Chef Dodd's Recipes for Soups

These are the ones served at the cooking class at Mama Nems Bistro.

Remember that these recipes are for a crowd. Cut them down for home use. 1/4 the recipe should feed you and a normal family. These recipes are really fairly thrifty. You can appear gourmet and be fiscally conservative at the same time. You can save your cooking money and spend it on gas!

COOKING WITH MAMA N’EM

Last night I took a cooking class form Chef Dodd Orton at Mama N'ems Bistro. He is a retired executive chef with the Hilton Hotel chain that has returned to rural Southwest Alabama to live. He is the chef now at the Rural Heritage Center in Thomaston. The restaurant is called Mama N’ems Bistro because a favorite saying in the area is Mama and ‘em always did it this way.
There is a series of 6 classes being offered in August and September on Thursday nights.
They each have a different topic. Last night was soups and sauces. They cost $20 each. You can take one or all. The topics still to come are: Breads on Aug 21, Desserts on Aug 28, Entrees on Sept 6, and Basic Food Service (how to put together an entrée) on Sept 11.
I signed up for two reasons – Chef Dodd is a wonderful cook and they start off the lessons with wine and cheese, so I knew it would be a fun party. You know, I’ve told you before we people in the Black Belt think nothing of driving 60 miles anytime for a good party. Actually, my friends and I drove only 30 miles to go. Everybody there had driven from somewhere. In rural areas we have to think regionally.
We watched demonstrations, asked the Chef questions, and then got to eat what was prepared as our lesson. Last night it was Vermont Cheddar Soup, German Potato Salad Soup, and Hollandaise Sauce. The hollandaise that he made was a no fail version. He started with a white sauce made with real cream, then added two egg yolks. When they were combined, he added lemon juice. It didn’t curdle as mixing dairy products and lemon juice sometimes will. He said that in a restaurant setting, if you served a traditional hollandaise made by slowly combining eggs, butter and lemon juice, it is too labor intensive. This surprisingly tastes very similar and is a lot less temperamental. Of course, purists will not be pleased, but my motto in the kitchen and in life is “If it’s hard, there must be a better way”.
You can see from the pictures of the class that there were men there. They are serious about cooking which did my heart good. Mostly in rural Southwest Alabama, men just barbeque or fry with no in between.
I will include Chef Dodd’s recipes for the two soups in the next blog. The proportions are for a crowd. For home use, you could divide the recipe by 4 and still have enough. However, I am just the messenger, not your mathematician. . Both recipes are delicious. I had ample servings of both. I do not like beer. I agree with Mae West – they can put it back in the horse. In the Vermont Cheddar Soup I have finally found a way that I like it. It gives the soup a tang that really compliments the cheese. I might use ½ a can instead of ¼ in the recipe.
I plan to go to most of the classes unless I have a conflict. I think when word get around, that there will be more lessons. It is a good learning experience as well as a social occasion. Good party, good food, and the chance to learn something besides. Not a bad way to spend and evening in the Black Belt.

DINNER IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY

My Dear friend and mentor, Kathryn Tucker Windham, has two things she feels very strongly about. One in that you should never put sugar in cornbread and the other is that dinner is served in the middle of the day with supper being served at night.
Yesterday, we had dinner in the middle of the day for the volunteers who worked on the movie premier. We wanted to say “Thank you” in a tangible way. We know that food is at the heart of most all southern traditions, especially here in rural Southwest Alabama. Our menu was one that reflects our culinary traditions. The menu was:

Pulled Barbequed Pork with Norman’s Secret Family Sauce
Hash brown Potato Casserole
Fresh Butterbeans and Okra with fresh tomato relish
Seven Layer Salad Sweet Tea
Homemade rolls with butter
Cheesecake Soufflé and Egg Custard Pie

