Dixie: Where Pork Is King and SPAM Won’t Do
Jul 04 '01 (Updated Jul 10 '01)
The Bottom Line In the cuisine of Virginia, pork is king - ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES!
My cultural roots are deep in Virginian soil. My mother was from Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, and my father was from Brunswick County, Virginia, that patch of soil near North Carolina known by natives as “sou’side Vahginya.” Brunswick County, too, is home of the eponymous stew, a delightful burgoo of chicken stewed in tomatoes and onions, with fresh corn, lima beans, and potatoes added in. Somehow I am able to repress the knowledge that the original recipe for Brunswick Stew begins “First you kill a squirrel” and love this stew as my favorite comfort food, a soothing melange of chicken and succotash.
Though my roots are in Virginia, I did not grow up there. I was born in Delaware, which has as much cultural significance to me as the fact that many businesses are incorporated in the state of Delaware: it’s simply a technicality of circumstance. I did most of my growing up in Texas, but Virginia stamped its character into my formation through my parents’ education as well as our summer trips to Virginia to visit family.
My memories of these annual pilgrimages to the mother state are punctuated by tastes and smells of Virginia cuisine. All communal life, if seemed, centered around meals, either preparing them or consuming them; and there were always, but always, three sit-down meals each day.
Breakfasts were huge farmhand meals, with fluffy scrambled eggs, crisply broiled bacon, fresh biscuits or bread, homemade jams, tumblers filled with orange juice, and sliced garden tomahtoes. Lunch (more often called “dinner” in the South) seemed to come quickly after such a hearty early morning meal, and it also featured tomahtoes, often marinated in vinegar with sweet cucumbers fresh from the garden. There would be sliced meat, the dibs and dabs of vegetable dishes left over from the previous day’s supper, again with fresh biscuits. Some kind of candy or bar, like date bars, was served for dessert.
The evening meal was the grandest. Supper was the time for roasted meats and fresh vegetable casseroles. Supper was when fresh rolls were made. Supper was the occasion for outrageous corn-on-the-cob eating contests, corn so crisp and sweet as to satisfy the longing for dessert. Yet, there was always dessert, always a touch of something sweet after a meal. My favorite was Lemon Chess Pie, smoother and less tart than a Lemon Meringue Pie, somewhat opaque and given a unique character by the inclusion of cornmeal.
But everywhere there was PORK: bacon, country hams, pork chops, roast pork, fried ham slices, ham loaf, ham salad, ham croquettes, and ham spread. My copy of The Smithfield Cookbook, published by the Junior Women’s Club of Smithfield Virginia, reads “There is hardly an occasion from christening to funeral that does not call for getting down a ham.”
While all country hams are regarded as savory, the king of country hams is Smithfield Ham. Smithfield Ham is the United States’ worthy answer to Italy’s proscuitto. Again, from The Smithfield Cookbook:
“This is, of course, no ordinary ham. It is the Smithfield Ham, praised as quite simply, the world's finest. The Smithfield Ham is distinguished by its dark red meat, the yellow translucent fat indicative of a peanut fed hog, a slightly oil texture and its salty but divine flavor. So distinctive are these hams that they are shipped all over the world where they grace the finest tables. Queen Victoria, as have other heads of state, ordered the hams on a regular basis.”
Smithfield Ham is rich for the pocketbook as well as the taste buds. Like proscuitto, it is often eaten only in small portions, as a piquant accompaniment. Usually we had small slices of Smithfield Ham on a beaten biscuit, a peculiar but delicious small biscuit made without leavening. The biscuit dough is literally beaten for about half an hour until it blisters, which allows the dough to rise somewhat. They are firm compared with the more typical fluffy biscuit, more like a thick cracker, and they marry beautifully with a savory slice of Smithfield Ham.
I remember a lunchtime when my grandmother had prepared a lovely large platter with slices of Smithfield Ham ringed with fresh beaten biscuits. So taken was my brother with the rich flavor of the ham, that he picked off a small piece to eat before the platter was delivered to the table. My grandmother, noticing this impulsive act, was outraged and said, “Ham with no biscuit? You might get sick!”
