Being Dead Is No Excuse Page 2
You should have three 9-inch greased and floured pans. Divide the batter evenly among the pans and bake in a 350° oven for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the cakes are golden brown and they have pulled away from the edges of the pan. Cool for 5 minutes and then turn out.
When the cakes are completely cooled, you can ice them.
Real Icing
Ingredients
2 ½ cups sugar
½ cup water
2 ½ tablespoons clear Karo syrup
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar
2 egg whites
pinch of salt
2 ½ teaspoons vanilla
freshly grated coconut
Combine the sugar, water, and Karo and boil for about 5 minutes. Beat the egg whites with the cream of tartar until stiff. Pour the hot syrup into the beaten egg whites, slowly and beating all the time. Continue to beat this mixture until the icing is stiff and glossy. Add a pinch of salt and the vanilla. Spread a little icing between each layer. Then ice the sides and top, and garnish the whole cake with freshly grated coconut. You can use an electric hand mixer to beat this icing.
Serves twelve.
Tomato Aspic
Can you be buried without tomato aspic? Not in the Mississippi Delta, you can’t. We’ve never been to a funeral where homemade aspic wasn’t served. Store-bought aspic is available, but no self-respecting Southerner would be caught dead—sorry—eating it. If you’ve never had real tomato aspic, you’re in for a treat.
This is the recipe Gayden uses most often because it is equally delicious with just mayonnaise, or with pickled shrimp, avocado slices, and other trimmings.
Ingredients
4 cups tomato juice
6 slices lemon
3 slices yellow onion, separated into rings
2 bay leaves
tops of one bunch of celery
several whole cloves
3 tablespoons horseradish
1 ½ teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce (Lea & Perrins)
4 envelopes Knox unflavored gelatin
½ cup apple cider vinegar
Put the tomato juice, lemon slices, onion slices, bay leaves, celery tops, and cloves in a heavy pot and simmer for 20 minutes, more or less. While this simmers, mix together the gelatin and vinegar. Strain the tomato juice mixture and add the gelatin mixture. Stir until the gelatin has dissolved. No lumps! Add horseradish, salt, pepper, lemon juice, and Worcestershire sauce. Taste and correct seasoning.
Lightly oil a 6-cup mold. Pour the mixture into the mold and chill until firm, several hours or overnight. Overnight is best. Unmold on a bed of greens. If the aspic will not come out of the pan easily, run a knife around the edge or dip the pan into a sink of hot water—just for a second!
Serves ten.
I like to double this recipe.
In that case, I use a 10-cup bundt pan.
Homemade Mayonnaise
People act as if it takes an act of God to make homemade mayonnaise. It doesn’t. But there is a real debate in Gayden’s family as to whether homemade mayonnaise should be thick or thin. Her mother swears by runny, but Gayden’s tends to be a little more firm. Of course, her mother makes hers by hand or with an old-fashioned Wesson oil-plunger contraption. This is now a collector’s item, and Gayden uses a food processor. Here’s her version:
Ingredients
1 large egg
1 ½ cups vegetable oil
1 ½ tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 ½ teaspoons Tabasco sauce
1 tablespoon lemon juice
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon white pepper
Assemble all ingredients. Put the egg in the food processor. Pulse for 30 seconds, and then add the oil slowly, while pulsing. When the desired consistency is reached, add the other ingredients until they are blended. This doesn’t take very long! Of course, taste and adjust seasonings. But know: If you blend too long you will get a version that is too thick. Thin seems to be the preferred lady consistency.
Refrigerate for at least an hour, as the taste improves. We always have a jar of this in the icebox, and it hasn’t killed us yet.
Makes about two cups.
Pickled Shrimp
Pickled shrimp are perfect with aspic. Without aspic, they are more appropriate for a cocktail party than for lunch after the funeral. Although our mothers wore dark colors and didn’t go out socially for months after a death in the family, we no longer observe an official period of mourning, even in the Mississippi Delta. Still, we’d be shocked if you gave a cocktail party too soon. There’s nothing to stop a friend from having a restorative cocktail party for you, however, as long as it’s not done in unseemly haste.
