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When I first moved South, I was a fish (possibly a Hudson River shad) out of water. I had more old-fashioned manners than most Yankees, but down South, I was not the most polite person anyone had ever met — but thank God, not the rudest.
I had just gotten married and moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi, where my husband worked. The whole neighborhood saw me drive up in a Dodge with New York plates. I said hello to the women staring at me as I walked my husband’s dog, Oscar, a dachshund for whom I bought a rhinestone collar and leash. They also stared at me in local stores, where I was often surrounded by people asking me who I was and where I came from. I thought their curiosity meant I would easily make friends, but I was wrong about that. I sensed, once their initial investigation into me ended, a deliberate cold shoulder from the women who watched me walk the dog.
I decided to be cordial. I baked sugar cookies and decorated them with fondant icing in pastel colors, and I wrote a note on embossed cards to each of them, introducing myself once more and telling my neighbors that I hoped to further an acquaintance with them. Only one lady on the street responded to the invitation favorably, a retired nurse who was kind. Everybody else wouldn’t wave back when I waved. Had the cookies insulted them somehow? The retired nurse thought they were delicious, she told me.
To make money before I started my graduate work at Ole Miss, I had a table at the local farmer’s market where I sold what I called “Brooklyn Cookies” and which I packaged with names that indicated which neighborhood in Brooklyn they were supposed to be associated with. I sold out at every market, and I made as much as if I had a summer teaching job. It wasn’t the cookies my neighbors didn’t like. It was the Brooklyn.
I was getting black-balled Southern style. I was following generally old-fashioned rules of etiquette. I am sincerely friendly and acceptably polite by even the most rigorous Southern traditional standards. They weren’t fond of newcomers of any kind in Vicksburg, and a Yankee from Brooklyn with lots of black in her wardrobe? I was very NOKD — not our kind, dear.
My heart was blessed by my neighbors, meaning that I was cursed in a pearl-clutching sort of way. In the South, for those who haven’t been rejected by the Chi Omegas or some other Southern sorority, “Bless your heart” is NOT a wish that you would be blessed. We use the f-word for what that means back where I come from. As far as my neighbors were concerned, my heart could go “bless” itself.
I thought it monstrously unfair that they didn’t like me. I seriously considered whether I should get a pair German shepherds to accompany Oscar the dachshund and me on our early morning walks — big dogs I would name after Yankee Civil War generals, just so I could call them in my back yard loudly — “Come here, Ulysses! Come here, Tecumseh! There’s a good boy!”
If Brooklyn offended them, I thought, I should never let them forget that Brooklyn was in the house, the house down the street from theirs.
I never got the German shepherds. Instead, I found two-legged companions who were like-minded — a woman attorney for the local ACLU, brilliant women writers, women with interesting ambitions their families never quite understood, and I fell in love with the South that gets itself black-balled from the oldest sororities — in other words, the majority of Southern people, especially the independent eccentrics of which there is never a shortage in any town. If the neighbors smile derisively when someone walks by and say, “Well, well! Miss Suzy sure has her ways, don’t she?” I bet you sawbucks to biscuits that Miss Suzy and I are having a glass of something on my front porch together that afternoon.
It took me a long time to feel quite at home in the South, but here in New Orleans, a city that holds parades for eccentrics, writers, and pirates, I now feel right at home. I take it as a confirmation of my long-awaited acceptance that I was chosen as the president of a small chapter of a national women’s organization, and consequently, I am something of a hostess for the group at moments. I have gone from being a Yankee invader (at the apparently never-ending siege of Vicksburg) to being the president of the local chapter of an organization which promotes the contributions of women writers.
When I met these women and men, I knew I was home. They wanted to talk about books — A LOT. They were smart. They were stylish. They were fun in a cosmopolitan nerdy sort of a way that I aspire to be fun — think how Lauren Bacall would be after having read all of Edith Wharton and just dying to talk about every novel. This was my sorority — not Chi Omega — Alpha-to-Omega — the whole alphabet rearranged to form word after word after word.
