Grandma Jean's coleslaw

I came home tonight with no particular plan for dinner, other than what I could dream up in the car on the way back from dance class. I decided on my old stand-by, grilled cheese and tomato. But since I was out of salad greens, I had to be creative if I wanted something besides carrot sticks on the side. I had to make due.

Turns out I am good at this, probably the result of frequently avoiding the grocery store: if I can make something work from what I already have in the pantry, I will.

Tonight’s side veggie came from an old piece of red cabbage and a carrot. That’s really about it. I was going to shred the vegetables and then improvise a dressing, maybe throw some mayonnaise and lemon together and call it coleslaw, but then I thought of the Southern cookbook Ann gave me a few years ago – I’d just baked cornbread from it, and I figured it would have a good coleslaw recipe as well.

The book, The Gift of Southern Cooking, is by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock, and though they contribute to it at least equally, mining their southern childhoods and subsequent journeys into all things culinary, it’s the only cookbook I have by Edna Lewis, and I think of it as hers.

According to the New York Times, Miss Lewis (as she was known) was the first to elevate southern cooking  beyond its “knee-slapping, cornpone image.” She was born in Freetown, Virginia, the granddaughter of a freed slave, and wound up bringing her kitchen traditions to New York society through restaurants and cookbooks. She became the doyenne of southern cooking, widely respected and admired by top chefs and glitterati. She died at age 89, in 2006.

I love this book. It really is a team effort; Peacock, it turns out, was so close to Lewis that he lived with and cared for her in her final years, and they were widely known (again, according to the Times) as “the odd couple of southern cooking” – she, an elderly, African American widow and he, a young, white, gay chef. The coleslaw recipe is his, developed when he was chef for the governor of Georgia in the 1980s, cooking for countless political barbeques. I know this because the story is included in the book: The bits before the recipes are at least as good as the recipes themselves. In addition to the provenance of the coleslaw, the explanations and stories turned me from disdain over lard, to wondering where I can buy some; and convinced me that I should make the homemade baking powder, to avoid that occasional metallic taste in my muffins and biscuits when I use the store-bought variety.

The recipes here are solid. I can vouch especially for the lemon chess pie and the biscuits, I am charmed by recipes like “cat’s tongues” cookies, red-eye gravy and chow chow, and I want to bake my way through nearly an entire chapter on cakes.

Tonight I found another reason to love this book: coleslaw. This one involves a cooked dressing, just like my Grandma Jean’s. Hers was finely shredded, and so is Peacock’s (though I have to admit, mine strayed far from the actual recipe, and I just shredded it coarsely since I was hungry and didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it). The dressing is heavy on the vinegar, too, a trait that puts me right back in the kitchen at Bixley Heath, the street in Lynbrook, New York, where my grandmother served my family Sunday dinners when I was small.

The recipe is simple, really: equal parts vinegar and sugar, boiled together for 3 minutes with a little salt; to this you add some Dijon mustard and half the amount of oil as vinegar, then the dressing gets added to the vegetables – Peacock calls for cucumbers with the cabbage, but I used carrot to stretch what little cabbage I had (and I had no cucumbers). There’s also a little cream and sour cream to finish the dish.

I think of Grandma Jean’s coleslaw with “cold cuts,” a favorite short cut for lunch or a casual dinner at her house. It also makes me think of her potato salad, which we called “German potato salad,” though I’m not sure why. She was actually Scottish and Irish.

As such, she would probably find it pretty funny that I now think of this pair of southern cooks as her compadres in the kitchen.  I love how cooking unites all kinds of people. Maybe she and Miss Lewis have found one another in some sort of culinary afterlife.

Thanks, Ann, for this book. As you can see, it’s a winner in more ways than one.

 

Photo is by John T. Hill, and ran on the cover of Lewis' book, The Taste of Country Cooking.