Ingredients
5 pounds shrimp
7 teaspoons salt
1 cup celery tops
½ cup pickling spice
4 cups sliced onions
a few bay leaves
2 ½ cups salad oil
1 ½ cups white vinegar
5 teaspoons celery seeds
2 teapoons salt
1 jar (3 ¼-ounce) of capers
Drop the shrimp into boiling water to which salt, celery tops, and pickling spice have been added. Boil 8 minutes. Drain immediately and cool. DO NOT LET THE SHRIMP OVERCOOK. Peel and de-vein the shrimp. Using a large glass container, alternate layers of shrimp with onion slices and bay leaves.
Mix the salad oil, vinegar, celery seeds, and salt. Pour over the shrimp. Drain the capers and add them to the shrimp. Place the container in the refrigerator for at least three days. Turn once or twice a day, without fail.
To serve, drain, reserving liquid in case you have shrimp left over.
Serves twenty as an appetizer, twelve as a first course.
Mary Mac’s Rolls
One of the most appreciated offerings is rolls. You can put them on the buffet table with the ham and homemade mayonnaise or hot mustard for sandwiches.
Ingredients
1 cup boiling water
¾ cup shortening
1 ½ teaspoons salt
¾ cup sugar
2 eggs, beaten
2 packages active dry yeast
1 cup warm water
6 cups flour
Pour the boiling water over the shortening. Add the salt and sugar. Let the mixture cool, then add the eggs. Let the yeast stand in the warm water for 5 minutes. Then stir into the shortening/egg mixture.
Mix in the flour, a cup at a time. Transfer to a greased bowl in the refrigerator and let sit for at least two hours (The dough will keep in the icebox for several days). For the short term, a damp cloth cover will do, but longer term requires plastic wrap.
Roll the dough on a floured board. Cut the rolls out with donut cutter, brush with melted butter, and then fold them over. Place in a buttered pan and brush with more butter. About 15 to 18 rolls will fit in an 8-inch square pan.
Let rise 1 ½ hours in a warm place.
Bake at 375°, or until brown on top, about 10 to 12 minutes.
These rolls freeze beautifully. To do that, bake them until almost done, then freeze. Thaw and take to house of bereaved. Reheat before serving.
Makes about five dozen rolls.
Hot Mustard
Somebody always brings a supermarket platter of deli ham. We don’t think we’ve ever been to a Delta funeral where there wasn’t at least one. Fortunately, this supermarket fare can be transformed into something really good with homemade rolls, mayonnaise, and hot mustard (for more ideas, see “The Eternal Slick Ham Platter,” p. 90).
Ingredients
1 cup dried mustard (Colman’s preferred; big yellow can)
1 cup tarragon vinegar
1 cup sugar
3 eggs
Combine the mustard and vinegar, and soak overnight. Add the sugar. Beat the eggs and add them to the mixture. Cook in a double boiler over medium he
at, stirring constantly until thick.
Keeps in the icebox for a long time… up to three months.
Makes about two cups.
Lace Cookies
Lace cookies are beautiful. They are not difficult. It just takes a bit longer because the dough spreads, so you get only a few per baking sheet.
Ingredients
2 cups Quaker oats
2 cups white sugar
1 tablespoon flour
½ teaspoon salt
2 sticks unsalted butter
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
Preheat oven to 350°. Combine the oats, sugar, flour, and salt. Melt the butter and pour it over the oats mixture while very hot. Stir until the sugar is completely melted. Fold in the eggs and vanilla, and mix until thoroughly blended.
Cover cookie sheets with aluminum foil. Drop scant teaspoons of dough at least 2 inches apart on sheets.
Bake about 10 minutes, or until the edges are lightly browned. These cook very fast: Watch carefully.
