oeuvres" all too often mean ubiquitous skewers of dried-out chicken saté or half-cooked snow peas with an ambiguous "fish paste" piped inside, it is relatively easy to wow people, and I have yet to discover a deviled egg or a giant lump of crabmeat bathed in homemade mayonnaise that didn’t do the trick. What I didn’t expect was the call I got the next day from a guest who was then an editor at the New York Times Magazine. "How would you like to write about food?"

So it was that the essays and recipes collected in this book came into being. To this day, I feel (almost) guilty for having been paid for them, such was the pleasure I derived in putting them together.

I am a person whose bedside reading is almost always a stack of cookbooks; my most fervent hope is that some really smart, very rich person will buy the once-great New Orleans creole palace Antoine’s and give me total control over the place. Such is my obsession with this particular dream—and just in case it ever comes true—I regularly drive my husband crazy sounding out ideas for the daily specials I plan to offer in the restaurant’s underused front room, where I also intend to install a marble-topped oyster bar. There is nothing that makes me happier than discovering a new canapé or spending long days—and nights—planning a party. I have clocked so many hours with my friend Keith Meacham, who, like me, was born in the Mississippi Delta, armed with legal pads and Post-it notes, poring over seating charts and mapping out possible menus, that her husband Jon, the author and editor of Newsweek, now refers to us—with more than a hint of derision—as the "crabmeat caucus." (In spite of himself, he appreciates what we’re up to—he inaugurated Newsweek’s first-ever food column, after all, and generously asked me to pen it.)

This obsession with food and entertaining is not my fault. I grew up in a place where restaurants were few and cooking was of paramount importance. We give food away as presents and peace offerings, and sometimes just because it is so incredibly good that we have no choice but to share it. (One of my favorite utterances is an emphatic, "You have just got to taste this.") We tote it to people in times of grief (when my grandparents were killed in a car wreck, the first thing my mother told me to do as she ran out the door was to empty the refrigerator); we use it to say bon voyage or welcome back. I was never home from boarding school for more than ten minutes, for example, before a family friend named John Gannon would appear at the back door with a pot of the red beans and rice he knew I’d been deprived of; when I finally got married, his widow gave me his recipe, beautifully written in calligraphy on a now-spattered card.

Giving a party was as natural as breathing, and almost as necessary and frequent (there wasn’t a lot else to do, but the people were really interesting). The party for Michael was an example of what my mother will only refer to as a cocktail supper, a term I tried for years to introduce to New Yorkers without much success. Essentially, a cocktail supper is an event that is for all practical purposes a cocktail party (a lot of people, a lot of booze) but one with enough food to constitute supper should you care to avail yourself of it, which also means it does not come to a screeching halt at eight p.m. It is not called a buffet supper because in addition to the fact that the word "buffet" is somehow slightly tacky, it does not include dinner plates or even silverware, both of which would interfere with your ability to hold and imbibe a cocktail. Every item is designed to be eaten fairly easily and neatly with your hands, and the most you can hope for is a small plate or, in my house, stacks of cocktail napkins with which to wipe your fingers. It is one of my favorite kinds of parties to give, as well as one of my favorites to attend, because my progress—talking, laughing, drinking, meeting people, quickly escaping them should the need arise—is not hindered by the task of getting a plate and finding a seat. This is also true of a cocktail party, but the food on hand at a cocktail supper is far more substantial than the odd passed canapé, so that your progress is also unhindered by falling down drunk. But in Manhattan, where people often endeavor to pack multiple events into their evenings, I found that they were confused. If they had a dinner date or another cocktail engagement to attend, they usually regretted it—they thought they were locked into a sit-down supper and thus could not risk stopping by.

Such was not the case at home. The cocktail supper remains such a staple that I feel sure that by now my mother has thrown at least a thousand of them—along with brunches and luncheons and formal sit-down dinners, not to mention catfish fries, poolside picnics, and dances in our backyard. But she is hardly alone and, best of all, every generation was allowed to get in on the act. When I was five years old, my mother and her best friend Bossy McGee gave an Easter dinner party for me and for Bossy’s two daughters, my friends Anne (whom I refer to as "McGee" in life and on these pages) and Elizabeth. There is a photo of the event in which I am wearing a pale yellow dress with a handmade lace collar and white Mary Janes, sitting with five other girls and boys at one of the two formally set round tables on our terrace at home in Greenville. The tables were lit by beautifully striped, egg-shaped votive candles that Bossy and Mama had spent days making by pouring layers of pastel-colored wax into hollowed-out eggshells. The candlelight lent a magical element to the proceedings, and we all were thrilled by the solid chocolate eggs they made by pouring melted Hershey bars into still more hollowed out eggshells.

I still cannot fathom what possessed them to go to such elaborate—and elegant—lengths for our young selves, but in the years since, I have seen them devote the same amount of attention to countless other shindigs, including the rehearsal dinner given for Bossy’s nephew and his fiancé, for which they made homemade chicken Kiev for more than a hundred people, pounding and rolling countless chicken breasts around pats of cold herbed butter. No task was ever too much to take on. When I was eleven and we had just begun dismantling our house for a major renovation, my father, typically oblivious to such details, announced that a famous author, who was also a political columnist and magazine editor, was flying into town for dinner in three days’ time. Immediately, door-frames were remounted, a fireman who moonlighted as a painter came every morning at two a.m. to paint over what damage had already been done. Forty people were quickly invited by phone and, due to the number, it was decided tables would be set up inside and out. My mother bought a raft of old wicker chairs for the outdoor seating, so she and Bossy and various other friends and neighbors set about making seat cushions, armed with staple guns and bolts of pale green cotton canvas.

