Good Morning Lowcountry

Servers vs. Those Served

New York Times food critic Frank Bruni yesterday complained about waiters. ("Tonight, Patronizing Language. Enjoy.") Specifically, he objects to the way restaurant servers instruct eaters ("Enjoy these appetizers left-to-right." "While it steams, you can enjoy the aroma."), the way they are so personal ("How are we doing?" "Do we have any food allergies?") and the way they insist on your enjoyment of the food.

The article in yesterday's Times got hundreds of comments, including one from a waiter at The Blue Plate in Charleston (who pointed out that servers are required by their employers to use restaurantspeak) and one from a diner in France (who said why are Americans complaining? Come to France where you practically have to slug a waiter to get his attention).

I'll comment here instead of on the Times' Web site. One of the most thoughtful readers there pointed out that dining out (in any country) has always been fraught with a kind of classism and snobism by which diners often feel entitled to either belittle or just NOT DEAL WITH persons serving them, whom they consider to be on a different level from themselves.

I've waited tables a few times, but the training I got in the U.K. gave me the best perspective on service. I worked at a private dining club in Edinburgh, Scotland, a very upstairs-downstairs kind of place whose members were important and sometimes titled.

I wore a really ugly wine-colored polyester uniform with starched white collar, cuffs and "wipe" over my arm. Britain, which doesn't pretend to not have class divisions, makes the rules of serving the upper class  very clear.

We (servers) were never to speak unless spoken to. We did not take food orders. The club members had arranged what they would eat before they entered the dining room. We were to simply deliver the food. We distributed no wine, water or coffee and asked no questions about preferences. The wine steward did that.

At any table, we were to serve the guest or guests first and the host, or hosts next. We were to serve from the left of each diner and move in a counterclockwise direction around the table. Should there be ladies present, we were to serve the guest's wife, first, then the host's wife, then the guest, then the host. We never touched a plate until all at the table were finished with each course. Each would signal this in turn by laying their knife and fork parallel to each other along the side of the plate (instead of crossed in an X in the middle of the plate, which meant they were still eating). We removed the dishes from the diner's right side. The easy way to remember it was: Serve to the left, take away from the right.

We were never to touch a diner or speak to him, much less comment on what he was eating. If we were asked a question, we could answer it. When we'd laid the food on the table, we retreated to stand by the wall in good view of each table we served, so that we could be summoned with a gesture, or a glance, if the diners needed anything.

Hurricane cookies (just in case)

Hurricane cookies are a particular gris-gris to keep storms out of the Lowcountry.

Shopping list for Hurricane Cookies
(assuming you have baking soda, baking powder and salt already)

all-purpose flour
unsalted butter (2 sticks)
granulated sugar
brown sugar
caramels (18 of 'em)
bittersweet or seme-sweet chocolate (6 oz.)
eggs (2)
pecans (a cup, chopped)

Now for the recipe, which I have kept secret for 10 years .... (click on Continue reading)

Hurricane Cookies
powerful gris-gris against tropical storms and hurricanes*

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 t. baking soda
1/2 t. baking powder
1 t. salt
2 sticks unsalted butter
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
2 large eggs
6 oz. bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped coarse
18 caramels, chopped coarse
1 cup coarsely chopped pecans.

350 degree oven
Whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Cream together butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs one at a time. Beat in flour. Stir in chocolate, caramels and pecans. Drop onto cookie sheet 2 inches apart. Bake 10-15 minutes depending on your oven (watch 'em).

*To be made (and eaten) when the Lowcountry is under a tropical storm watch or a hurricane watch.

Mayhaw jelly

I've liked Mayhaw Jelly for a long time but I can't find it in Charleston. I have to wait and stock up on it from the jelly,-jams-and-preserves store at the old Edisto Inn and Restaurant on Highway 17 South just this side of Jacksonboro. (Who remembers when it was a great place to eat fresh seafood and lines went out the door and around the corner starting about 4 p.m.? If I remember correctly, it opened at 5:30 p.m. only on weekends.)

You can also get Mayhaw Jelly at the vegetable stand on the left near where Highway 17 joins I-95 on the way to Savannah.

The best I've found is by Cedar Head Farms out of somewhere in south Georgia. Mayhaw berries grow wild in the swamp, which makes picking them and making jelly from them labor-intensive. Most people in south Georgia make it themselves for their own use. The jelly is a beautiful orange sunset color.

This month's Saveur magazine, a food magazine I am addicted to for its international food travel pieces and global ingredients, takes up the subject of Mayhaw Jelly and recommends you order it direct from Cedar Head Farms in Colquitt, Ga. Colquitt, the Mayhaw Capital of the World, has an annual festival dedicated to the delicious berry. The festival is coming up the third weekend in April.

French country cooking

I have a number of cookbooks that I love but don't cook out of often.

