Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (49 page)

I stop for a gin and tonic at the Gibson inn, a nice sea-breezy place in
Apalachicola, built in 1907. Old tourist brochures promise "Botanical Gardens" and an "Ice Machine Museum." Dr. John Gorrie invented the first ice
maker in 1845, a piece of technology that would make fresh Florida seafood
available to the world. But not mullet, of course: frozen mullet tastes muddy;
you have to eat it within a short time of taking it from the sea. The Gibson has
oysters, blue crab, and grouper. No mullet today. "We usually have it," says the
bar lady, standing in front of the "Smoking Permitted" sign. "But you can't
count on it these days."

At Angelo's on Ochlockonee Bay, I eat grouper (they don't have mullet
today, either) and watch the sun make zigzag patterns on the water like heavy,
dark-blue silk. Pelicans swoop, and I see, out in the bay, a little storm of jumping fish sailing over one another like stunt motorcyclists. It's a school of mullet, jumping to beat even Henry the pole-vaulter. It's somebody's dinner
somewhere, but not mine.

I never eat boiled peanuts except when they are in season
(July through September), because they are only good when made from freshly
dug "green" peanuts-and the small, redskinned Valencias are the best.

When I wrote my first book about the cooking of the South Carolina coastal
plain (Hoppin' John's Lowcountry Cooking, 1992), I was trying to present as
honest a survey of our traditional foods as I could without sacrificing the integrity of a single dish or ingredient. At the time, I would no more have eaten
a boiled, previously peeled jumbo peanut from Virginia or North Carolina
than I would have eaten local oysters in July or peaches in February.

I was also trying to be as scholarly as possible, with solid historical documentation of what I was calling traditional. It was not always possible. For example, stories of Thomas Jefferson's single-handed importation of many of
the foods that were South Carolina favorites just didn't ring true to me. Surely
eggplant had been here in the subtropical low country before it had been in
Virginia. Combing through plantation) ournals, diaries, shipping records, and
newspapers hadn't proved my theory, however, until I found several mentions
of "guinea squash," still a common name for Solanum melongena among oldtimers here.

You won't find eggplant called "Guinea squash" in the Oxford English Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Hortus
Third Cornucopia II, or Sturtevant's Edible Plants of the World. But I found the
term-and, hence, the plant-in numerous unpublished colonial papers. Encouraged, I soon thereafter stumbled on Henry Lauren's mention of tomatoes
growing in his downtown Charleston garden, twenty years before Jefferson's.
But peanuts-particularly boiled-still refuse to give up their roots.

I had always assumed that you could define the South as boiled peanut territory, but, in fact, there are many Southerners who have never even heard of
them. For those of us who know and love them, boiled peanuts have probably always been a part of our lives. We do not recall a first tasting, but the thought
of boiled peanuts conjures profound memories of places and people that we
always associate with them. It has been suggested to me that perhaps boiled
peanuts aren't really about taste but about those memories, but I don't think
that's true either. I love them whether I'm eating them salty and warm on a
brisk autumn day near the shore, or cold, right out of the refrigerator, as a leftover snack.

I've often said that the South is more emotion than nation-that describing the boundaries of the region is all but impossible. I've been asked to join
"Southern" organizations that include only the states of the Confederacy, but
I know lots of folks from Kentucky, Arkansas, and Oklahoma who consider
themselves Southern. Few may think of northern Virginia as truly Southern,
though most West Virginians would be insulted if I called them anything else.
Some writers have tried to define the South as where you are automatically
served grits with breakfast, but there are pockets throughout the region where
corn has never been ground for use as a hot breakfast cereal. So grits aren't any
more typical than boiled peanuts. But both of those Southern foods do evoke
profound memories.

I think of the late fifties, before interstate highways and air-conditioning
brought the hordes of people "from off" to the South Carolina low country
where I was reared. When I was in the sixth grade, I would go waterskiing with
the Salleys. Their daughters, Walton, Ding, and Sam (E.D., their father, must
have really wanted boys!), taught me how to ski. They had a black cook who
would boil up big batches of peanuts and put them in plastic Sunbeam bread
loaf wrappers. We'd take them to Lake Murray, and E.D. would pick out a deserted island in the middle of the lake to use as a base for our daylong adventure. We'd toss the bags of peanuts overboard to float on the water and then
take turns skiing until our arms and knees hurt. I remember trying to time our
stops so that we'd land by one of the floating bags of peanuts. We'd just drop
the rope and slowly sink down into the muddy water. The Salley girls could
lean over and pick up a bag from their slaloms. I could barely get within ten
feet of them. But no one loved the boiled peanuts more than I, and I always recall those floating bags of the warm, salty snacks whenever I eat them today.

Memories like those may simply come as a response to the inevitable questions about boiled peanuts that arise these days at the outdoor events where
peanuts are served. Invariably there is now someone who has moved here
from off and who wants to know more about them.

Salley is an old Orangeburg County name. Settled by Germans and Swiss
in 1730, the county is still largely populated by descendants of its original set tiers, though by the time we moved there, it was 70 percent black. (Salley,
South Carolina, home of the annual Chitlin' Strut Festival is in nearby Aiken
County.) We weren't Old Orangeburg; we weren't even South Carolinians. We
had moved there when I was three from the bayous of Louisiana, where my father worked in the chemical industry. He and Mother were both from Tennessee; she, from the western part of the state-McNairy County, later of
Walking Tall fame; and he from the hills around Knoxville.

