sweet rolls, potatoes
stuffing, pumpkin, pecan pie
Christmas Eve cooking

I was making my list and checking it twice of the cooking I need to do today in preparation of the Christmas Day feast tomorrow and the words lined up nicely for a holiday haiku.

I enjoy cooking.

Maybe because I never HAD to do it much but was allowed to dabble in the kitchen from time to time.

Most holiday dinners being part of that time.

Back back years ago, I boarded at a frat house for a term when I started college.

To help with the board bill I took on a kitchen job.

Being last in line to choose kitchen jobs, it fell to me to be Sunday Dinner Cook.

This meant I had to prepare the Sunday After Church Noon Dinner for around 50 college age men.

I didn’t have to know much about cooking or recipes for this job.

And I didn’t learn much about cooking or recipes while on the job.

But I did learn something very important about cooking for a large group.

I learned timing.

The frat had a real weekday cook and she would get the Sunday roast out of the freezer and start it thawing before she left on Friday.

I had to make sure the roast was in the oven by 6AM.

The rest of the meal was opening giant cans of applesauce and vegetables and making a couple gallons of powdered mashed potatoes and remembering to get the rolls out of the freezer.

Pretty much everything was just warmed up on the stove or in the oven.

I had a vintage 1920’s era basement kitchen to work in.

It had a gas range with 8 burners, a 6 foot long flat frying surface, warming table, prep table all made out of cast iron and industrial freezers and fridges.

There was a butcher block stand in the center of the kitchen that, to this day, makes me look at any other butcher block stand in any store or catalog and say, “welllllllllll … not what I am used to.”

It was equipped with all the latest and greatest in kitchen gadgets and tools that were then available in 1920.

The can opener was lethal.

It was like operating a drop forge with razor sharp edges.

Another kitchen tool was a meat cleaver the size of a tennis racket that weighed about 30 lbs.

After I discovered this cleaver hanging on the wall in a back room, and after I learned how to use it, I would ask anyone in the kitchen if they might want an apple.

If they said ‘yes, sure’, I would get an apple (we had a huge bin of apples down there, too) polish it up for a second and place it on that butcher block.

Then I would pick up that cleaver with both hands and get the heft of it going in my shoulders and lift it up and in a flash, chop that apple in half.

Usually the guy would scream, and jump back, then laugh and then run up into the house to find someone and say, “Hey! Go ask Mike to get you an apple!”

We all agreed that apples prepared this way tasted better than any other apples.

The Sunday Dinner crew would show up around noon and set the tables and get pitchers of powdered milk and water ready.

Then my show started.

As I remember there were 4 long tables in the dining room that would seat about 12 guys a table.

The meals were served family style so I needed two big serving bowls of whatever per table.

Whatever dish I was warming up, I need to have enough to fill 8 big serving bowls.

Dinner was served promptly at 12:30pm so that it could be eaten and everyone back upstairs in the TV room for Sunday football by 1:00pm.

(TV Room … GOSH … How old am I?)

When the kitchen crew started setting the tables, I set out all of my serving bowls and made sure I had a pile of serving spoons.

I got the roast out of the oven.

This piece of meat was huge and early on I learned to cut the thing into quarters before trying to slice it.

The roasting pan was filled with marvelous grease and I had enough training from my Mom to know how to make real gravy.

About 12:15pm the kitchen crew would troop in and ask for directions and I had them spoon out the veggie of the day, applesauce and potatoes into the serving bowls.

Baskets of rolls went out.

I started slicing the beef.

By the time the time the other food had been set out, the platters of meat were ready and set and I would yell, ‘Go get Em!’

Someone on the crew would run upstairs to the common room and press the house buzzer for three long buzzes.

This was the call to dinner.

It was a three story house with a wooden stair case.

Those guys didn’t so much walk down stairs as much as the tumbled down in one loud cloud of noise.

As the roar of their stair stomping and loud conversation increased, I filled gravy boats (that I had dug out of the back of kitchen cupboards) and had them placed on the tables.

As the guys came in, the comments started.

“It’s ALL READY AT THE SAME TIME”, they would say.

“It’s ALL HOT”, they would say.

“GRAVY!!!!!”, someone would shout.

Like I said, if I had to do it everyday.

If I just plain HAD to do it, I am sure I would have different thoughts but looking back I have an almost absurd feeling of satisfaction.

And I know how to get a meal of many dishes off the stove, out of the oven and on the table at the same time.

We spent last weekend in Atlanta with the kids and grands.

