Food, culture contrast in 'Cross Creek Cookery'

Cross Creek Cookery was published 75 years ago.

This year (2017) marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of Cross Creek and Cross Creek Cookery, both by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. First editions of both books have a place of honor on my bookshelves.

Rawlings moved to Florida in the 1920s and homesteaded in pioneer fashion on a citrus grove in Cross Creek. Even today, the Creek remains a hamlet. It's a strip of land sandwiched between Lochloosa and Orange lakes, an easy drive from Gainesville or Ocala but a century away in ambience.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Cross Creek was remote. Many local customs and behaviors were country holdovers from the turn of the 20th century and earlier. Rawlings captured the essence and lifestyles of the people, and brought them to life in fiction and nonfiction. Readers met many of the locals in Rawlings' popular memoir, Cross Creek.

Although Rawlings lived her version of a Florida Cracker lifestyle at Cross Creek, she was from a privileged background. She moved seamlessly between her rural haven and the urban Northeast. Nowhere is that contrast more evident than in Cross Creek Cookery. 

The cookbook features a mix of local country cuisine and family recipes from Rawlings' cultured upbringing. The instructions for "Mother's Almond Cake," with its "Almond Paste Filling" and "Boiled Frosting for Almond Cake," require three pages of text. "Cassava Pudding" - a backwoods treat - needs only a paragraph. The recipe was shared with Rawlings by a homesteader in the Ocala National Forest. The woman and her family had settled in the Florida scrub before it became a national forest.

The book's commentary is as revealing as the juxtaposition of recipes. Rawlings was aware. She knew that although she had lived in Cross Creek for years, she never truly could be of Cross Creek. In her preface to the recipe for "Sweet Potato Pone," she tells of the time she invited a local friend to Christmas dinner at Cross Creek. She spent days preparing an elaborate meal.

Afterwards, she told her guest the meal was an example of a typical Yankee Christmas dinner. She asked what his family would eat for a typical Florida Cracker Christmas dinner. Her friend's reply? "Whatever we can git, Ma'am. Whatever we can git." (Page 183)

Be sure you get the chance to spend some time with one or both of these classic books. Happy 75th Anniversary to a piece of Florida's past.

Learn more about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and her life and works from the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society: https://rawlingssociety.org

Oblong hush puppies? Apparently

This recipe was found on a postcard
tucked inside a vintage cookbook
 from the 1920s. (Photo: Gerri Bauer)

The summer grilling season has officially started, so of course I'm thinking about food. More than usual, I mean. In Florida, grilling season runs from January to December.

Floridians have been cooking outdoors forever. In pioneer days, outdoor cooking was done to keep heat out of the house and lessen the risk of fire. Kitchens were often in detached buildings, for the same reasons.

But whether one cooked indoors or out, over a wood stove or a fire pit, certain traditional foods often showed up on the menu. One such food is the hush puppy, a corn-based fritter flavored with onion and deep-fried. I long assumed hush puppies of yore resembled hush puppies of today - small rounds about the size of golf balls. A hand-written heirloom recipe I found tucked inside an antique cookbook reminds me never to assume.

The recipe for Tallahassee Hush Puppies is on a postcard mailed in 1949 to a Mrs. Edwin Haynes of Canton, N.C., from someone named Edna, obviously a relative or friend on first-name basis. The ingredients are familiar: cornmeal, baking power, chopped onion, milk, salt. The shocker is that Edna instructs the cook to hand mold her dough into oblong pones. She even gives specific dimensions.

I realize I'm a Yankee, but I've lived in Florida for many, many years. I have never seen an oblong hush puppy. Edna notes that she found her recipe in a book of old Southern recipes. Makes me wonder what the original source is. I'd love to know.

The recipe is below, if you want to try it out. First, can I just say that finding such a handwritten note tucked inside a vintage cookbook I bought at a flea market is like finding buried treasure. And it wasn't the only surprise I found in The Rumford Complete Cook Book, by Lily Haxworth Wallace, "lecturer, teacher, and writer on domestic science."

Numerous penciled recipes cover blank pages in just about every chapter. They're all written in cursive, too. There's even a ration card used as a bookmark.

