Black-Eyed Peas, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties

IntroductionSeveral years ago, in my former apartment in Manhattan, I threw a going-away party for my close friend and editor Michael Boodro, who was leavingVogueto become editor-in-chief ofGarden Designmagazine. It was spring, and in honor of the occasion I was mindful that a horticultural theme should be more or less in play. But in the end, except for covering a cake with brightly colored flowers, I did what I always do for big parties. I passed silver trays of ham biscuits (hot buttered Marshall's biscuits with a thin slice of ham, country or otherwise, tucked inside), along with pimento cheese sandwiches (on Pepperidge Farm Very Thin wheat, cut into strips), watercress sandwiches (rolled, with sprigs sticking out of one end), and cucumber sandwiches (on rounds of regular Pepperidge Farm white with homemade mayonnaise). On the dining table there were: platters piled with crabmeat maison ( jumbo lump crabmeat mixed with homemade mayonnaise, capers, and thinly sliced scallions) accompanied by toast points; steamed asparagus spears with bright yellow curry dip; deviled eggs (I use my friend Rick Ellis's recipe, which boasts both butter and mayonnaise); and thickish slices of rare beef tenderloin with horseradish sauce and Sister Schubert's yeast rolls. Sometimes I substitute lamb or pork for the beef (and a chutney mayonnaise for the horseradish sauce), and occasionally I will also add a platter of smoked salmon with brown bread and dill butter. I can't remember if I did the latter for this particular gathering; what I do know is that people went crazy.Now at this point I had lived in New York for more than a decade. My own friends were used to the transplanted Southern specialties I always had on offer, but this group was mostly made up of Michael's friends, and they had clearly never dipped an asparagus spear into a bowl of curry dip or bitten into a hot ham biscuit in their lives. In a city where "hors d'oeuvres" all too often mean ubiquitous skewers of dried-out chicken sate or half-cooked snow peas with an ambiguous "fish paste" piped inside, it is relatively easy to wow people, and I have yet to discover a deviled egg or a giant lump of crabmeat bathed in homemade mayonnaise that didn't do the trick. What I didn't expect was the call I got the next day from a guest who was then an editor at theNew York Times Magazine. "How would you like to write about food?"So it was that the essays and recipes collected in this book came into being. To this day, I feel (almost) guilty for having been paid for them, such was the pleasure I derived in putting them together.I am a person whose bedside reading is almost always a stack of cookbooks; my most fervent hope is that some really smart, very rich person will buy the once-great New Orleans creole palace Antoine's and give me total control over the place. Such is my obsession with this particular dreamand just in case it ever comes trueI regularly drive my husband crazy sounding out ideas for the daily specials I plan to offer in the restaurant's underused front room, where I also intend to install a marble-topped oyster bar. There is nothing that makes me happier than discovering a new canape or spending long daysand nightsplanning a party. I have clocked so many hours with my friend Keith Meacham, who, like me, was born in the Mississippi Delta, armed with legal pads and Post-it notes, poring over seating charts and mapping out possible menus, that her husband Jon, the author and editor ofNewsweek, now refers to uswith more than a hint of derisionas the "crabmeat caucus." (In spite of himself, he appreciates what we're up tohe inauguratedNewsweek's first-ever food column, after all, and generouslyReed, Julia is the author of 'Black-Eyed Peas, Hostess Gowns, and Other Southern Specialties' with ISBN 9780312359560 and ISBN 031235956X.