One is "Monet's Table," a gorgeous picture, narrative and recipe book about the life and gastonomic loves of Claude Monet with his mistress and then second wife Alice Hoschede at Giverny. For one thing, it has sumptuous photographs of the interior of the house... blue-tiled kitchen, blue-and-white China, fabulous yellow wooden chairs. For another, Monet had a great kitchen garden that he painted often and ate from regularly. The book includes recipes he actually used and loved. He devoted time and reverence to food and its preparation. I also have "Renoir's Table" another gorgeous biography/foodie extravaganza.

Both impressionists were successful enough to live well and eat well.

So I was surprised to find (in the P&C's occasional in-house cookbook give-away) "Van Gogh's Table." I snatched it up but thought: Wasn't Van Gogh on the edge of starvation his whole life? Wasn't he so UNsuccessful that he never sold any paintings and resorted to boiling leeks and potatoes in his room? Didn't he drink and smoke more than he ate?

The recipes are taken from the Auberge Ravoux, the cafe and boarding house the painter patronized in 1890 in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, his last home. Can't wait to make Veal Stew with Mushrooms.

The best account of French country cooking that I have in my small library is the one by Alice B. Toklas. Gertrude Stein's lover decided that since Gertrude was the writer, she'd be the cook. Her cookbook is a wonderful compilation of funny stories about almost every dish, process, French provincial locale, and meal for a friend in their ex-patriate, avante, artist crowd... Bass for Picasso, for example. "The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook" also has her famous Hashish Brownies recipe, which she used to whip up for the bridge club.

Hurricane Cookies (eating)

We're going to get a blow and a gully-washer from Ernesto, as a tropical storm, not a hurricane.

The good news is that we are eating the Hurricane Cookies now in the newsroom. Bakers out there (Heather/Joan) be warned: these cookies are a messy pain to make. Chopping up all those caramels and chocolate and pecans. Also the caramel melts on the pan in little side puddles that you have to cut off with a knife. But, they're Hurricane Cookies! Messy like a hurricane.

Today's GMLc is ... not there at the mothership. It will be soon ... we hope.

Hurricane Cookies (shopping)

The Lowcountry is now under a Hurricane Watch. Time to make Hurricane Cookies. I am on the way to the grocery store to pick up ingredients. Since I didn't have time to explain the particular magic of these messy (just like a hurricane) cookies in an earlier post, lemme do that now.

In 1996, I started making these cookies when the Lowcountry was issued a tropical storm or hurricane watch... in between buttoning down the house for hurricanes that were headed our way. Making cookies was a relief from latching hurricane shutters, emptying the refrigerator, turning off the water, turning off the power, packing, tying things outside down.

So I made 'em (and ate 'em and passed 'em around and other people ate 'em.)

I started noticing that every time we went under a tropical storm watch OR a hurricane watch and I made the cookies, the storm veered off... usually to North Carolina or Virginia, both places that fall under the category of Anywhere But Here. Sorry, states to the north of us, but hey. I've made them 7 times that I remember. Every time I've made them, the storm has veered.

When Hurricane Floyd gave us a backhanded slap and created the mother of all traffic jams in the Lowcountry, and ripped the back half of my mother's roof off, I was on vacation in Maine and couldn't make them. I left Maine before the storm made landfall in South Carolina and flew to Atlanta to be with family who had evacuated Charleston.

On the plane from Maine, I ate a large chocolate chip cookie I'd bought at the airport. Didn't work.

Friends and relatives have suggested that maybe hurricanes headed here really don't pay any attention to the go-away-hurricane cookies, but it's best not to question this particular mojo. We believe in it. It's become ritual. (The cookies in the photo are not Hurricane Cookies. Mic Smith/Staff)

The recipe is on the next page.

Shopping list for Hurricane Cookies
(assuming you have baking soda, baking powder and salt already)

all-purpose flour
unsalted butter (2 sticks)
granulated sugar
brown sugar
caramels (18 of 'em)
bittersweet or seme-sweet chocolate (6 oz.)
eggs (2)
pecans (a cup, chopped)

Now for the recipe, which I have kept secret for 10 years .... (click on Continue reading)

Angel's Diner

When GMLc got the news that the Central Coffee Shop in Manning has closed, we listed in print the other day our favorite diners: the late, great Goody House (now a Starbucks on Calhoun Street), the late, great Huddle House on King Street, Millie's in Richmond, Va., and the Fog City Diner in San Francisco.      

     (Central Coffee Shop, Manning, S.C.)

We FORGOT the most bizarre diner we've ever seen. We had the pleasure of a VERY LARGE cheeseburger and fries and a Coke in a frosted Coke glass. (We passed on the chocolate milk shake, but it looked delicious).
It's Angel's Diner in Palatka, Fla., Florida's oldest diner, made from an old railway dining car. Lots of chrome, some neon, very small, booths and bar stools. Curved ceiling. A menu that includes catfish and frog legs. We'd show you a picture ... we have one at home, a square Holga color image ... but it's at home and we're here and we're too tired.