There are certain things you should know about some of the dishes.
• One: The way a person doe’s barbeque is a highly personal thing. The sauce may vary in our region from a sweet or tart tomato base to a highly vinegar concoction. It will never have a mustard base. The best barbeque is a two day process. It must be smoked most of one day, then pulled or chopped. In our family, we have discovered the real secret of the best barbeque is to pour a mixture of mostly water with Ketchup, vinegar and Worcestershire sauce in it over the hot meat and its natural juices, then refrigerate it overnight. The liquid will disappear into the meat by the next day. Heat the meat up and serve it with whatever sauce you like. The mixture from the previous day is not considered sauce, it is marinade.
• Two: Butterbeans or peas are generally served with some kind of relish to add spiciness and flavor according to the eater’s preference. Many cooks have a special relish that they can when the tomato crop comes in, or when they are looking for something to do with those hard pears that are in every old house yard. They generally contain spices of various kinds, almost always adding some amount of onions and peppers – sweet or hot. Southern food is not bland, but like Mexican, you add the spices and heat yourself at the table. My family has a relish that is not cooked. My great aunt invented it as far as I know. It is very simple. We used to try to guess what was in it and complicate the simple mixture that we discovered to be composed of chopped fresh tomatoes, onions and peppers with 2 tablespoons of sugar per quart. Salt and pepper is added to taste. Usually, cornbread is served whenever there are peas and butterbeans. We had homemade rolls to be fancier since they are not every day fare (too much trouble), but I did miss my cornbread.
• Three: Okra is generally cooked with the peas or beans. It doesn’t look nice, though, if the okra falls apart, so for company, the okra is removed to a separate dish for serving. Everybody has an okra story. My family traditions tell of relatives who didn’t think they liked okra. My grandmother used to remove it from her pea pot because one of the children wouldn’t eat the slick stuff that boiled okra becomes. She wasn’t about to cook two pots of peas, so she just removed the okra from the peas/beans before bringing them to the table, so that the picky child never knew. The family got the full benefit of the flavor with her none the wiser. The okra was added near the end, so it didn’t have time to get slick. We don’t stir the pot while the okra is steaming on top, so it doesn’t break up.
• Sweet Tea is always served at a dinner in the middle of the day. I personally like to sweeten my own tea, but with guests, it must be already sweetened> the logic behind this is that cold tea does not sweeten well and takes more sugar. I don’t know how anybody could stand more sugar than sweet tea already has. To be perfect, it should taste like cane syrup. It is too much for me, but my guests require the effort.
• Potato salad is the general potato side served with barbeque, but so many cooks are shortcutting the process with bought potato salad that the hash brown casserole seemed to say we cared about the palates of our guests.
• We always say egg custard pie rather than just custard pie for a reason. There are chocolate custard pies and coconut custard pies that are cooked on the stove and added to a baked crust then topped with meringue and baked. An egg custard pie on the other hand is baked in the crust with no meringue. It is, if done right, a silken concoction that melts on the tongue.

The guests at the dinner in the middle of the day seemed to enjoy the food. As usual, I prepared way too much. It would be real faux paux to not have as much to eat as the guests could possible stuff in. I have included pictures of them enjoying the food. There is an individual picture of one special gentleman, Reverend Mosley, the owner of Mosley Funeral Home who provided limousine service for the premier. I had to take his picture to show you. Con you believe this man is 88 years old? He told Kathryn Tucker Windham that night that he was 89. When I said I couldn’t believe it, he said “Let’s straighten this out right now. I am only 88.” He will be 89 this year. He looks and acts so young. I wonder what his secret to perpetual youth is – embalming fluid? Whatever it is, we all need to get some, unless the embalming fluid is being used on us. We can wait a while on that.

THE PREMIER IS A WINNER

It really happened! We had the Deep South World Premier of Ron Harris’ movie and it was a sell out! Two hundred and fifty seats were filled. There were politicians, a former governor’s wife who is a huge supporter of the arts in her own right and hundreds of local people.
The movie was a science fiction fairy tale. It was an arty film noir that wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea. The reviews of the film were mixed, as we knew they would be, but the reviews of the reception were unanimous – everybody had a grand time! To quote the editor of the Thomasville Times, Arthur McLean:
“It’s not every day they shut down Front Street and set up the tents. It’s not every day that Kathryn Tucker Windham drives downtown in a limo, but there it was, both events at the same time.” He went on to tell about a nice lady from the Huntsville Botanical Gardens group that came to the premier asking him if this was a big event in our little hamlet. He said “I told her I reckoned just about any event was a big one for Thomasville…..Good ol’ Clarke County folks love to have a reason to get out of the house and socialize for a while”. And socialize they did. The foods in the street were set up with all kinds of local delicacies.
As I said, the reviews were mixed about the movie. Ron was expecting this. He said before the movie that he just hoped the people wouldn’t hate him after they saw it. This really was the premier in front of a general audience. It had been shown before at festivals, but not in a theater to regular people. Some of the regular people were really funny. One cute man came up to me, put his arm around me and whispered in my ear “That was horrible”. Another viewer said she didn’t understand the movie, but wanted to say something nice to Ron, so she said she liked the scenery. That was really funny, since the movie took place in a basement. Other sci-fi buffs loved it. Ron said it was interesting to get the audience’s reaction. He was very pleased as he and Kathryn Windham watched the movie front rocking chairs. They had told stories about going to this theater in their youths prior to the screening. Ron said the fact that Kathryn had watched silent movies there 80 years ago gave us all most a century’s worth of perspective on the movie industry. They had to bring the rocking chairs down from the stage to sit in because all the other seats were taking.
There are not enough nice things to say about how the local people worked together to make the event a success. The City cleaned up the streetscape and erected the tents. They provided security. The local theater owners, Linda and Jerry Edwards volunteered the Thomasville Theater. In addition, they painted, cleaned the seats and got new curtains for the wall. They also provided concessions and served as ushers. Wal-Mart was a big supported and their manager was personally involved in the planning of the event. The Thomasville Times gave us great publicity. Super volunteers from the Chamber of Commerce, Ala Tom RC&D, a local candidate for public office, Ron’s family, and tourism volunteers worked in every capacity from preparing and serving food to anything else that needed doing. The whole town worked together. People came out in support of the event. Rural Southwest Alabama is a great place to live and on Monday night was a happening place!