AHHHHHH.....AMBROSIA!

My first mother-in-law was born and raised in Tennessee. She was a wonderful cook, and I learned to eat “real” food, as well as “southern” food at her table. As I may have noted earlier, my mother was an awful cook of even very ordinary and plain things. Food held no delights for her or, by extension, for my sis and me. So when I married into Ida May's family, I learned not only that real food could taste wonderful but also about corn bread cooked in a skillet, green beans simmered in a pot for hours with strips of bacon, and just how delicious fried okra was. I was especially fond of her fried okra, and even though I watched how she made it, I did not have the knack for cooking it. I tried many times without success. So knowing this, when she fixed it she would always phone us to come on over and help her eat it.


One day last summer while at the local laundromat I was nosing around in a magazine and came upon a new recipe for okra. The developer of the recipe was a southern cook used to making fried okra, but he had "seen the light" about not cooking with so much bacon fat (which of course is what made fried okra exceptionally tasty) and he said this: Don't spoil the okra by frying it or cooking it in gumbo. Pick out small okra pods, wash them lightly and sauté them in a frying pan with a balance of olive oil and butter. Cook them until they are just "al dente" (maybe 5 or 6 minutes), then drain, add salt and pepper and eat while hot. He swears that cooks have missed the boat for years by cooking them any other way. He says they were slimy in gumbos (that is correct) and lost their greenness to dark brown when fried in bacon fat (they did). He assures the readers that we will never want to eat them cooked any other way once we try his new way!


I tried his way, and I have two thoughts: Either this man wrote the new recipe just to have something published or he was crazy. I found it hard to believe that his highly touted healthy-cooking okra recipe would be good, and by golly, it wasn’t. I bought baby okra and followed his directions perfectly. And when I put those little sautéed okras in my mouth it was like trying to eat a slimy, hairy crispy bug. They were awful. How could that man say that we’d never go back to fried okra in bacon fat again? I don’t know what that man was thinking.

Although Ida May never cooked grits to my knowledge, I later learned in a visit to Baton Rouge that grits were eminently edible. Our cousin Beryl served them as she would mashed potatoes. They were sitting on the dinner plate in a pile; a huge chunk of butter was slathered on the top and then the whole mountain of grits was salted and peppered within an inch of its life. Never having tasted grits I wasn’t sure that I was going to be all that enamored of them, but I quickly learned that I had really missed out on something yummy. Later while having breakfast in a local restaurant we were served sausage and eggs with a helping of grits on the plate – and those grits were of a consistency of something like Cream of Wheat. Again I wasn’t sure I was going to like them, but they were just as good that way (doctored with butter and seasonings) as when they were standing upright in a mound on my dinner plate. And many years later my cousin in Swansboro, North Carolina, took me to a restaurant that served “Shrimp and Grits” for lunch, which was a bowl of Grits and cheese, topped with shrimp and a marinara sauce. It was to die for.


I am convinced that if grits had a more esthetically-pleasing name, more people would like them. “Grits” and “eggplant” are two delights that I believe suffer from misnaming. I am not a connoisseur of southern foods (and especially not of pig-picking), but at least for the few things I have a personal acquaintance with I can be counted as one of the loyal cheerleaders.