I'm not sure which previous owner left their mark for later generations to find. First published by the Rumford Company in 1908, the cookbook was popular enough to go into second and third printings. My version is from 1928 and bears signatures of four owners, including me. I'm guessing "Thos. E. Haynes" was the first owner, as his name is written splashily, on an angle, across half the inside cover. The rest of us share part of the opposite page.

I still haven't read through all the additional recipes that someone - possibly Mrs. Haynes - penciled throughout the book. She also jotted notes here and there. One of my favorites is on page 118. "Good try this" is written next to the recipe for French Rolls, with an arrow drawn to the recipe name for added emphasis. Good recipes know no eras. I think I'll give those rolls a try. But first, the hush puppies. Thanks, Edna.

TALLAHASSEE HUSH PUPPIES
2 cups corn meal
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 and 1/2 cups sweet milk
1/2 cup water
1 large onion chopped fine

Sift the dry ingredients together & add milk & water. Stir in chopped onion. Add more milk or meal as may be necessary to form a soft but workable dough. With the hands mold pieces of the dough in pones (oblong cakes about 5" long & 3" wide, & 3/4 thick). Fry in deep hot fat until well browned. Found this in book of old Southern recipes. - Edna

Of haw jelly and cassava pancakes

****Recipes in this blog post are for historical interest only.****

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, I can focus on a small treasure of a cookbook, a bicentennial edition published in 1968. Yes, eight years earlier than the 1976 Bicentennial the rest of us remember. But for New Smyrna (Beach), 1968 was indeed a bicentennial year. The coastal city was settled in 1768 in what is believed to have been the largest British colonization attempt in the then-New World. 

You can access Smyrna colony textual documents at the University of North Florida's Florida History Online, and I highly recommend a stop at the New Smyrna Museum of History next time you're in the area. It's run by the Southeast Volusia Historical Society, which in 1995 issued a reprint of the 1968 Keepsake Recipes of New Smyrna, Bicentennial Edition. The cookbook is the focus of this blog post soon as I stop rambling about New Smyrna Beach. I lived there for seven years, and have a soft spot for it.

The New Smyrna Junior Woman's Club published the original edition of the book. Many residents who contributed recipes had local roots far back into the 19th century. The women shared a number of pioneer culinary treats, including the haw jelly and cassava pancakes of this post's title. Eileen H. Butts contributed both those recipes, and she has this to say about the pancakes: "A most wonderfully different taste delight." Hmmm. Maybe, but after reading the recipe I'm not so sure I'd be willing to try them out:

Grate the fresh cassava root. Soak for a couple of hours in salted water. Squeeze out water. Stir grated pulp in any good pancake batter.

However, they do sound a tad more appealing than the Golden Cattail Pancakes recipe, which calls for a cup of cattail pollen.

The haw jelly sounds delicious, and Eileen notes that, "There is no jelly in all the world more beautiful - a lovely rose color and nothing else has the delicate haw flavor." Berries of the Florida native hawthorn are hard to come by, and people who know where haws are growing tend to keep mighty quiet about it. I've traipsed around a lot of Florida and  have yet to encounter the plants. Consider yourself lucky if you come across some "summer haws," the kind transformed into the jewel-tone jelly of the recipe. 

After the work of finding the main ingredient, the rest of the recipe is equally demanding. It calls for the cook to wash the haws, "pick over carefully" and then boil them until they burst. The hot pulp is placed into a jelly bag and set aside until all the juice has dripped out. Only then does the cook proceed with typical jelly-making steps of boiling the mixture with sugar until the jell stage is reached. 

Finally, there's a note that if haws are in scant supply, a "very few" green apples may be added at the juice-making stage.

After all that, a recipe for Orange Leaf Tea is a breeze.  Contributer Mary Elizabeth (Mrs. Walter M.) Pace instructs the cook to first search for tender young leaves of an orange tree. Then, "bring water to a slow boil, add leaves, cooking slowly several minutes." And that's it. Done. Sweeten to taste if you wish. 

Essentials of living often served double and triple duty in pioneer homesteads, and Orange Leaf Tea fits in that category. Mrs. Pace ends her tea recipe by advising: "Good for breaking fever and bring out the measles." I may try the tea for its taste - it does sound yummy - but on matters of ill health I'll defer to modern medicine. With a dose of tea for good measure.