When I lived in the North, I was occasionally a hostess where there would be formal place settings, delightful gifts at each place setting, but there is an expectation in the South that beyond any particular level of fancy swag, there ought to be a warmth of reception and a down-home element of even some of the fancier gatherings here. I let that element of folksy vernacular style mingle with more formal elements of my service of high tea last Sunday afternoon for my organization’s board and our intern.
I love two particular things about tea parties in New Orleans —
The tea can (and often should be) iced. It’s too hot down here to drink a steaming cup of anything in August! Throughout the year, one may choose to have tea that’s iced — either sweet or “unsweet,” for the Yankee guests. When my marvelous church in Oxford, Mississippi, Christ the Rock Apostolic Church, would serve food for members, they were always kind enough to serve both sweet and unsweet iced tea. Of course, as the only Yankee in the room, I was the only one drinking the unsweet tea. It was an act of Christian charity that they thought of me.
A tea party is not a tea-totalling party in New Orleans. It is perfectly appropriate to serve both tea and alcohol, though usually not alcohol in the tea.
My high tea, therefore, included strawberry champagne cocktails and a choice of either mint iced tea or lemon iced tea. People drink in Louisiana, a state that never really got behind prohibition of anything. In Louisiana, sometimes the best wine shop in the region is in a gas station, and even though the guy who rings that wine up at the cash register has a sign behind him that says “Welcome to Bubba’s Gas & Lube”, the customer still walks out of the shop with the same wine that a sommelier would recommend to you in a snooty restaurant in New York City. I don’t just love it that they drink in New Orleans. I love it that they know HOW to drink here, WHAT to drink here, and if you ask them WHEN they might drink, the answer is likely to be “any time you don’t have to drive and the boss ain’t looking.”
The problem with traditional high teas, of course, is that they are traditionally organized by ladies with some leisure. If women don’t work outside the home, and if they don’t have four children under the age of seven, they tend to have more time to plan menus, polish silver, and make the food they serve their guests. A woman of true leisure, of course, would have her servants do all that silver polishing and cooking. Most of us today, however, are what Julia Child called “servantless cooks.” On top of that, most of us work outside the home. It takes time (high time?) to prepare a high tea. I didn’t have much of that.
So I had to slap together a high tea between Saturday afternoon (after I taught a French literature class online) and Sunday morning (long enough to clean up and have people over for the first time in a long time). What was a bookish carpet-bagging Southern hostess to do?
Well — these things —
I went outside and picked a fist full of mint from my garden. Then I put it in some hot tea and let it cool, then refrigerate. I cut up a couple of lemons and made lemon-infused iced tea as well.
I baked a spice Bundt cake from a mix and made a lemon-cinnamon glaze (see the recipe below).
I boiled some eggs and made egg salad sandwiches on white bread with a lemon-herbal mayonnaise (not made from scratch but improved from the jar), cutting off the crusts to make them old-fashioned-tea-sandwich-style.
I sliced cucumbers and used the same mayonnaise to make cucumber sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off.
I took dark wheat bread and made salmon-cucumber salad sandwiches with that same infused mayonnaise. I again cut the crusts off.
I made a classic quiche lorraine, which I cut up into tea-party-sized pieces.
I bought almond petit fours. Nobody makes petit fours at home, not even in France. Unless you are opening a tea salon, you really don’t have the time, as the fondant icing and candied flower petals are just a lot of work.
I made an arugula and clementine salad in a classic balsamic vinaigrette.
I made strawberry champagne cocktails.
We had a lovely time talking, eating, and drinking in my living room with these snacks. What was leftover, my husband ate when he came home from work.
All these efforts (apart from the cleaning to get ready for guests) took me about three hours. It helps that I chop fast. It helps that I either married into or inherited several sets of wedding dishes and have tea-party essentials (see the double plate caddies above). But I managed to make something elegant in rapid-fire time.
I hope that as it becomes safe again for us to congregate as this pandemic wanes, that you have tasty treats to share with people who bless you and wouldn’t say “bless your heart” about you behind your back in a passive-aggressive way. If you were here now, I would offer you some lemon tea or some mint tea. If you liked, I could make us some more champagne cocktails. It’s a blessing to share food with friends, a real blessing, not a passive-aggressive one.