It is just me and my wife and one son for Christmas Dinner this year.

Still, it is Christmas.

The cooking will start tonight.

I will get the morning sweet rolls all set and in the fridge ready for the oven tomorrow morning.

I’ll get the sweet potatoes peeled, boiled and mashed ready for a casserole of sweet potatoes, two eggs and 1/2 cup of brown sugar – sprinkle with brown sugar and a touch of cinnamon after it comes out of the oven.

I’ll reduce a loaf of bread to cubes and set out to get nice and stale for stuffing even though I am just roasting a turkey breast tomorrow.

Then the pies.

Pumpkin for my son.

He will manage to consume at least the essence of pumpkin pie under a thick coating of whipped cream.

Then the pecan pie.

My Dad loved pecan pie.

I thought it was a bit too sweet.

A bit too sweet until my Grandma Hendrickson would show up with her famous butterscotch pie.

As a kid, I honestly thought my Grandma melted butterscotch candies and poured the bright yellow glop into a pie shell.

To this day I am not sure that isn’t the recipe.

Family history has the story about one of my Mom’s brothers asking if, on his birthday, he could have an entire butterscotch pie to himself.

The story went he never ate butterscotch pie again.

But pecan pie.

As I said, I always thought it a bit too sweet.

Then I moved to the south.

People I met down here introduced me to real pecan pie.

People I met introduced me to a pecan pie that was gooey and thick and crunchy and somehow light and not so sweet that it made your teeth hurt.

There was a secret ingredient.

Instead of corn syrup, you know, the stuff they put in soda pop, the secret ingredient is Alaga syrup.

According to the website, “In 1906, the Alabama-Georgia (ALAGA) Syrup Company was established by Louis Broughton Whitfield, Sr. along with his wife, Willie Vandiver Whitfield. Mrs. Whitfield, a native of Montgomery, Alabama, named the company to represent both her home state and that of her husband who was from LaGrange, Georgia.”

The slogan for ALAGA syrup was, “ALAGA – Good Every Drop.

Alaga Syrup is ribbon cane syrup with a little corn syrup added.

Because ribbon cane is grown by small farmers and refined on site, it is less pure than common sugar cane syrup.

The process leaves ribbon cane syrup a brown color.

Ribbon cane is also very sweet to the taste.

Being less refined, it also has a richer, almost full flavor, while sugar cane syrup is just very sweet.

It is easy to find on the shelves at your local Winn-Dixie, Publix, or Piggly Wiggly.

I feel bad for you all up north as you cannot get Alaga Syrup up there.

I feel bad for me as I can’t even get this in South Carolina.

But I got a bottle from my daughter in Atlanta for Christmas.

For the pie, the recipe I always use is on the Alaga website.

The recipe used to be listed as the ALABAMA STATE FAIR GOLD MEDAL PIE of 1923 Recipe but now shows up under the link, Southern Pecan Pie.

It is a simple recipe … really, it is.

Original Alaga Syrup Pecan Pie Recipe

Preheat oven to 350
1-9″ pie plate lined with pie crust
Put Pecans into pie plate lined with pie crust.
1 cup Alaga cane syrup
3/4 cup white sugar
3 eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 stick butter
1 Tbl vanilla extract
1 cup whole pecans

Bring syrup and sugar to a boil and boil for 3 minutes.
Add hot syrup to beaten eggs, beating constantly.
Add butter, let melt.
Add vanilla.
Pour over pecans.
Bake at 350 for 35-40 minutes.

The trick is getting that roiling boil of sugar and syrup and then stirring in the eggs without the eggs separating.

I’ll be making this tonight.

I’ll be eating this tomorrow.

After dinner and pie I will say, “why did I eat all that?“

At some point tomorrow night I’ll look at my wife and say, “Want a piece of pie?“

imagination
seeds of dreams are found in books
golly miss dolly

Since moving to the South, I can report there are indeed some things southern that southerners take seriously.

Very seriously.

Football.

Well, college football anyway.

On this devotion to college athletics, all I can say is that my old college up north has, since 2018, played in the NCAA Final Four of all FOUR major sports.

That includes, football, basketball, baseball AND hockey.

When UGa or ‘Bama add a hockey team, call me.

The love and devotion to that food item known as grits is real.

I have had some that are really good.

I have some that were like eating ice cream on the beach on windy day.

Gritty.

And there is Dolly Parton.

The patron Saint of the South.

Being from the North, I knew of Miss Dolly.

Even one of my favorite northerner authors, Jim Harrison once wrote about the crystal clarity of Miss Dolly’s voice.

