This is an excerpt from Stephen Hunter's excellent novel Hot Springs. I'm not familiar with this sort of regional cuisine, so I'm hoping some of you southern BITOGers can tell me how authentic this would be for the time. (The novel is set in Arkansas in 1946.)
I already know what scrapple is, due an earlier post here.
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But Junior had other ideas. Did he want to come up to the house and eat dinner with the Turners? Er, no, not really, but Carlo now saw no polite way out of it, and Junior and his boys seemed really to want his company, a rare enough occurrence in his life. So in the end, he meekly said yes, and was hustled off.
And what a dinner. Whatever the Turners did, they ate well. Squirrel stew in a black pool of bubbly gravy, like a tar pit, collard greens, turnips, scrapple, great slabs of bacon all moist with fat, taters by the long ton, in every configuration known to man, chicken-fried steak, gnarly and soaked in yet another variation on the theme of gravy, corn on the cob or shelled and mushed, a mountain of grits slathered in a snowcap of butter, hot apple dumpling, more coffee, hot, black and strong, the attention of flirty little Turner girls, somebody's female brood of cousins or nieces or something (never too clear on exactly who these girls were) and, after dark, corn likker and good storytelling.
It was night. Mosquitoes buzzed around but the Turner boys, all loquacious, were sitting about on the porch, smoking pipes or vile cigars imported from far-off, glamorous Saint Louie, in various postures of lassitude and inebriation. In the piney Ouachitas, crickets yammered and small furry things screeched when they died. Up above, the stars pinwheeled this way and that.
I already know what scrapple is, due an earlier post here.
**********************
But Junior had other ideas. Did he want to come up to the house and eat dinner with the Turners? Er, no, not really, but Carlo now saw no polite way out of it, and Junior and his boys seemed really to want his company, a rare enough occurrence in his life. So in the end, he meekly said yes, and was hustled off.
And what a dinner. Whatever the Turners did, they ate well. Squirrel stew in a black pool of bubbly gravy, like a tar pit, collard greens, turnips, scrapple, great slabs of bacon all moist with fat, taters by the long ton, in every configuration known to man, chicken-fried steak, gnarly and soaked in yet another variation on the theme of gravy, corn on the cob or shelled and mushed, a mountain of grits slathered in a snowcap of butter, hot apple dumpling, more coffee, hot, black and strong, the attention of flirty little Turner girls, somebody's female brood of cousins or nieces or something (never too clear on exactly who these girls were) and, after dark, corn likker and good storytelling.
It was night. Mosquitoes buzzed around but the Turner boys, all loquacious, were sitting about on the porch, smoking pipes or vile cigars imported from far-off, glamorous Saint Louie, in various postures of lassitude and inebriation. In the piney Ouachitas, crickets yammered and small furry things screeched when they died. Up above, the stars pinwheeled this way and that.
