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Eatin' Low on the Hog
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15102 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1989 |
5,136 Words |
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Roger L Welsch
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WHITE TRASH COOKING
Ernest Matthew Mickler
Berkley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 1986
134 pp., $12.95
SINKIN SPELLS, HOT FLASHES, FITS AND CRAVINS
Ernest Matthew Mickler
Berkley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 1988
158 pp., $14.95
In these table-top cookbooks, Ernest Matthew Mickler has sought to explore whimsically the foodways (not simply the foods) of the lower class of America's Southeast. I suspect that Mickler and many of his readers would argue that a good many people from that region and class have spread to other parts of the country, and that many people from other parts of the country have adopted White Trash ways, even if they have never ventured outside the city limits of Los Angeles or Butte, Montana. The food described in these books depicts a foods system reaching well beyond the Southeast, but both of these books are first and foremost regional cookbooks.
White Trash Cooking, nonetheless, became one of the surprise best-sellers of 1986; garnering accolades and honorable mentions from tabloids and slick glamour magazines alike. Reviewers were bemused and intrigued by the amateurish photos of authentic rednecks and the dogpatch diction of the recipe contributors. While White Trash Cooking is a general collection, Sinkin Spells, Hot Flashes, Fits and Cravins is presented as a collection of recipes for foods customarily brought to social gatherings of the sort listed in the title. Each book has the same organization--a brief introduction, a section of color photographs showing the foods, people, and geography, and about 250 recipes.
The recipes in White Trash Cooking are divided into conventional categories--vegetables and meats, fish, salads, sandwiches, candies and sweets, puddings and pies, breads, pickles and jellies, and drinks. Sinkin Spells is divided more loosely into those occasions at which the foods are presumably appropriate--religious events, funerals and wakes, reunions and picnics, holidays, butcherings, bees, and domestic gatherings, plus another grouping that looks to me like more religious events and yet another that looks again like picnics.
That paragraph sums these books up pretty well. White Trash Cooking is a solid cookbook with just enough local color and humor in it to make it good reading both for food and fun. But Sinkin Spells is, as its title suggests all too well, like my Aunt Bonnie's chocolate chip cookies that always had too many chocolate chips: They were so loaded with sweetness, doodads, and foofaraw, they just didn't hold together any more.
I have owned my copy of White Trash Cooking for a couple of years now and have tried a few of the recipes. Recipe titles like "Mary Linder's Washday Soup" or "Liver Hater's Chicken Livers" add a nice spiciness to the White Trash stew. The short quotations and explanations added to many of the recipes are some of the best reading in the book, although I also note that as I read through it two years ago with no idea that I would eventually review it, I jotted in the margin on two different pages, "Too
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