She seemed sweet but no one to be taken seriously or at least not too seriously.

Miss Dolly is on my mind because the other day I was online at my local library which here in the Low Country is the Beaufort County Library.

There was an announcement on the website that the Beaufort County Library, in partnership with the LowCountry Community Church, was now a part of Miss Dolly’s Imagination Library.

Through this partnership with the Imagination Library, free books were now available to kids in the area.

I was aware of this program if vaguely so.

Some years ago, with much fanfare it seems to my memory, Dolly Parton announced that she wanted to give books to kids.

Very sweet, but not something I took very seriously.

I was sure it was pretty much a publicity stunt of some kind.

It seems like I remember reading that over one million books had been given away through this program.

But in the back of my brain were other memories about Miss Dolly,

Miss Dolly had recently donated a large amount of money to Covid Vaccine research.

Back a few years ago when fires went through the Great Smokey Mountains part of Tennessee where she was born, Miss Dolly cut an album of songs and the proceeds went to relief agencies.

Intrigued enough by the announcement and these other memories, I clicked on the link to read about this new partnership.

I went with a cynical, ‘oh really‘, ‘isn’t that sweet‘ pre-set suspect animus in my mind.

Then I read the announcement.

Then I read some more.

Then I closed my eyes and said a quick prayer to thank God for people like Miss Dolly.

I figured that this program sent some lucky kids a book.

And it does.

Once a month.

Every month.

Until the lucky kid turns five.

The program had not delivered just one million books, BUT one million books A MONTH.

I had to read that part a couple of times to make sure I read it right.

What the program needs is a local non-profit as a partner.

I immediately searched the zip codes where my grand children live to see if the program was available there.

If it was, my grand kids were going to get signed up.

Sad to say it wasn’t.

Maybe there are flaws to the program.

Maybe there are flaws that make this program hard to partner with.

Maybe, maybe maybe.

On the other hand, maybe this is one of those programs that people, for reasons mentioned, think this is a sweet little program but not one to be taken seriously.

I don’t want to think that.

I want to think this program exists to put books in the hands of kids.

I want to believe it.

I want to believe it is what it is and says what it says and does what it does.

I want to believe that Miss Dolly is as sweet as I think she is.

I want to believe that Miss Dolly is as serious as she says she is.

The Imagination Library website states:

Inspired by her father’s inability to read and write Dolly started her Imagination Library in 1995 for the children within her home county. Today, her program spans five countries and gifts over 1 million free books each month to children around the world.

The website then quotes Miss Dolly herself:

“When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true.

I know there are children in your community with their own dreams.

They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister.

Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer.

The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.”

I also remember that recently the state of Tennessee was planning to put up a statue of Miss Dolly.

As I remember it, Miss Dolly asked that the money go to charity instead.

Very sweet.

Very Very Sweet.

Very serious.

Why isn’t the Imagination Library available where you live?

You want to do something during covid, there isn’t anything much easier than ask this question.

Ask this question, then do something about it.

The Imagination Library is looking for the next local champion.

As Miss Dolly said, The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.

An Imagination Library.

Dreams that go beyond the wildest dreams.

book shop after hours
slide money under the door
good deed weary world

The Old Bay Marketplace is an arcade or covered outdoor walkway through the middle of a building that is lined with shops on either side of the walkway located on Bay Street in downtown Beaufort, South Carolina.

On the corner of the entrance to the arcade on Bay Street is a used bookstore named the McIntosh Book Shoppe.

The McIntosh Book Shoppe is situated there on the corner of the entrance into the arcade so that there is a door facing Bay Street and another back door that opens out into the covered walkway.

The space outside this back door under the covered walkway is crowded with book carts and tables that are filled with books for sale.

So many carts, tables and books are crowded into this space that moving all these carts, tables and books would be a lot of work to bring in at night and put back out the next day.

So the books, carts and tables are not brought in at night.

The books, carts and tables stay outside in the covered arcade.

On the arcade wall, next to the door, is a metal rack stuffed full of envelopes.

Next to the metal rack stuffed full of envelopes is a small, hand lettered sign.

The sign reads:

After hours – put money in envelope and slide under the door.

It is altogether appropriate at this point to quote Big Bill’s, “How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world” (Merchant of Venice – Act V, Scene I)

But, somehow, it is better to quote Gene Wilder in the role of Willy Wonka.

So shines a good deed in a weary world.

PS: Admit it – this made you smile and feel a little bit of a warm bump inside – maybe a small kick of hope in your soul.