A Good Pot of Something

Winter calls for a good pot of something bubbling on the stove. Anybody can have one. People who are gone to work all day can use a crock pot and the rest can enjoy the smell while they have a Dutch oven on the stove top.
People in rural southwest Alabama will generally have their pots full of vegetable soup which will always include lots of tomatoes, butterbeans, okra, and corn as the chief ingredients as well anything else. If you say vegetable soup to anybody around here, you better have put those things in the soup if you call it vegetable. A lot of folks put up what they call “soup mix” in jars or frozen. The quantities of the four aforementioned vegetables will vary according to how good the four individual crops were during the previous growing season. I am going to say something sacrilegious now, but I feel I must do it in the interest of sharing our culture. You can use canned tomatoes and butterbeans. You can use frozen okra and corn. When I think how the canners I know have slaved over their soup mixes, I feel bad for them. Putting up vegetables is a slave maker. Any person who has ever put up fresh vegetables knows what I am talking about. When they are ready, it’s now or never. They must be picked at their peak of ripeness, and canned or frozen instantaneously. I have seen many vacations postponed or not taken because “the corn will be coming in soon”. Corn is the worst taskmaster of all because its very sweetness depends on a speedy processing. Now there is a frozen corn put up in packages like bulk sausage that taste just like Momma’s that she grated off the cob. The people who take great pride in their own corn canning even have to admit that they have been equaled. I suspect they are secretly glad of the alternative. Corn canning is the worst slave master of all. You can’t even wait a day on it. Okra, butterbeans, and tomatoes can be held out a day, if you spread them out on newspapers so they don’t go through a heat. Butterbeans and okra can actually be refrigerated. Tomatoes can be refrigerated as a last resort, but they won’t be as good. Corn can’t have any of this forgiveness. In fact, I decided long ago that I would buy my corn in the roll because I don’t have any masochistic tendencies and I think putting up corn is a subtle form of torture. I thank God for large scale farmers and wish them commercial success of the greatest magnitude.
I am going to have to admit something else to you. This traditional vegetable soup is not my favorite pot of something. One pot meals are some of my favorite foods, but I like variety. I actually like the other local traditional bubbling pot better. It is dry beans cooked with some form of pork. It can be a ham bone or bacon or even a good smoked sausage such as our local Conecuh or Monroeville brands. They can be plain or have a whole onion or some garlic thrown in. They can be seasoned with plain salt or my favorite Creole seasoning. They can be soaked ahead of time for a nearer fresh texture or cooked long and hard for a mushy texture. Any of these ways they are delicious. They can be a meal in themselves or a side dish. They best way to eat them is in a bowl like soup with crumbled cornbread and chopped green onions.
Another soup pot specialty I have just come to terms with in my old age is the hunter’s delight – venison or deer meat as the locals call it. I had some bad experiences with deer meat in my childhood. Somebody would have a deer drive and give Mama some meat. She would tell us it was beef and cook it bone dry in the oven. The poor deer was already filled with hormones from running for its life on the deer drive. Then to be cooked without special seasonings and misrepresented as beef was a bad deal for all concerned. I always thought deer meat tasted funny and usually it does, unless properly butchered after not being run through the woods with brooms, guns and whooping hunters in hot pursuit.
I am finally convinced that venison can be good food, if prepared properly. I have a gentleman caller who knows how to treat it right. He waits for it in a tree, shoots it quietly without fanfare, and then bleeds it out right away. He then hangs it up and begins the butchering process. He removes all fat and tendons, leaving only chunks of meat. He then grinds it twice himself, or cuts the tenderloin into slices. When he makes a pot of venison chili, I’ll put it up against anybody’s chili – beef or venison. We ate it two nights in a row recently. The first night the chili was served in a bowl with cornbread, onions and yellow cheese. I don’t know why it had to be yellow cheese, but when I put out some pepper jack cheese, he objected and ‘lowed as how only yellow cheese would do. Of course, I had some on hand. My house is cholesterol heaven. The second night, I made a taco salad with the chili. I loved the little extra crunch of the vegetables.
I would be happy to have a pot of something bubbling on the stove every night of the winter. I think pots contain my favorite foods. I’m not through telling you about our pots of things. This is TO BE CONTINUED.