what I ate last: curried sweet potato fritters and rice
The last couple of days have been pretty good on the food front. Last night I even managed to have two dinners - I'd already cooked and eaten a spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce, when Cara-Mae turned up to bake bread and make herself (and me as it turned out) a sort of cassoulet for supper. And today Cara-Mae and I had a lovely peaceful lunch on the porch of a tiny catfish diner near Mason's Bend - the typical soup from round here (chicken with small broad beans, green beans, corn and a tomato base with a little chilli heat), freshly fried catfish, hush puppies and fries.
Catfish when freshly cooked like this is absolutely fantastic despite its ubiquity and simplicity and the hush puppies were fluffy and grainy. We sat and ate, with our sweet tea, while chatting to the owner-cook - a woman by the wonderful name of Willie Pearl, who started the diner in January after deciding to retire from Magnolia, one of the big catfish plants nearby. Before that, she told us she used to cook in people's houses - 'rich white people in town', as she put it. She grew up nearby in a family of 11 children, and was cooking for them from a young age, learning from her mother. All the black women here spend inordinate amounts of time at the stove, while the men occasionally tend a grill or barbecue. Willie Pearl had one of her sons working with her, serving and washing the dishes. 'He don't know to cook nothing', she observed.
Catching up on the press, this article is absolutely right - vanity and snobbishness are the only way to eat and keep (reasonably) trim. If you don't deign to eat a big mac then you won't get fat.
Catfish when freshly cooked like this is absolutely fantastic despite its ubiquity and simplicity and the hush puppies were fluffy and grainy. We sat and ate, with our sweet tea, while chatting to the owner-cook - a woman by the wonderful name of Willie Pearl, who started the diner in January after deciding to retire from Magnolia, one of the big catfish plants nearby. Before that, she told us she used to cook in people's houses - 'rich white people in town', as she put it. She grew up nearby in a family of 11 children, and was cooking for them from a young age, learning from her mother. All the black women here spend inordinate amounts of time at the stove, while the men occasionally tend a grill or barbecue. Willie Pearl had one of her sons working with her, serving and washing the dishes. 'He don't know to cook nothing', she observed.
Catching up on the press, this article is absolutely right - vanity and snobbishness are the only way to eat and keep (reasonably) trim. If you don't deign to eat a big mac then you won't get fat.
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