Yes, pork is king in Dixie. Arkansas Razorback fans sport pig-shaped hats and shout “soooo-EEEE!” Deliverance, with its infamous line, “Squeal like a pig,” could never have been set north of the Mason-Dixon Line. While in Texas, beef brisket is the standard cut submitted to the barbecue grill, then slathered in a spicy tomato sauce, in the South, bahbahcue is (what I think of as) an odd mixture of pork stewed with vinegar and mustard. It is served shredded, usually on a bun and topped with crunchy cole slaw.
My family relocated to Texas when I was quite young. It was a challenging cultural and culinary adjustment for us. Mother tried her mightiest to recreate her favorite Virginia meals. Pork chops were grilled, ham slices were fried and topped with pineapple, ground pork was molded into loaf pans and baked. These were fine fare but unsatisfactory compromises of Virginia dreams and memories with the reality of Texas groceries.
I remember vividly Mother’s attempt at sausage making. She hooked up the old, hand-cranked meat grinder to the kitchen counter and sacrificed chunks of pork flesh into its funnel. As she cranked, pale pink worm-like shapes oozed from the other end. The harder she cranked, the more pork ooze she produced, a rather sad reward for such vigorous labor.
There are some things children should not see, and sausage making is one of them. It is through the trauma of witnessing the grinding and reduction of animal flesh, sinisterly similar in hue to one’s own Anglo-European flesh, that the vegetarian impulse is born.
Thankfully, Mother soon tired of her thankless labors at crushing dead pigs. Seeking less time in the kitchen and more time on the golf course, she adopted the New American Way of serving “convenience foods,” foods (or often called “food products”) where the grinding, shaping, and cooking have been done. And this is how SPAM came into our household, borne of the deeply rooted Virginia hankering for pork and the modern quest for efficiency.
SPAM was not a trauma unto itself, but it evoked memories of that earlier trauma, of witnessing the grinding of pig meat. Ensconced in the pink and blue tin, colors perversely associated with a baby’s layette, it meant to suggest the highest degree of standardization of food production and quality control. Instead, for me, it was only a repulsive, gelatinous reminder of the brutal carnage I had witnessed in my own home. Though fried SPAM slices seemed to honor the hunger my parents had for pork, they were a further insult to my young mind and taste buds.
And so I grew away from my cultural heritage, the seemingly-ingrained longing for all things pork. Although the pork industry has worked hard with its “Pork: the other white meat” advertising campaign with slightly racist overtones, I take a more affirmative action approach to meat, preferring meat of color, a deeply seared steak or darkly roasted cut of beef.
More and more I find myself simply preferring bread, vegetables, and cheese. It is rare that I can find fresh vegetables that match my memories of the sweet summer tastes of Virginia. But the mere pursuit of a match offers satisfaction, and I experience no eerie discomfort at slicing and dicing legumes as I do when carving a roast.
What is bred in the bone wars with the conscious mind as perennially and pointlessly as do the Union and the Confederacy. I’ll go weeks, yea months, with nary a bite of meat, then inexplicably develop the taste for a ham sandwich. Happily one good sandwich seems to satisfy that raw impulse; it does not send me on a porcine bender, a Lost Weekend of overindulgence on porkrinds and bacon.
With growing age, I find in my bearing and my character that genetics seem to be taking the upper hand over experience, just as eventually Grant vanquished Lee. I fear my destiny is this: that in my old age, I will rest under some bridge, my senility further clouded by cheap sour mash whiskey, and eat SPAM straight from of the can, spread on a saltine cracker – one bite for me, one bite for my scraggly cat – singing softly, “When Johnny comes marching home again…”
* * * * *
This epinion is offered as part of the July 3, 2001 “Great SPAM ® Write-Off,” hosted by the wild and wonderful fez_monkey himself. Thanks for inviting me! Please read the enormously creative selections written by my colleagues:
Abazur
Catboon
Emptywishes
fez_monkey
James23
Jkkelley
Juliette
Kboo
Kris-kochanski
Mangiotto
Mcgina
Megugrrrl
MuseMelpomene
Phixed
Repulsemonkey
Sleestakk
Sloucho
Sordid-1
Sundogg99
29th_Candidate
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