Welcome to “Eating America,” a weekly cross-country culinary road trip. From New Orleans to Nashville to New York City, we explore America’s unique cuisines and hometown favorites through staff interviews, field notes, and delicious recipes. Read on for a chance to win a copy of our new The Complete Cook’s Country TV Show Cookbook.
Above: Cook’s Country Chicken-Fried Steak
It’s been a long time since Louise Emerick’s childhood in Dallas. But ask about cornbread, and she’ll wax poetic.
“Cornbread up north doesn’t sit right with me. It’s sweet, and a little too fluffy. It’s more like sheet cake than real cornbread.”
That’s because Louise grew up on her grandmother’s East Texas cornbread. The recipe calls for a cast-iron skillet, “sweet milk,” white cornmeal (“Yellow cornmeal is for the pigs,” her grandmother said), and bacon drippings. Louise’s grandmother kept bacon drippings in a coffee can under the sink; today Louise keeps hers in a ramekin in the freezer. When you find perfection, you don’t mess with the recipe. And this is classic Texas comfort food.
“It’s savory, crusty, and coarse,” Louise says. “Love on a plate.”
Above: Cook’s Country Southern-Style Skillet Cornbread
Louise comes from a long line of fantastic cooks. Thanks to her grandmother, affectionally called “Mama,” and her own mother, Louise was instilled with a love for good food. This passion brought her all the way to Boston, where she now works as the Senior Books Editor at America’s Test Kitchen.
She’ll be the first to tell you she’s not a Southern cook, to admit she can’t handle eating heavy Texan fare everyday. But there are a few comforting, nostalgic dishes she couldn’t do without. Recipes she’s asked her mother to write down so they can never be lost. It’s funny how a bite of food can take you back to a place, a person, a suddenly clear memory.
She can’t eat green beans without thinking of her mother, who handpicks them one by one at the farmer’s market downtown. Crazy as it seems to pick out individual beans, the resulting Green Bean Ham Hock is magic.
She fondly remembers that when she put a plate of brisket, mashed potatoes, and fried okra in front of her dog Boone, he went for the okra first, an instinct that warmed her heart.
And the barbecue. She didn’t think she was fiercely biased until she met her husband, who grew up in North Carolina, and the barbecue battles began. No matter how much pulled pork she tried, it always came back to brisket in thick, smoky sauce.
“It’s a point of pride and what I grew up on. Brisket is king.”
Above: Cook’s Country Texas Barbecued Beef Ribs
Then there’s the Pecan Pie That Almost Won, her mother’s incredible signature dessert. Unlike some pecan pies, this one isn’t sticky or cloying, but beautifully nutty and just sweet enough. Her mother’s recipe calls for a secret ingredient—vinegar. Once, she entered the pie into the Texas State Fair, which was a “really big deal, especially when you’re from Texas.” The pie made it into the Top 3, but before her mother could bake the pie for the final round of the contest, she fell sick.
When Louise’s grandmother came for a hospital visit, she couldn’t help but ask her daughter, “Are you really sure you can’t get up and make that pie?”
When it comes down to it, Louise treasures these memories of her childhood and her hometown even more than the food itself.
“Food is a story, not just something you eat,” she says. “It brings people together. It’s a community. We all remember what we were doing by what we ate. Our best memories are about food—it’s that simple, and it’s good.”
Above: Cook’s Country Texas-Style Blueberry Cobbler
All featured recipes in this post will be free through October 14, 2012.
Last Week’s Contest – The winner of our Regional Favorites: Miami Key Lime Pie giveaway is Kelly, who wrote: “Growing up in the Nutmeg state surrounded by mostly macintosh apples, apple pie ruled our holiday dessert table. Double crust, hot and preferrably a’la mode!” Thanks, Kelly!
This Week’s Comment Contest Giveaway – Does your family have an old regional recipe passed through the generations?
Let us know in the comments for a chance to win a copy of The Complete Cook’s Country TV Show Cookbook, which includes more than 200 great American recipes like Slow-Cooker BBQ Beef Brisket and Texas Sheet Cake.
About the Author: Elissa Bernstein
13 Comments
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Coming from a Chinese background, I learned traditional recipes through word of mouth and observation. One of my favorite items to make are “zong zi,” a type of Chinese tamale or rice dumpling wrapped in bamboo leaves. Different regions have different fillings and ways of wrapping the bamboo leaves, but my favorite version comes from Toisan, where my grandmother lived. Sticky rice, peanuts, pork, Chinese sausage, mushroom, salted egg, and mung beans… simple ingredients, but a complex folding technique that you have to learn by hand passed down through the generations.
