God Save the Sweet Potato Queens (16 page)

Death Chicken

Here is one we got from Tammy’s friend Maggie: Death Chicken, so called because Maggie and everybody in her family has made it for funeral food so many times. When we first read the ingredients, we thought we might have to jack around with it a little bit; the spices seemed off to us. Specifically, the recipe calls for bacon, oregano, and nutmeg, among other things, and we thought that the oregano and nutmeg might possibly mess up the bacon, and we just have to say emphatically that we are 100 percent against anything that might possibly mess up bacon, which is considered holy where we come from. But we decided that we would make it just exactly like Maggie said the first time, just to see what, if anything, actually needed jacking with. Well, let me tell you—it was a pure vision, the sight of us eating Death Chicken for the very first time. It was a pure vision with a pretty hefty soundtrack to go along with it, too. Ever seen that cartoon about Precious Pup where they give him a dog biscuit and he levitates about six feet off the floor, horizontally, and he comes down real slow, clutching various parts of his body, in the throes of ecstasy, emitting loud, repetitive sounds of rapturous delight the whole time? That’s kinda what we did although we all suck at levitating. It was, in a word, perfect. I wouldn’t change a single thing except to make a whole big bunch more of it than we did because we ’bout took each other’s arms off trying to get at the stuff.

Here’s how to make Death Chicken: Start off right by lining a 9 x 13 pan with six or more slices of uncooked bacon (we recommend more, naturally; you know, some people like to say “less is more,” but we are just the kind of girls who believe that more is more—and also better). This is just the perfect start to a perfect ending of just about anything, in my opinion. Next, pour a cup of uncooked rice over the bacon. I love it when you don’t have to cook the rice first, don’t you? On top of the rice, put some chicken pieces; happily, the skin must be left on for cooking purposes, and you may use white, dark, whatever you want. Salt and pepper the chicken a little bit and sprinkle a little paprika over it. Then whisk together 1 can of cream of chicken soup and 1 cup of water, adding a little bit of garlic salt, a pinch of nutmeg, 1 teaspoon of oregano, and 2 to 3 tablespoons of dried parsley flakes. Pour all that over the chicken and cover the whole deal with heavy foil (emphasis on heavy; it matters). Cook it at 300 degrees for two hours, with no peeking. Now, this part is most excellent because it means that you can put it in the oven and go to the funeral and come home to find your funeral food all done. And it will evermore be the hit of the funeral gathering, too, let me tell you. Make at least a double batch because, I promise you, you won’t get enough of it at the funeral to suit you and you’re gonna be crabby as all get out when you get home and don’t have a big pan of this stuff waiting for you.

Another thing about our Death-Defying Recipes is that they all can serve a dual purpose, if need be. You can not only take it for tasty funeral food; you can use it to hasten the onset of a funeral in certain individuals, should the need arise. Say, for instance, you happen to be in possession of a very old, extremely wealthy husband who himself is possessed of a bad heart and no other heirs but you your ownself. You married him, thinking zippity-do-dah was just around the corner, but he just persists in living on, day after day after day, until you are just about ready to kill yourself over it. Well, now, a good wife would be cooking hot meals for her husband. This stuff, on a regular basis, would be just as effective as arsenic, and they can’t put you in the penitentiary for it. Bacon is completely legal in all states: We checked. So you could call it Doo-dah Chicken, if you wanted to.

Connie’s Death Corn Five

What was that movie—
War Games
or something with Matthew Broderick or somebody like that, where somebody was gonna blow up the world and it came in stages of DefCon 1–5? We don’t remember what DefCon stood for, but we liked that part. Over the years, we have used that ranking system ourselves to illustrate the level of personal catastrophe that was occurring or about to occur: A DefCon 1 situation would be something like, oh, having a flat tire on a hot day and not being able to find your husband to make him change it and bitch him out about not replacing your tires before this kind of thing happened, while a DefCon 5 would be this same situation but when you finally do find him, he’s with another woman and they have used your credit card to pay for the hotel room. So, anyway, when we got this great funeral food recipe from our friend Connie, and realized that it has exactly five ingredients—one of which is corn—well, we thought it fairly cried out to be named Death Corn 5.

You take one package of yellow rice—being Southern, we naturally prefer it be Zatarain’s. You have to cook the rice ahead of time and that’s a pain, but it can’t be avoided. Fortunately, the rest of the recipe only involves dumping stuff in a casserole dish and stirring it up. So you cook the rice just like the box says, only you don’t put any oil in it. Don’t worry, there will be fat in a minute. You know whoever said “time heals all wounds” is just an idiot. Time doesn’t heal shit-diddly, not by itself anyway. If something rotten happens and you just sit down and wait for it to pass, I promise you, no matter how long you sit there, if you don’t eat something good, you are gonna feel every bit as bad as you did when you started—worse even because you’ll be starving slap to death. No, time does not heal all wounds; fat, however, does. I can’t think of a situation bad enough that fat wouldn’t improve significantly.

So, anyway, you’ve got your Zatarain’s yellow rice cooked without oil. Now dump it in your casserole (a quart size is probably big enough—but here again, why don’t you just go on and make a big vat of it and freeze some of it?). Then dump in a can of Mexicorn (that canned corn with red peppers and other stuff thrown in), a can of cream of chicken soup, a stick of butter (melt it first), and a cup of shredded cheese—cheddar or hot Jack, if you like a little kick, which I do. Dump and stir, as I said, and maybe put a little more cheese on top—you can just never have too much cheese, you know—and cook it for about 20 minutes or so at 350 degrees.

