Sugar Rush

Quick, think of a dish that you remember fondly from childhood. If you say 'Fried chicken and a coke float,' then it’s possible that you’re related to my mother-in-law. Having lived in close proximity with mine for eighteen years, I'm well-acquainted with the good lady’s enthusiasm for old-fashioned country vittles, no matter how inadvisable they might be from a dietary perspective. But it wasn’t until my wife organized a family heritage weekend recently that I saw the full power of her extended family’s childhood cravings running wide open. As has been mentioned before, we live in an old farmhouse that has been home to generations of my wife’s family since it was built for her great grandfather by his father, over a century ago. The Woods were farmers who grew corn and sweet potatoes and, later, soybeans, in rural West Feliciana Parish; and raised cattle, hogs, chickens, turkeys—anything not bright enough to find its way through a barbed-wire fence. The property on which the house stands remained an active farm into the nineteen-eighties, so when my mother-in-law and her two sisters grew up here in the 'fifties, the rhythms of farm life were still very much the daily reality. Grandpa Warren had a giant green thumb and was knocking it out of the park in 1953, the year he was crowned "Progressive Farmer of the Year" by Progressive Farmer magazine. Back then they clearly ate differently, though. Soybeans, for example, were for livestock feed and Grandpa Warren would not in his wildest dreams have imagined seeing his soybeans steamed, renamed "edamame," and served for hipsters to gobble in Japanese restaurants while waiting for their sushi to arrive.

Anyway, in early June my wife organized a weekend’s worth of activities designed to celebrate all this farm history. Christened "Camp Westmoreland" and conceived with the idea of keeping the youngest generation in touch with their rural Southern heritage by doing things the "old folks" did when they were kids, this meant hayrides to the creek, storytelling on the front porch, family tree art, rock painting, watermelon seed spitting and inner tube races across the pond. And food. Lots and lots of food. Since this was a weekend to remember days gone by, it was decided that the menu should reflect the 'fifties too. And suffice it to say that the older generation took to the idea with relish.

Caution and calorie counting were temporarily suspended, replaced by enough fried chicken, catfish, sweet tea, hush puppies, potato salad and homemade ice cream to sink a barge. All weekend you couldn’t walk into the kitchen without encountering an aging Baby Boomer shoveling down cupcakes or wolfing pork 'n beans. It’s as if the presence of family, familiar surroundings, and memories of a long-ago childhood—when chicken was fried and bacon was good and no-one knew nor cared about trans fats or cholesterol—had conferred permission to ignore everything we’ve learned about healthy eating for just a little while. Things came to a head on Sunday morning when four generations of campers converged upon Aunt Frances’ dining table for a hearty breakfast of Pigs-in-a-Blanket and Purple Cows—which is the name by which the family (possibly uniquely) knows coke floats.

Now I don't know about your idea of a well-balanced breakfast, but in my experience any day that begins with the consumption of a dozen cocktail wieners baked in crescent roll pastry is unlikely to end well. Especially if you wash down said pigs with a mug of homemade ice cream with Coke poured over it. Extra especially if the next item on the agenda is a swimming race across a pond. My wife and I consider ourselves pretty careful about the things we feed ourselves and our children. We cook from scratch, avoid fried foods and processed ingredients, and prioritize fresh, locally grown produce whenever we can. So do most of the other Woods family members who are still around to consider such things. And yet, the moment those rows of golden brown, fantastically processed, glistening tubes of salty, porky deliciousness emerged from the oven, it’s as if a kind of nihilistic fever gripped the room. All the family members born on the far side of 1980 fell upon the pigs-in-a-blanket, piling plates-ful alongside their Purple Cows and demolishing both with a relish an outsider would surely have considered unseemly. I think I personally ate about a dozen before the fog lifted. But the funny thing was that the kids—ours and ones from other branches of the family—just weren’t that interested. Raised in the era of ubiquitous coverage about how everything in our diets is killing us, they gazed in disbelief upon their Generation X parents and Baby Boomer grandparents hypocritically guzzling Coke and spilling ketchup on their shirts, and asked whether there was any orange juice. I would have felt shame if it wasn’t for the sugar rush. What kinds of health-nut kids are we raising? More importantly, what are they going to eat at their own family reunions fifty years from now? Edamame? Grandpa Warren would be turning cartwheels in his grave.

Since I am not a real Woods family member but only a foreign observer of their weird traditions, I can't say for sure whether Pigs-in-a-Blanket truly had a regular place on the Woods family dining table. But there’s a certain poetic truth to the idea that they were, and poetic truth is the only kind in which we’re interested in this column. Still, since making Camp Westmoreland an annual event requires the ongoing presence of some "old folks" to handle the storytelling, I do think it might be prudent to develop some, er, "progressive" Southern culinary traditions to celebrate. How do you grow soybeans, anyway?