Recently, I asked Dad (who is a great cook and who, in the fifties, was a
member of les Amis du Vin and had a wine cellar in Orangeburg) when he
first remembered tasting boiled peanuts.

"Never heard of them till a trip to South Carolina in 195o. Everybody in Orangeburg ate them! In the Cajun country, everybody ate sausages-rouge et
blanc-and tried to outdo each other with the intensity of the pepper."

My father has a summer house in the mountains of North Carolina now, so
he's back near his childhood home. But he says he never saw boiled peanuts in
the mountains when he first started going back up there about nine or ten
years ago.

"Now," he says, "all the roadside stands have them!"

"We grew peanuts for our own consumption when I was a lad. Granny
would soak them in brine, dry them, and then roast them in the oven. Salted
in the shell. Of course, those were not green peanuts."

Green peanuts. That's the real key to understanding boiled peanuts. They've
got to be freshly dug. I used to not eat boiled peanuts except in late summer,
though these days I'm not as picky. There are so many good hybrids being
grown now that taste pretty good (though I have never had a Virginia
peanut-a variety known as "jumbo" in South Carolina-that tasted as good
as the small ones) and that are available fresh ("green") from spring through
fall. Of course, we never get green Virginias down here; they're always dried.
The difference between fresh and dried is the same for all legumes, and a
legume is, after all, what a peanut is.

Kathi Purvis, food editor of the Charlotte Observer, says she comes from a
family, Georgians all, who are "boiled peanut fanatics."

"When I was a small child in eastern North Carolina, people treated my
family like we were odd because we boiled our peanuts," she recently confided.
"Parched and roasted peanuts are much more common in North Carolina
and Virginia. I've long maintained (and had to, having spent much of my life
in a non-boiled peanut state) that boiling peanuts makes much more sense
than roasting them. They are, after all, a legume, and we would certainly never
consider not boiling a kidney bean or a Great Northern."

The current trendiness of sushi bars throughout the country might help
popularize boiled peanuts. Soybeans boiled in the shell -edamame-are becoming a very popular appetizer. I have a Japanese friend who visited Charleston, where I live, one summer, and when I offered her boiled peanuts, she took
to them immediately, saying, "These taste very much like edamame. We eat
them with beer at baseball games." Which is exactly when a lot of southerners
eat them.

John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the Center for
the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, admits that
they are, "bar none," his favorite snack. He admits to having "fond memories"
of going to the South Carolina State Farmer's Market in Columbia and buying
them there. It always seemed that was the epicenter of boiled peanut culture
for my family.

Columbia is about forty miles from Orangeburg. It's real peanut country.
But when I went to college in Georgia, half the people I met, it seemed, came
from South Georgia, where there are fifteen thousand peanut farmers. But not
all Southerners, much less Georgians, are fond of boiled peanuts. Some wellknown authorities on Southern cooking are loath to enjoy them.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Jim Auchmutey, a native of the big city,
hates them. "I have tried to like them. Every year, when we're driving up to the
mountains to see some leaves, my wife Pam, a Savannah native, makes me
stop beside a boiling cauldron to buy a bag. She eats a bunch of them -suck,
swallow, spit-and then I try one to see if my taste buds have changed in the
past year, the way I suddenly liked cheese when I became a senior in high
school. Boiled peanuts haven't happened for me yet. They always taste like
those salt pills the coaches told you to take in track to keep from throwing up."

I prefer boiled peanuts that aren't all the same size, so that some of the
smaller ones are cooked so soft that you can eat the shell as well as the peanuts.
I asked Lucille Grant, one of Charleston's great cooks and the granddaughter
of a slave, if she had always eaten boiled peanuts.

"Oh, yes," she mused. "Boiled peanuts were one of my granddaddy's
things. He really prided himself on his peanuts, and he would only grow those
little Spanish ones. He'd come from the fields with some dug-up bushes and
he'd boil them up and they were always so good! But you can hardly find those
little peanuts any more, and they really do taste the best."

Peanuts are grown in nine states, but only about i percent of them are those
little Valencias-and most of those are grown in New Mexico, far from boiled
peanut territory. Nearly half of the peanuts grown in this country go into
peanut butter.

Growing up in Orangeburg, I heard peanuts called "ground-nuts," "goobers," "goober-peas," and "pindars," but the dictionaries and usual sources
haven't helped much with those words, either. Sir Hans Sloan published a
natural history of Jamaica in 1707 in which he described the "pindal," or Indian Earth-nut, but the first citation the Oxford English Dictionary lists for
"goober" is 1887. We know that the words "goober" and "pindal," like "okra,"
"gumbo," and "yam," are of West African origin. Though peanuts are native to
the New World, they came to be known in America through slaves from West
Africa. Food writers mostly avoid any mention of boiled peanuts, but Jessica
Harris, the eminent scholar of the African diaspora, has found boiled peanuts
in Ghana, whence the recipe probably arrived in South Carolina, and in
Brazil. In Ghana, the peanuts were simply boiled and eaten as a snack or with
boiled ears of corn on the cob; in Brazil they were served as part of a Candomble spiritual ceremony.