When the cookies have cooled, peel the foil off the backs and start another batch!
Remember, you need to have several sheets, or you will spend your entire afternoon in the kitchen. While you have one sheet in the oven baking, be sure you have another waiting to go in.
These freeze well if you use an airtight container.
Makes about five dozen cookies.
The Top Ten Funeral Foods
Tomato Aspic with Homemade Mayonnaise
Fried Chicken
Stuffed Eggs
Virginia’s Butter Beans
Can’t-die-without-it Caramel Cake
Homemade Rolls
Banana Nut Bread
Aunt Hebe’s Coconut Cake
Methodist Party Potatoes
Tenderloin
2
The Methodist Ladies vs. the Episcopal Ladies
Anyone in our neck of the woods who is not counting on immortality might want to give serious thought to taking the appropriate steps to become a communicant of St. James’ Episcopal Church, before it is too late. No, belonging to St. James’ won’t necessarily get you into heaven. But it will ensure that you have a tasteful sendoff. Great vestments. No tacky hymns. St. James’ sets liturgical standards for the Ark-La-Miss region (as the tristate area is known). St. James’ is traditional and eschews novelty, though after members of the church vestry were impressed by the televised funeral of a female notable at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., a verger was added. Who could resist a verger? But other than that, St. James’ rarely changes so much as the position of a candlestick. Even the acolytes look the same from generation unto generation. That is because they are frequently the sons and nephews of previous acolytes. St. James’ feels it has achieved liturgical perfection on earth. Ladies from the altar guild have been known to visit the Vatican only to sniff, “That’s not how it’s done at St. James’.”
A nice funeral is good for everybody. If the family has been through a long, painful sickness, it’s a chance to pull themselves together, spruce up, sober up, and put on their best dark clothes (white is acceptable during the Delta summer) and bid the dearly departed a formal farewell. We begin planning our funerals well in advance, not infrequently leaving behind detailed instructions. St. James’ ability to offer parishioners the comforting knowledge that a dignified exit awaits them may be a central factor in maintaining its high membership rolls. Marguerite Blanton, who bragged that her family had been Episcopalians since the Crucifixion, once got so furious with the rector that she briefly entertained the notion of joining a band of renegade Episcopalians who held Sunday services in the community center. It was only the thought of her funeral being held at the community center that stopped Marguerite dead (so to speak) in her tracks. “You know,” Marguerite said, “that’s just not me.”
Southern Episcopalians wear their devoutness lightly. That’s one reason they excel at funerals. They have a knack of comfortably mixing the formal and the casual, the proper and the relaxed (or perhaps the proper and the highly improper). Nowhere has this sensibility been better summed up than in the immortal words of Anne Dudley Hunt. (Of course, she was Anne Dudley Something-Else at the time.) One Easter Even—that’s Episcopalian for the day before Easter—Anne Dudley was hobbling around the kitchen, bravely dyeing Easter Eggs, despite her knees, which were bruised black and blue. “I just don’t know,” Anne Dudley said. “Did I hurt my knees yesterday afternoon doing the Stations of the Cross? Or did I do it falling down drunk last night?” That, in a nutshell, is the spirit of Southern Episcopalianism. (To her credit, Anne Dudley remains a loyal daughter of St. James’, even though the bishop put his foot down and flatly refused to let her have her fourth wedding there. The fifth time, she was too proud to ask.)
Greenville Episcopalians are sensitive enough to know that simply being dead doesn’t mean you no longer care about social status. Nobody wants an ill-attended funeral. (If you look carefully, you’ll notice older people moving their lips as they quietly count heads.) St. James’ turns out in full force for its own. Penniless little old ladies and bank presidents alike get a nice turnout. For a really big funeral, dual membership—in St. James’ and Alcoholics Anonymous—is the ticket. Episcopalians who have belonged to AA attract a standingroom-only crowd, without increasing the liquor bill for the reception. St. James’ is so welcoming of mourners that, at a funeral, even if you accidentally sit in somebody else’s pew, nobody gets really mad. (This doesn’t hold true on other holidays, such as Christmas Eve, that attract the once-a-year worshipers; then regulars get their noses out of joint if they find a stranger in their pew.) A big St. James’ funeral is well worth a lifetime of polishing altar brass and needle-pointing kneelers. (You don’t have to go to church every Sunday, but the minister’s honorarium should be handsomer for the parishioner who’s darkening the door for the first time in years in a coffin.)
Yet another not-to-be-sneezed-at benefit: You won’t be at risk for the nudge-producing eulogy. When Sally Bashford’s dreadful old stepmother died, the Methodist minister lavishly eulogized her. You’d have thought somebody in town actually liked the old bat. There is rarely a eulogy at St. James’, though in recent years a homily has been added to the funeral service. A brief note in the program explains that there won’t be a eulogy. God doesn’t “need to be reminded” about the deceased. Neither do the rest of us. While eulogists are going on and on about what a model citizen and devoted husband Mr. So-and-So was we’re trying to keep straight faces. He was a notorious fanny pincher and crook, who was lucky not to have ended up behind bars. Yes, dead or alive, we’d all like to have praise heaped upon us. But isn’t it safer, really, to wait until everybody is at home with a toddy? That way, if you can’t stop laughing, you can claim you had too much to drink.
Speaking of the printed program, there are two schools of thought: Some believe that it should helpfully let outsiders know when to kneel and sit, without quite letting on that anybody thinks they don’t know; old St. James’ congregants—those in the eighty and above age bracket—are horrified that anybody would need to be told. Are there really people in the world who haven’t bothered to learn what Episcopalians do? Should they not be punished? Fortunately, the sprightly Young Turks—sixty-five and under—are beginning to come into their own, and the program, with directions (an implicit acknowledgement that one actually knows people who do not belong to St. James’), is now thoroughly accepted. St. James’ is, by the way, a middle-of-the-road church—embroidered chasubles and so on—but it’s not a smells-and-bells kind of place. Of course, there were the late Miss Finlays, Little Miss Finlay and Big Miss Finlay, bless their hearts, two unmarried sisters—pillars of St. James’—who sat in the front row bobbing up and down like jumping jacks. They went in for crossing themselves and genuflecting. You could just about see what everybody was thinking: That’s what comes of being a maiden lady who’s never had sex.
You might think that by no
w all the St. James’ selling points have been enumerated. They haven’t. In addition to the dignified ambience and many other attractive features, St. James’ is right across the street from the old Greenville cemetery. Talk about location, location, location. The walk over, after the church portion of the obsequies, is picturesque, especially in the fall, when you’re not sweating bullets from the Delta heat. Nice English-county feel, which is popular in the Delta. The locale is also convenient for a reception, which is often held for family and friends in the parish hall. It follows the ceremony, and the “death committee” (more formally known as the Pastoral Care Committee) is in charge.
Attention to detail and borrowed silver are keys to its success. The committee rolls “big brown,” the table, out into the parish hall, drapes it with a damask tablecloth, and puts a large silver coffee urn and tea service at one end and a large silver tray of goodies at the other. There is a chair for someone, usually an older lady, to pour. Once somebody put Coffee Mate on the table. The pourer quietly sent it back to the kitchen. A single overture to modern packaging: packets of low-calorie sweetener in a large silver wastebowl. Compotes on both sides of the table are filled with nuts. On the table are cheese straws; two cakes, each on a silver stand; and neat little squares of fudge cake (a famous local recipe; see Lowery’s Fudge). A silver pitcher (borrowed, of course) sits on a special table for water drinkers. The table setups, if not the food, reflect an important article of the Episcopal credo: You can’t be too thin or have too much silver. This is also just about the only time when two or three Delta Episcopalians are gathered together for any reason whatsoever and there’s no booze. That’s waiting at home.