LET THEM EAT CAKE!

The History of Mardi Gras King Cake

To go along with my first post, I decided to explore the history of another favorite Southern food especially favored in the Mobile Area. Since Mardi Gras is right around the corner I chose the famous king cake that is made only during the weeks of Mardi Gras.

The roots of the king cake date back to the early days of Christianity in Europe. King cakes traditionally go on sale to coincide with the Epiphany or Twelfth Night. It became traditional to bake a special cake -- a king's cake -- to mark the occasion.

Back in the olden days, a king cake was a simple sweet bread baked in an oval, much like it is today.It became customary for the party giver to include a small bean, coin or other trinket in the mix. According to legend, the recipient of the treasure was afforded special rights and privileges.Nowadays the finder of the prize is charged with hosting the next party, at which time another king cake with a bean would be served, and so on and so on. The bean has now been replaced with a tiny plastic baby. Custom no longer dictates that the victim who finds the baby host the next party; they are now only required to bring the next king cake.

The prize is also no longer baked into the cake, rather the baker places it inside the box so that the host or hostess can hide it in the cake, or not. If you do choose to hide it in the cake, it's a good idea to let your guests know it so nobody swallows it. By most accounts, the king cake didn't appear as a part of Mobile's Mardi Gras celebration until 1959 when Fred Pollman, owner of Pollman's Bakery, brought back a recipe from New Orleans where the practice had been going on for years. And, just as soon as you start to enjoy them, they're gone. Tradition holds that none are sold after the celebration of Carnival ends on Mardi Gras.

The Required O Brother Moment

A Southern Way of Life

If you are born and raised in the south, especially Alabama like I have, often times when you meet someone new you will be asked a very important question regarding a certain loyalty. This situation arises most predominately in Alabama especially in the autumn months. The question is "Auburn or Alabama?". Friendships will be based off an answer and an immediate prejudice will be rendered if the answer is opposite of the questioner's team. Or even worse, if the answer is "I don't like football," or something to that effect, there will be no stopping the flow of jokes and teasing and ostricization that will follow. Now granted this may be a bit overkill for the majority of the population, but there are people out there who live, breathe, eat, and sleep college football.
I have many friends, three of them being my roommates, who are Alabama fans. We are civil enough to each other during the season, but there is no shortage of sniping comments, especially if one of the teams didn't do well. It all culminates to the day of the big rivalry game, in Alabama's case, the Iron Bowl. It doesn't matter how bad the season was as long as your team wins that game. Friendships are all but dissolved on gameday. I have even avoided speaking to my roommates for a little while after the game.
There is one thing that transcends the bitter rivalry that exists in Alabama, which was ranked at the second best rivalry in the country, the love of college football. The redemption between friends is the impassioned discussion of the game, players, teams, and prospects for the next year. Friends spend hours every week discussing Saturday's games and the outcomes. Saturday comes and the day is devoted to one thing, football. Southern traditions have come from it. Tailgating may not be specifically Southern but we have perfected the tailgate. The tailgate is where rivals can share good food, beer, and good times; a proverbial last meal before the war that is about to be waged.
Southerners pride themselves on their football. The SEC is usually regarded as the most dominant conference, and with good reason. Based off of their tough defenses and hard-nosed offenses, SEC teams seem to be a reflection of the South itself, rife with a passion for the game and the atmosphere. It is a glorious thing when your team is victorious and supremely disheartening when you suffer a loss, and large quantities of alcohol goes to both sides whether in victory or defeat and even the most bitter of rivals when inebriated enough can agree on one thing, there is nothing like college football in the South.