It was a landmark event of sorts because my mother planned what would become her legendary standby, the short-notice-but-elegant menu Bossy dubbed the "V.D. Dinner," referring to the various "visiting dignitaries" who would partake of it over the years. Though by now it has endured variations driven by my mother’s occasional whims and changing seasons, the basics remain pretty much the same: rare tenderloin or a rib-eye roast, butter lettuce with avocado and pink grapefruit, wild rice pilaf, spinach and artichoke casserole, scalloped oysters, homemade yeast rolls, and either charlotte Russe or chocolate mousse for dessert.

By the time the writer arrived, no one could tell the house had been in utter disarray just a few days earlier. One of our friends, a totally charming ex-patriot Brit cotton farmer, was also a vibraphonist, so he brought his vibes just in case the spirit moved the writer, who was a gifted pianist. The spirit moved both of them—a lot—and I remember that Bossy’s very good-looking niece danced on the table to at least one number, and that I went to sleep listening to the writer’s rousing version of "Cielito Lindo" which in those days I knew only as the "Frito Bandito" song. When the writer’s wife, an accomplished Manhattan hostess, returned home, she wrote my mother for the oyster recipe.

I loved the excitement that went into those kinds of triumphs, and from a very early age I tried to produce a few of my own. Since my mother insured that my own birthday parties were the stuff of legend (every year, from the time I was two until he retired, they were written up by local newspaper columnist Brodie Crump), I insisted on planning the birthday parties of my mother and father, choosing the menu and the guests, and setting at each place the same crepe paper surprise balls that I enjoyed at my own celebrations. Again, it is astonishing to me that my parents and their friends so enthusiastically indulged me in these endeavors, but they did, and I owe whatever confidence I have as a hostess to the fact that those early efforts were not shot down, or worse, laughed at.

Somewhere along the way I also learned to cook. I was fascinated by my mother’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, one of the few cookbooks she owned that was bound like an actual book, rather than with the usual plastic binders of various Junior League publications. By the time I was ten, I had made so many quiche lorraines that my Uncle Mike, my Aunt Frances’s beloved second husband whose fine gift-and-antiques store featured a cooking school in the basement, gave me an enormous porcelain quiche dish with a lovely horn-handled server, both of which I still have. From our family cook, Lottie Martin, I learned the importance of the cook’s hand. Lottie could follow and excel at any written recipe my mother gave her, but when she made things like mashed potatoes or biscuits or even pie crusts, I noticed that she never followed a single instruction—and that her versions were always far better than anyone else’s.

Lottie died way too young—I was fourteen—but my mother had cooked alongside her for enough hours to have absorbed many of her tricks, and when I went off to college I dutifully copied many of Mama’s "greatest hits" in a bound blank book that I still refer to all the time. None of our undergraduate friends knew what to make of the parties my roommate and I gave in our Georgetown apartment, since the usual college fare of blocks of cheese and canned dip was replaced by a slightly more economical version of the menu for the party in honor of Michael. Instead of studying my Logic textbook, I planned elaborate brunches featuring Craig Claiborne’s cheese grits, my mother’s curried fruit, and slow-scrambled eggs with braised artichoke bottoms and mushrooms from the battered volume of Mastering the Art I had claimed as my own. When I reached my twenties, other then-revolutionary cookbooks joined it on my shelf: Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook, The Silver Palate Cookbook, and Wolfgang Puck’s first outing, Modern French Cooking. On a visit home, I made a birthday dinner for my father from the latter—shrimp in a mustard tarragon sauce and carrot loaf, both recipes I still use—but the California chardonnays we were all just learning about replaced the surprise balls.

These days I own hundreds of cookbooks, and many august cooks whom I mention on these pages have served as influences, but when I entertain I almost always return to the fare of my youth, the stuff my mother and Bossy and countless numbers of their friends put on their tables: fried chicken and tomato aspic with dollops of homemade mayonnaise, country ham with homemade hot mustard, fried oysters and pickled shrimp and hot crabmeat mormay, seafood gumbos and stews, curried rice salad and squash casserole, salted pecans and peppery cheese straws. The list, thank God, is endless because, like my mother, I throw a lot of parties. But the driving theory behind each offering is the same. As Mama once asked me when I was headed down a particularly fraught and too-ambitious dinner party path: "Why don’t you just serve something that tastes really good?" This is not as easy as it sounds. It requires a certain sense of security for one thing—there are still a lot of people in this world who are convinced that a snow pea piped with an indiscernible pink paste is chicer than, say, a humble ham biscuit; that deviled eggs are for picnics only, that a French roll from a fine bakery is more impressive than a yeast roll cooked in an aluminum pan. They are wrong of course, and it is a lesson I am profoundly grateful that I learned at an early age.

Excerpted from Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties by Julia Reed

Copyright © 2008 by Julia Reed

Published in 2008 by St. Martin’s Press

All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher