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Chocolate Gravy

Mamaw Onsby lived in a small two-room house set back from ours under a huge white oak with thick knotted roots that gripped the earth like the toes of Antaeus.

She had come to live there after her husband of sixty-odd years had died, and rarely coming to our house, content sitting at home listening to the radio and reading her Bible. Daddy tried to put an air conditioner in a window, but she wouldn’t have it.

She was a tiny old woman, not much taller than I was at 11 when she died, and like many women of her generation who considered smoking unladylike, Mamaw dipped snuff (Garrett) and would make snuff out of cocoa and sugar for us to dip with twigs from the big black gum tree growing near the road.

Her home was an early destination for me and her other great-grandchildren because she would make biscuits every morning, big, fat cat-head biscuits that she baked in an antediluvian skillet. Mamaw usually made sawmill gravy to go with the biscuits, but my brother Tom always asked her to make chocolate gravy. She’d look at him and say, “Oh, this thickenin’ gravy ain’t good enough for you, is it?”

My brother Tom, little devil he was, would say “NO!” as loud as he could, and Mamaw, with a mumble about him being “just like a durned Onsby” would make chocolate gravy. The rest of us to be polite always had a biscuit with regular gravy, but she made us have another with chocolate “so it won’t be wasted”. It never was.

Heat two cups whole milk with a pat of butter; mix very well three tablespoons cocoa, two tablespoons plain flour, three quarters of a cup of sugar, add to warm milk with a whisk, stirring vigorously to prevent lumping. Heat until gravy thickens. Some people add vanilla to this, but for the life of me, I don’t know why.

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Pat Lamar’s Lasagna

When I was working at Audie Michael’s, a restaurant on the Square in Oxford (current site of the City Grocery), we became well-known for two items outside our regular menu. One was gumbo, and the other was lasagna. We ran both regularly as luncheon specials.

Since we were basically an upscale burger joint, we didn’t do a lot of catering, usually only large take-out orders for regular customers. But one day Pat Lamar, a wealthy, socially prominent patron and later mayor of Oxford, sent in a messenger carrying a beautiful, shin-high (swear to God) McCarty bowl with a tapered bottom. My boss came waltzing into the kitchen with this huge piece of pottery and said, “Mrs. Lamar wants you to make lasagna in this for her party tonight.”

“Sure,” I said. “Is this oven-proof?” He looked at me like I’d hit him with a hammer. “What do you mean, oven-proof?” he asked. (He was a nice guy, just lacked focus.) “Look,” I said. “I’m not about to take an expensive piece of pottery, fill it full of lasagna and bake it in an oven without knowing that it’s not going to shatter.”

When realization blossomed in his mind, he panicked. In my experience, this has been management’s basic reaction to anything that’s not in the manual.

“What are we gonna do?” he said.

“Call her up and see if she’s baked in it before,” I said.

A few minutes later he came back and said, “She’s never put it in the oven, but she thinks it will be fine.”

I was skeptical. Even if the piece was insured, I didn’t want to have to clean up an oven full of lasagna and broken crockery. So I got on the phone and called Ron Dale, the top ceramics professor at Ole Miss.

“Jesse Lee,” he said, “To be honest with you, I do not know if it will withstand the heat or not. But the one thing not to do is to put a cool piece into a hot oven. Bring it up to heat.”

So I took a deep breath and made lasagna. I filled the bowl with warm water to heat it up a bit, poured that out, and filled it with swirled layers of meat, cheese, sauce, and noodles, all warm.

The entire ordeal, a Vesuvius-looking wonder that took four people to lift, went into a cold oven. I turned the thermostat up maybe fifty degrees every fifteen minutes or so. My boss positioned himself in front of the oven on a stool staring at the oven door until I ran him out with a mop.

After three hours, the lasagna was bubbling beautifully and the bowl showed no cracks. I found a box big enough to hold the damn thing and was just closing the lid when Mrs. Lamar’s entourage came to pick it up for the party, which had already started.

Once it was out of my hands, I went up to the bar and got good and snockered.

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Dolly Parton’s Five Layer Dinner

This recipe is from Dolly’s Good Lookin’ Cookin’: A Year of Meals – A Lifetime of Family, Friends, and Food, which she put together with her sister Rachel in 2024. It’s just as down-home as Dolly, meat, potatoes, and veggies, and easily feeds 6 people.

In a skillet over medium heat, brown 1 pound ground beef in two tablespoons olive oil. Slice 3 medium russet potatoes, toss in olive oil, and place in the bottom of a 9×13 baking pan. Cover with the cooked beef, add 1 14 oz. can diced tomatoes drained, 2 onions, sliced or diced, and 1 chopped green pepper, seasoning with salt and pepper as you layer. Drizzle with oil, cover tightly with foil, and bake in a medium (350) oven for 1 1/2 hours.

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Hector’s Moussaka

“Jess, while my people built the Parthenon, yours were stuffing sheep shit in rock walls to keep the wind out. When Homer first sang of the anger of Achilles, your ancestors were banging on skin drums and grunting like swine. As Praxiteles found Apollo in living stone, yours were whittling dildos from oak knots.”

“Hector,” I said, “You are a strong and beautiful god bringing the fire of civilization to this aspiring ape. Your divine radiance blinds me.”

“Do not mock me, you Cretan. You asked me to teach you how to make moussaka as my great-uncle Nikolaos, so I must make you properly respectful of the gift. They say Uncle Niko made Greek cooking a Frenchified farce, but what he did was throw away the trash the Turks and Slavs put on our plates and brought classic refinement to this beautiful old dish. Now it is ἀμβροσία, ambrosia, food fit for the gods. Here, I’ll show you.”

Trim stalks and bottoms of 2 large eggplants, peel and slice to ½ inch. Soak in salty water for about 20 minutes, and dry on paper towels. Peel 4 potatoes and slice to ¼ inch. Fry potatoes and eggplant in olive oil until just soft. Set both aside on paper towels to drain. Add oil if needed and sauté two diced white onions until translucent. Add about a pound and half of lean ground beef to the onions in the frying pan, mix well to break up the meat, add two cloves minced garlic, and an 8-oz. can of tomato sauce. Mix very well, then lower heat and simmer uncovered, stirring, until liquid is reduced. Set aside.

For Béchamel, melt ½ stick butter, add ¼ cup plain flour, mix well and cook over medium low heat until it stops bubbling. Gradually add four cups whole milk, stirring continually, until quite thick. Cool and incorporate two beaten egg yolks. Set aside.

Grease the sides and bottoms of a large casserole. Cover the bottom with a layer of potato slices, add a layer of eggplant  and drained tomato slices, and half of the meat mixture. Cover the meat layer with remaining potato slices, then more eggplant and tomato, with meat mixture. Top with Béchamel and bake at 350F for 40 minutes or so. Cool before slicing to serve.

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Apple Pecan Cookies

You don’t see many Southern recipes for apple cookies. What apples do well here are made into sauces, pies, or cakes. A quick scan of Southern Sideboards, Bayou Cuisine, River Road Recipes, Vintage Vicksburg, Gourmet of the Delta, The Jackson Cookbook, and The Mississippi Cookbook turned up nary a one. But I did find a recipe in Hosford Fontaine’s Allison’s Wells: The Last Mississippi Spa, and it’s superb: rich, moist, and aromatic.

3 cups of unpeeled diced apples (I use Galas)
2 sticks butter, softened
¾ cup sugar
¾ cup brown sugar
3 eggs, lightly beaten
2 cups flour
1 tablespoon grated orange peel
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
A half teaspoon each ground cloves, nutmeg, and salt
2 cups rolled oats
¼ cup white raisins
¼ cup chopped pecans

Cream butter and sugars well, add eggs and flour mixed and sifted with spices and baking powder. Stir in apples, oats and nuts, then refrigerate dough for about 30 minutes, stirring once. Form dough into ping pong balls and bake on a lightly oiled cookie sheet with parchment paper at 350 or until lightly browned. Cool on a wire rack. This recipe makes about two dozen wonderful, chewy, cookies.

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A Yankee in the Kitchen

Syracuse, New York is hometown to Tom Cruise, Grace Jones, and Jake, who says his ancestors were Greek. Every now and then he’ll offhandedly mention “Uncle Ari and Aunt Jackie.”

Jake sniffs at my Southern heritage, informing me that his parents contributed to programs for eradicating hookworm, pellagra, and illiteracy in Mississippi. He came to Jackson over two decades ago as the result of a convoluted series of circumstances I’ve long since quit trying to unravel. He stayed because he likes the weather; his recollections of lake-effect snow are unbelievably horrific. Even after twenty-plus years here, people still ask him where he’s from. (It drives him nuts).

Generous soul that I am, in an effort to reciprocate his family’s (undoubtedly fictitious) charity, I set my hat to learn how to make good Yankee baked beans using the sturdy pots he brought back from Maine last year, which of course had been made by exceedingly sweet people in a religious community near Bangor.  (No, I didn’t go; he was meeting his mother to visit an aunt, and I was better off here with beer and cable.)

I breathed deeply and took a pound of dried navy beans, a cup of diced ham with rind, and a half cup of sorghum molasses and threw it all into the (unquestionably gorgeous) 2 quart pot with a cup of chopped onions and a bay leaf. I covered them with water, seasoned with a teaspoon of black pepper and a heaping tablespoon of dry mustard. The (topped) pot went into a 250 oven for four hours. The results were rich and smooth, with the the mustard cutting the molasses enough to let the beans make a statement.

Jake credited the pot of course.

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Meatballs in Green Salsa

Mix pork and beef 1:1; ground pork can be hard to find, so I usually substitute a mild pork sausage. If you’re using plain pork, add salt, pepper, smoky paprika, and a hefty dose of granulated garlic. Moisten a cup of breadcrumbs with milk, and mix in a beaten egg; add this slurry to the meat mixture, and work with your fingers until thoroughly blended. Form into snooker balls, and poach in lightly salted water until firm. Place in a hot oven to brown. Remove, coat lightly with salsa, top with queso, and return to oven until cheese is lightly browned. Serve hot with more salsa, good beans, and hot corn tortillas.

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A Shroud for the Lord God Bird

Magnificent in flight, majestic in repose, the ivory-bill was the largest woodpecker in North America. At first sight the bird made people say, “Lord God, what is that?!”

As the vast virgin woodlands of the South fell to the axe during the late 19th and early 20th century the ivory-bills, which required extensive tracts of timber to survive (an estimated 2.5 square miles of old-growth forest for a mating pair), began to starve. By the first decades of the 20th century, only one sizeable portion of virgin Southern woodland remained intact, an area of dense mixed long-leaf pine and deciduous trees that stretched from the Brazos River in Texas to the Tensas in Louisiana. Once covering over 2 million acres, by the 1930s the “Big Thicket” had shrunk to a mere 800,000.

In an an odd twist of fate, an extensive section of this forest had been purchased by the Singer Sewing Machine Company to secure hardwood for machine cabinets. This, the so-called Singer Tract, was the last documented home of the ivory-bill, and the fate of this splendid bird indeed hung by a thread. In 1937 Singer sold the logging rights to the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company, and in the next year cutting began. Under the agreement, land logged by Chicago Mill and Lumber became that firm’s property, but until then, the Singer Company still held ownership.

The survival of the ivory-bill became a subject of national consideration (a significant gesture during the war years) involving President Roosevelt, the Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, the directors of the National Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the War Production Board, and the National Audubon Society. In 1943 Mississippi Governor Paul B. Johnson, Sr. along with the governors of three other Southern states—Sam Jones of Louisiana, Prentiss Cooper of Tennessee, and Homer Adkins of Arkansas—joined in an action that remains unique in the annals of American history: a last-ditch effort to save a species from extinction.

In December of 1943, the chairman of the board of the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company met with the brokers of a potential land deal that would have established a national park and refuge for the ivory-bill. The other participants were Louisiana’s conservation commissioner, the refuge director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and their attorney John Baker. But despite the offer of $200,000 from the state of Louisiana to purchase the remaining Singer Tract, James F. Griswold, chairman of the Chicago Mill and Lumber board, refused to deal. In what is perhaps the ugliest and most blatant admission of corporate greed and irresponsibility in the history of the United States, Griswold said, “We are just money grubbers. We are not concerned, as are you folks, with ethical considerations.” In a similar vein, Singer Company treasurer and vice president John Morton told Baker that Singer “didn’t care.”

Subsequent offers proved fruitless, and the Singer Tract was clear-cut (by German POWs, no less), creating a wasteland of baked mud studded with stumps, sending the Lord God bird over the abyss into certain extinction.