I’m not a Texan by birth. Texas is an island and you can live here, love here and know here like the natives but you’ll never be one. Sometimes I think I smell different since real Texans always sniff me out, never mind that I’ve lived here over half my life now, mostly in Austin. My first Thanksgiving with my new husband in 2001 really brought this truth home (to Houston that year). Our families came together for the great feast, his from places between Houston and the Sabine River. Mine traveling from wherever they lived at that time, but with food traditions rooted in Maryland and Indiana, from which they originate. As mealtime closed in, my mother asked if there were any peas to accompany the mashed potatoes and gravy. My new mother-in-law replied, of course. Seated family, bowls passing, glasses and silverware clinking, the silence of partial satiation ripe for over stuffing. My mother finally asks for the peas. A bowl of purple hull peas is passed to her. Bafflement courses through our family. Then we laugh at the suddenly obvious reality, peas to them are not round and green. Instead they’re something closer to beans and they come from a field, just like Grandma used to grow, selling extras to lucky travelers on the side of the road. They variety is unimportant, whether it’s cream peas or black eyed or the aforementioned, as long as it’s not the green round type. The cooking method varies none, boil with water, salt, black pepper and pieces of bacon. They should be cooked until very soft and the liquid is more of a sauce. They are simple to make and I too have adopted and adapted the tradition. Delicious indeed, though I’d not want them between my mashed potatoes and gravy. We may not have created whirled peas, but we certainly learned our families could be two peas in a pod.
My family is Indian (Gujarati), but my mother grew up in Bangalore, which is a cosmopolitan city. So, though she cooks traditional Gujarati food, she also knows (and has perfected) how to make masala dosa from South India and samosas, which are Punjabi. There is no way that anyone will ever replicate the taste and texture of the paper thin rice pancake (dosa) or the flaky dough crust of the samosas. I don’t even bother eating Indian food at a restaurant. It all tastes awful compared to hers.
My mom has a framed piece of delicate paper with her great-grandmother’s apple pie recipe hanging on the wall of her kitchen. Passed down and in some very old handwriting. I have a picture of it, but hope to get the original some day.
We’re Asian, and our definition of delicious cake is a little different from Westerners’ who require their cake to be moist. For us, it’s more important that it’s airy. So, whenever I feel like eating a plain cake, I always turn to my mom’s super-easy Sponge Cake recipe, and it goes like this (seriously, it’s great as is, no frosting necessary!):
3/4 cup (6 oz) Softasilk cake flour
2 tbsp oil
5 eggs, separated
3 oz sugar
Beat egg whites and sugar for 5 min
Add yolks and oil, continue to beat until blended
Pour batter into oil-brushed pan
Bake at 350F for 20 to 30 min
My grandma quickly learned to cook like a Southern lady in her adopted home state of Louisiana, and some of her pie recipes, especially buttermilk, are still family favorites years later. We also have a recipe for a banana nut cake with lemon icing that my granddaddy used to request for his birthdays, and we are still enjoying it with the next generation.
I don’t know if it’s a regional recipe or not, but my mom still makes a molasses cookie recipe she learned by heart at the side of her grandmother, who learned it from her grandmother, who used to sell them to travelers on the stagecoach in the Berkshires.
And no, I can’t pass it along–it’s never been written down, just orally handed on to the females in the family as a rite of passage.
Growing up in Ohio, also known as “The Buckeye State”, a regional favorite is of course- buckeyes! Not the nut, but the dessert! They are basically little peanut butter balls covered in a chocolate shell while still leaving a little border at the top to make it look like a buckeye. Just about every little gas station sells them, but some are better than others. Thankfully, my mom has a great recipe so I can have perfect buckeyes anytime I want! Handy since I live in Alabama now and they are not readily available.
Cornbread Dressing is a recipe that has been passed down from my grandmother and mother. Not the Jiffy Mix kind with creamed corn, but crushed up cornbread mixed with grits, chicken stock, celery, onion, and a few other ingredients. Growing up in South Georgia, we had Cornbread Dressing at just about every holiday meal gathering. I soon realized after my first Thanksgiving with the in-laws (in Houston) that most folks don’t know good cornbread dressing. My MIL thought pre-bagged stuffing was the way to go. I could barely choke it down. The next year I made my family’s Cornbread Dressing and the in-laws couldn’t get enough of it. I’m now expected to bring it to Thanksgiving dinner every year.
i guess mine isn’t regional but it is from family – lokshen kugel.
its the first thing i learned to make and memorized it before i was 6.
My mother’s Mennonite sour cream chocolate cake from scratch. It is moist and dense. It is a bit chwey with air bubbles in the cook batter. The very top is thin with a nice crunch. She served it warm from the oven, no frosting, with a cold glass of milk for dessert.
if we had a regional recipe passed down, it stopped with my mom. she didn’t have time to cook when i was growing up. no idea if it’s regional, but one of my fav desserts is “better than robert redford dessert” that i got from my step-grandma.
My grandmother was of Chinese descent, so she made a lot of Chinese-style cuisine. One recipe that has been passed down in the family is her Cantonese rice stuffing that we’d make at Thanksgiving. I love the recipe because it has allowed us to blend Chinese heritage with American traditions.