Shopping list
Produce
Fresh strawberries
Frozen strawberries
Parsley
Arugula
A bag of clementines
2 cucumbers
A bag of lemons
Fresh mint
Fresh dill
2 onions
Any lettuce leaves for the sandwiches.
Meat
Bacon
1/4 pound of smoked salmon
Dairy
1 small container of heavy cream
4 ounces of grated cheese (I used soy cheese)
1 dozen eggs
Bakery/bread
Hearty white bread
Dark wheat bread
Petits fours (you could also make your own small treats, but I am telling you what I did here).
Grocery/dry goods
Mayonnaise
Cake mix
Vegetable oil (for use with the cake mix)
Olive Oil
Prepared pie crust (or you could make your own)
Nutmeg
Cinnamon
Powdered sugar
Tea
Alcohol
Two bottles of champagne (not the best quality, as they are for cocktails, rather than enjoying on their own)
These ingredients cost $137 this week at my grocery store. Take away $25 if you don’t intend to drink champagne cocktails.
Of course, if you already have any of these ingredients, the price is less.
Recipes
Lemon-cinnamon glaze (for a Bundt cake)
Make the recipe for the cake as instructed. As I said, I used a mix because I was in a hurry.
My glaze recipe may vary depending on how much glaze I want and how thick I want it to be. You can see in the photo above of the cake, I chose to make a relatively thin glaze. If I wanted to make it thicker, almost like a donut fondant glaze, I would double the sugar and halve the lemon juice. I suggest you try to coat the back of a spoon with the glaze before you declare yourself done. If it isn’t thick enough, add more powdered sugar. If it is too thick, add more lemon juice.
2 cups of powdered sugar
2 tbsp. Cinnamon.
1/4 cup of fresh-squeezed lemon juice
Mix these ingredients together until you have a glaze that is the right thickness for your project, adjusting proportions accordingly.
Lemon-dill mayonnaise
One can make one’s own mayonnaise. I just used Hellman’s. I infused 2 cups of mayonnaise with the juice of two freshly squeezed lemons and mixed these with 1/2 cup of chopped dill.
See my previous post for the recipe for my egg salad.
Salmon-cucumber salad
4 ounces of smoked salmon
1/2 a cucumber, diced
1/4-1/2 cup of lemon-dill mayonnaise.
Mix and spread on bread.
Quiche Lorraine
1 pie crust
3 eggs
A dash of nutmeg
3 tablespoons of chopped parsley
1/3 cup of cream
1/3 cup of grated cheese
4 slices of bacon, chopped into one-inch pieces
2 onions, diced
Salt and pepper to taste.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Put the bacon in a frying pan. Once it has started to render fat, add the onions. Fry over a medium flame until the onion is clear and the bacon is somewhat browned. Set aside to cool.
In a bowl, mix the eggs with salt, pepper, the parsley, the nutmeg, and heavy cream.
Roll out the pie crust into a quiche pan. Place the cooled bacon and onion in the center of the pie crust. Pour in the egg mixture.
Top the egg mixture with the grated cheese evenly.
Bake for about an hour.
Arugula-clementine salad in a balsamic vinaigrette
3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
1 table spoon of balsamic vinegar
Chopped parsley
A bowl full of arugula
6 clementines, sectioned.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Mix in a large salad bowl the olive oil, vinegar, and parsley. Add a pinch of salt and pepper.
Add the arugula to the bowl and toss.
Add the clementine sections and toss again.
Strawberry champagne cocktails
4 fresh strawberries, sliced in wedges.
3 ounces of frozen strawberries, diced while still frozen (use a food processor for this).
The juice of three lemons
Mix the lemon juice with the diced strawberries.
Spoon the mixture into the base of a champagne flute topped with a wedge (half sliced down the middle so that it sticks to the edge of the glass — see my photo of the glasses on the table above).
Pour champagne slowly to the top of the glass so that the diced strawberry rises.
To your health!