Thoughts provoked by Southern Lit class and NBC 15 News at 5

How ironic it was to learn that on our first day of Southern Lit class, the very day that we talked about the contrdadictions present in the post-Civil War South, one of those contradictions was the top story on the evening news. The president of the Alabama NAACP very publicly criticized the Mobile Azalea Trail Maids, saying that the girls' dresses reminded him of the days of slavery, and that they would be a "laughing stock" at President Obama's Inaugural Parade. The group was really fresh on my mind, as we had just talked about them in class as well. In my husband's family, there are four girls, myself included, who served or are serving as Azalea Trail Maids, so it's obviously very important to us. We naturally get a little defensive when comments like this are made against our beloved organization (we're a little fanatical, I know). As much as I love the Azalea City, what really interested me in the story was how it connected so perfectly with our class discussion. How do we, in 2009, deal with the racial tensions that still exist in our society? Slavery is a harsh part of our Southern heritage, but it is our heritage nonetheless. It is possible, or even right, to dress up in an antebellum costume and then require people to remember only the good and not the bad?
But we also know that dwelling on past events prevents progress, and dwelling on that aspect of the past is not something the Azalea Trail has been doing--22 percent of the currently serving Maids are minorities. In fact, the negative response to the NAACP president's remarks was so overwhelming that he has since apologized for his comments. Obviously this long-standing Mobile tradition is beloved by many people, minorities included, who feel that celebrating our history is serious and important, not a "laughing" matter. I think that so many of us recognize that the troubling elements of Southern history and culture are forever intertwined with the beautiful and good. If we can't get rid of the tensions that exist, but we can't stop the celebration of tradition, what should we do? Marching in the inaugural parade of the first African-American president of the United States sounds like a good start to me.

Grits: A Southern Tradition

I decided to dedicate my first blog to food since it is a huge part of my life; namely, southern food. I thought about what some of my favorite southern foods were and narrowed it down to one of my favorite southern breakfast foods: grits! I could eat grits with every meal. Cheese grits, butter grits, bacon grits, eggs and grits, and the list goes on. I decided to research the history of my favorite breakfast food and the information was actually very interesting.

Grits are served as a side dish for breakfast or dinner and are traditionally eaten with butter and milk. Three-quarters of the grits sold in the United States are from a belt of coastal states stretching from Louisiana to the Carolinas, known as the "Grits Belt."

Grits (or hominy) were one of the first truly American foods, as the Native Americans ate a mush made of softened corn or maize. In 1584, during their reconnaissance party of what is now Roanoke, North Carolina, Sir Walter Raleigh and his men met and dined with the local Indians. Having no language in common, the two groups quickly resorted to food and drink. One of Raleigh's men, Arthur Barlowe, recorded notes on the foods of the Indians. He mad a special note of corn, which he found "very white, faire, and well tasted." He also wrote about being served a boiled corn or hominy.

When the colonists came ashore in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, the Indians offered them bowls of this boiled corn substance. The Indians called it "rockahomine," which was later shortened to "hominy" by the colonists. The Indians taught the colonists how to thresh the hulls from dried yellow corn. Corn was a year-round staple and each tribe called it by a different name.

In the Low Country of South Carolina and particularly Charleston, shrimp and grits has been considered a basic breakfast for coastal fishermen and families for decades during the shrimp season (May through December). Simply called 'breakfast shrimp," the dish consisted of a pot of grits with shrimp cooked in a little bacon grease or butter. During the past decade, this dish has been dressed up and taken out on the town to the fanciest restaurants. Not just for breakfast anymore, it is also served for brunch, lunch, and dinner.

Even as times change, grits have evolved from a regional food often used for survival to a food of choice and comfort in many American homes. Grits have also gone upscale being featured on menus in many five-star restaurants throughout the country.

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Fat Man Squeeze will be playing at The Alabama Music Box downtown, 8 pm Jan 25, with Wayne "The Train" Hancock (a modern day Hank Williams, Sr.). If you don't know FMSq--they are a local speedgrass (bluegrass meets rockabilly) band. Josh Pridgen, a longtime UM student and humanities guy, is the the bassist. They're an experience and they are pure-D postmodern South.

Rhett

Telling about the South

We'll have a conversation (in image, music, prose, poetry, heck even crafts) over the next few months about the nature of the South and its literature. Everything is fair game--your posts will form a portfolio that will mix lighter posts (videos, anecdotes, bbq recipes) with heavier ones (responses to the readings, original works, etc.).

To embed video in the post (like the GWtW clip above), copy the text that 's in the 'embed' box above the video on YouTube, Google videos, etc. Then just paste that into the box and hit 'publish post.' No need to worry about using the upload (little film icon on the compose page) function.