Please note that all five ingredients are yellow. Can you imagine a more cheerful dish to take to the bereaved? I’m sure it will perk them up no end. Note: At a cooking demonstration I once commented that you could make this recipe with nonfat soup, nonfat or low-fat cheese, and Benecol (instead of butter) and it would be pretty low fat, but I wouldn’t do it for somebody I loved: They deserve the full-fat treatment, in my opinion. Susan Trott, leader of the Cooter Throb Queans (not a typo) of Memphis, Tennessee, came up to me afterward and declared that there was nobody in the world she disliked enough to make a fat-free casserole for.

Larrupin’ Good Sweet Potatoes

Lest you forget of what we are the Queens, here’s the best thing involving sweet potatoes you ever put in your mouth. I first got this recipe from a guy I used to work with, Mark Magee. Well, actually, I got it from his wife, Pam, by way of Mark. He’s a sweetheart and a multitalented guy, but I’m quite sure cooking ain’t one of ’em. Whenever there was a covered-dish event at work—the only justification I can see for working at a real job as opposed to being self-employed—involving everybody toting massive amounts of fattening foodstuffs to work with them for public consumption, we would all just wait by the door with a spoon for Mark to arrive because Pam would pack him off to work with this incredible sweet potato stuff. We would just hover, like so many vultures with spoons, and as soon as he set it down and took the foil off, it was as good as gone. Reta Washam, the only white woman I have ever known who could keep up with me on a dance floor, told me that she got this same recipe from her mamaw (Yankees: that’s grandmother) and it was “larrupin’” good. My daddy used to say larrupin’, too (it rhymes with
terrapin
but has nothing to do with turtles). I never knew the definition of
larrupin’,
but I did infer quite early on that if something was larrupin’ good, I should get as much of it as possible, and I advise you to do the same.

Okay, to make this larrupin’ sweet potato stuff, you first want to boil a bunch of sweet potatoes. (Don’t even think about using canned sweet potatoes in any recipe I ever told you about. There are certain things that are acceptable, even desirable, to get from cans, like cream of anything soup, but canned sweet potatoes are a sacrilege.) You want to end up with about 3 cups’ worth of mashed ones, so ever how many ’taters that is, use that many. I’m sure a cookbook can tell you; I can’t. I just boil a big pot full of sweet potatoes; Julia Child, I ain’t. Here’s the deal, though: If you boil the sweet potatoes with the skins on, after they’re boiled, the skins just slip right off in your hand, practically. On the other hand, trying to peel one raw sweet potato, let alone a whole pot full of them, would be enough to sour you on this recipe from the get-go.

So boil ’em, then peel ’em, then dump them in a big bowl and put in
at least
1 cup of sugar, 1⁄3cup of milk, a stick of butter, and a teaspoon of vanilla. You know when I say a teaspoon of vanilla that I mean for you to let the vanilla run over the sides of the spoon for a little bit before you stop pouring. You also need just a dash of salt in there or it will taste flat. The sugar part you have to do to taste: Start with a cup and if it needs more, then by all means, put more in. After you get done tasting and testing, then beat in two eggs. Trust me, you do not want to put the eggs in first and then go to tasting it to see if you’ve got enough sugar in there: The sweet potatoes are just hot enough to make the eggs poisonous but not hot enough to cook them. After all that’s done, put the ’tater stuff in a greased casserole. (Once again, you can make a vat of this and freeze it.)

The topping is the kicker. You want a cup of dark brown sugar (why do they even make the light brown kind?), 1⁄3 cup of butter, 1⁄3 cup of flour, and a cup of pecan pieces. Stir it all up together and spread it over the top of the ’taters. Kay North wrote me that she also puts a cup of coconut in this same topping. I tried it and it’s killer. Sometimes I’ll make it with coconut on one side and regular topping on the other: This is the height of luxury, I believe. After you put the topping on there, you bake it at 350 degrees for about a half hour. I have often thought of putting this in a pie crust, since it’s better than any sweet potato pie I ever had in my life. As it is, though, it gets served as vegetable, which means, of course, that it doesn’t count as dessert, and you can have that, too.

“Get Back, Granny” Sweet Potato Cobbler

There is a saying in the South—of baffling origins—that when something is tasty in the extreme, it is “good enough to make you slap your grandmaw.” Why would the consumption of something yummy provoke one to an act of violence—and against a senior adult at that? I cannot fathom how this got started. Perhaps William Safire could be of assistance. At any rate, I got this recipe for sweet potato cobbler from my friend Ray Lee who told me when he brought the dish out to serve, “This stuff is so good, it’ll make you slap your grandmaw.” And, I must admit, if there was any truth to that maxim at all and I was a whacking sort of gal, this stuff would endanger the quality of life for grandmaws everywhere.

First thing, boil some sweet potatoes (remember the skins come off easily after they’re cooked). You need about 2 cups of sweet potato chunks to make this stuff. Now melt a stick of butter in a 13 x 9 x 2 pan—anything that starts out like this is gonna be good, don’t you know? Okay, then heat 2 cups of water and two cups of sugar until the sugar melts. Then make a dough out of 1 1⁄2 cups self-rising flour, 1⁄2 cup shortening and 1⁄3 cup milk. Roll that dough out to a rectangle about 1⁄4 inch thick and sprinkle it with 1 teaspoon of cinnamon and one of nutmeg. Put your sweet potatoes on there, roll it up, and pinch the ends together to seal them. Then slice that roll into about 15 or 20 pieces and put them in the pan of melted butter, pour the sugar syrup over them, and bake the thing at 350 for about 45 minutes.

Just to be on the safe side, don’t serve this when your grandmaw’s around.