Pot Liquor, Food For Your Soul

The vegetarian Canadian said to the American Delta-born carnivore, “I can make you a dish so good you won’t even miss the meat.” The carnivore retorted, “now why would you even want to do that?”

“Don’t throw that out!,” I tell my children when they’re cleaning the kitchen after I’ve cooked and we’ve eaten dinner. I want them to keep the juice from the savory pork roast, the holiday ham or the baked chicken leftover after dinner. “I’m fixin’ greens Sunday and I need that to start’m.”  We say fixin’, finna or fittn’a. It’s the Delta dialectic for fixing to which is, according to my French Canadian friend from Winnipeg, Manitoba, quite comical.

“How are you fixing your food?” she asks in her polite Canadian sort of way. “Is it broken?” A quick education in the ethos of soul food etiquette eases her pain of having been held hostage by a penchant for refined dining.  Back home in my momma’s kitchen we “fixed” our food by often piecing together something old, something new, something borrowed and the blues.

I like my greens mixed – collard, mustard and turnip. Leave out the turnips if you must, but this epicurean delight will neither include nor resemble the delicate salad medley of baby spinach, arugula, Swiss chard, and radicchio.  That would make it too safe and this type of eating is not designed to be a trek into carnivorous sobriety.

“I’ll need that pot liquor to decorate the natural flavor of these greens aged,” I remind my children. They need to simmer with my choice of neck bones, hocks, or smoked turkey. Take your pick of pork or turkey. Blend that liberating libation with a diced juicy white onion, chopped tops of a bright green scallion, a little vinegar – apple cider or red wine – cayenne pepper, minced garlic, a little sugar, a few secret spices, and what you’ve got is the beginnings of “soul food” heaven. 

I’m a Delta boy from southeast Arkansas, born in a small town riddled with dirt roads and country farms. We had country stores but nothing along the order of the highway side joint Cracker Barrel. Our country stores were likely 10×12 rooms. The highlight was penny candy, penny cookies, sour pickles and peppermint sticks. “I’m a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas,” was the Dixieland song sang at our annual town-wide celebration. I was an adult beyond 21, living in the northern Midwest before I learned to appreciate southern cooking. It might be a misnomer to call it cuisine. While the Cajun and Creole transform the French to southern with their beignets, crepes, etouffee and baguettes.  I’m not yet convinced we should use their language to colloquialize the culinary soul of the south. It may be good for Louisianna bread pudding, but it’s misleading when speaking of food the Delta’s way.

I learned this through the power of pound cake in Milwaukee, Wis. At a German-owned restaurant called Elsa’s On the Park. A restaurant fashioned with a quarterly rotation of remarkable art, marble top tables, serving staff in starched cotton shirts and black trousers ready to serve with effortless hospitality, Elsa’s borrowed a taste of down home cooking. It was called “golden gate cake”, a healthy slice of pound cake laid over a bed of caramel, topped with vanilla Häagen-Dazs, whipped cream and splashed with golden rum. It was to die for. In one dish I got to live all over the country. I never knew pound cake could be so decadent.

Sunday dinners were bountifully endowed with rich ‘tastations’ like, candied yams or sweet potato pudding. My grandmother called it sweet potato pun; to this day I don’t know the correct way to say it or even spell it. Add to that cornbread dressing, cranberry sauce, fried chicken, dumplings, green beans and OH MY GOD, Grandma’s homemade, golden and butter-crusted yeast rolls – the special recipe and then the hot-water or iron-skillet cornbread, a great companion piece to the mixed greens which must be eaten in a special way – no fork, no spoon just fingers.  I made that mistake once after returning to the south, I found myself fixing myself a bowl of greens and reaching for a fork. Grandma looked at me, and a friend of mine whose family was populated by rodeo cowboys, and said, “Now you know, you’re eat’n them greens all wrong! You’re supposed to be sop’n’m.” As in sopping them. ‘Sopping or sop’n’ means taking the cornbread in one hand and anchoring the greens as you picked them with your fingers and ate them both simultaneously. The cornbread acts as a sponge for the pot liquor. For some reason the greens just taste better this way.

This would perhaps be just a Sunday fixin’s, but the richness of this diet still delights as a daily delectable. Sunday dinner could not be extricated from its Sunday “helping” — meaning that sacred ritual of church. Andy Griffith offered it in the North Carolinian expression, ‘Sunday go to meeting.’ This ritual, populated by the certain fashion of dress, hats, gloves, trousers, pinpoints, suits and ties. To this day it’s common to hear the term Sunday shoes or perhaps even church shoes.  Yet Sunday, marked a genuine rest from our work where we could recline into the resolve of faith family and friendship.

Particularly for me, being a PK (preacher’s kid), I live with an undying affection for human hands at the heart of Sunday fixins.  Some of our church congregants lived as farmers, having evolved through promotion from share cropper to land owner. It was common during that time for them to bring fruit of their land, a portion of their harvest to the pastor’s family. It was a way of showing appreciation and nurturing the body of the one who had been charged with nurturing their soul.  I hated, though, having to snap peas, shell beans, shuck corn and pick pecans. My fingers ached and I was so slow. My mother could have a gallon sized bowl of peas shelled and picked before I could manage to clear a cup of them.  But on some level when we cooked and dined we could feel the music of Sunday morning in the Sunday Dinner. We prayed often, “Dear God, bless the hands that prepared and the hands that provided.” Our food connected us to the earth and God at the same time.  Southern cooking is like country music and Soul food is like the blues.  Both genres, beyond the music, show and taste how we tell the story. So goes the food of the south, it’s all about the telling of the story and what you use to tell it, except on Sunday. On Sunday, the food touches the tongue like the soothing sound of gospel music. This music helped us live beyond the blues to the miracle. It’s like we could see in the food, beyond our callused hands and bruised egos from having to piece-meal our vittles, the miracle of the meal.  

Nothing like gospel music, it’s jazz the Jesus way. And the way we heard it was rich in the heart of the south living as the closeted guru nurturing and grooming the sounds of Elvis and Al Green. Our music was unscripted and unscored, lacking in sheet music but saturated with composition. It was straight from the heart of musicians who touched their instruments with nothing less than what had to be the marriage of melody and mind with a direct connection to our fingers. Music this way is pregnant with inspiration, and food for the soul. The music was patterned on every first day of the week in much the same way we would see it ensconced in the styles of a Jimmy Hendrix. Gospel music took your breath away and dinner was no less like being an audience to the jazz of the kitchen. The food, soul food, was without recipe but missing nothing in flavor and nothing in fullness.  Pot liquor was and is the ever looming libation that gives Soul to our food. Its how we borrowed from yesterday’s best and ingeniously kept something old fresh enough to start something new. If you’ve ever listened to a beautiful symphony, a brilliant ballad, or a solo concerto, you probably never left the performance thinking about the instrument you didn’t hear. Fixing our food was our way of making a meal out of what was there and helping us forget what was not.