Category: Side dishes

Jerri’s Hush Puppies

“Heh, heh, heh!” snickered Jerri as she began reeling in her ninth bass. I just reached for the landing net.

Things had started off well for my wife: On her first cast of the day she hooked and brought a sixteen inch bass to the net. I was happy for her. I hate feeling guilty for catching all the fish.

However, she kept repeating that performance. I was paddling the canoe, so I couldn’t cast as often as she, but if I hadn’t rigged both rods myself, I would have suspected that she had dipped my jig and rubber worm in some kind of fish repellent.

After two more bass brought to the net, I switched to the same combination as Jerri’s. There was no change, except that we both took a break from casting as I rigged another jig and worm for Jerri after a lunker headed for the territories with the bait in its mouth.

Things did get better. A keeper bass threw my jig in my face and though we never actually saw it, I had a really, really big one on for a few seconds. But there was no honest way of changing the final score. Jerri: Ten bass landed and four between fifteen and a half and seventeen on the stringer. Me: zilch.

She did let me fillet them, and she fried fresh bass fillets for supper. However, she didn’t make hush puppies to go with them after we discovered that we didn’t have enough vegetable oil at the cabin.

Jerri makes wonderful hush puppies. She reduced the size of a recipe from a cookbook that we have had for nearly fifty years. Betty Crocker’s Outdoor Cook Book was published in 1961; it has been republished in a facsimile edition with all the wonderful drawings that make the book a joy to browse. To give you an idea of what you will find inside it, here is the artwork that goes with the hush puppy recipe along with Jerri’s comment.

Hush puppy image

Note the daddy dog shushing the kids. Been there, done that.

Like many dishes invented by ordinary people, the origin of hush puppies is unknown though it is probable that hush puppies were first made in the southern United States, where cornmeal is a staple food. One explanation is that fisherman mixed leftover cornmeal fish breading with water and fried the batter to feed their dogs. Another is that Confederate soldiers fed their dogs leftover fried corn bread to keep them from barking and alerting Union soldiers.

Interesting stories, perhaps, but once you have tasted a good hush puppy, I think you’ll agree that it would be a very lucky dog who got one of these treats.

INGREDIENTS:

3/4 cup cornmeal
3/4 cup water
3 T milk
1/2 T vegetable oil
2 tsp. grated onion
1 large egg
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. sugar

PROCEDURE:

Take an egg from the refrigerator and allow it to come to room temperature. Grate or finely mince two teaspoons of onion. Bring the water to a boil in a small saucepan and stir in the cornmeal. Keep stirring for three or four minutes or until the cornmeal gets thick and starts to form a ball. Remove the pan from the heat.

Pour an inch of vegetable oil into a medium saucepan and start heating the oil over low heat while you finish the batter.

Add the onion, oil and milk and stir until you have a smooth mixture. Beat the egg in a mixing bowl until it is lemon colored. Stir the cornmeal mixture into the egg until you have a smooth batter.

Put the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar into a sifter or just whisk them together in a small bowl. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the cornmeal batter and stir until everything is blended together.

Raise the heat under the oil. When the oil reaches 375º, drop the batter by teaspoonfuls into the oil. Fry the hush puppies until they are golden brown, about six or seven minutes. Use a slotted spoon to turn the hush puppies so they cook on all sides.

Remove them from the oil and drain them on paper towels. You can test one by cutting it in half to make sure that it is cooked through.

NOTES: Use two teaspoons to drop the batter into the oil. This recipe makes a dozen to sixteen hush puppies.

Rhonda’s Rice and Broccoli Casserole

This is a recipe from Kansas, a statement which you might want to interpret as a gourmet alert. The ingredients include Velveeta. But though I hate to admit it, in spite of that this recipe makes a delicious side dish.

Rhonda, the wife of one of Jerri’s cousins, contributed the recipe to a cookbook compiled by the Farm Bureau Women of Butler County, Kansas. As I have mentioned elsewhere, my mother-in-law gave us the cookbook for Christmas many years ago, and Jerri has made many of the recipes. Some have become favorites, like and this one from Rhonda is going to be added to the list.

When I warmed up the leftover casserole to go with the hot dogs and pasta salad we set out to feed my brother-in-law and his work crew at the cabin, he remarked how well the broccoli went with the rice as he took a second helping. It is indeed a tasty combination.

When I confessed that the sauce was made with canned soups and Velveeta, he guffawed and asked me if I finally was abandoning my purist policies.

One of his grandsons and a member of the work crew looked puzzled. “What’s Velveeta?” he asked.

“It’s like American cheese, like the single slices you get on cheeseburgers,” I said, “but it comes in a box.” I got the box out to show him.

“It’s a brand name,” my brother-in-law explained to him.

“OK,” said he, and took a serving.

I can remember the box of Velveeta in the refrigerator at home. Like Rhonda, Mom used it in cooking because it made really smooth sauces. Velveeta was invented in 1923 in Monroe, New York, and was named for its velvety smooth texture. It is a dairy product, so even Wisconsinites can admit to using it without shame. It is not, however, to be confused with a good Wisconsin brick, Cheddar or Colby.

When Jerri and I were first married, most Kansas supermarkets offered Velveeta, ground Parmesan, and a handful of other cheeses, nearly all from Kraft. Last summer, when we stopped at Emporia, Kansas, to stock up on the best flour I know (Hudson Cream), I made a point of inspecting the cheese case.

There were probably a hundred different varieties and brands of cheese made by cheese makers from Oregon to Vermont as well as Wisconsin, an enormous improvement in the last four decades. I almost felt like I had wandered into a good Wisconsin supermarket.

Velveeta was still in the cheese case, but my attitude towards it had changed. Even the ancient Romans used some processed foods including fish sauces and cheeses flavored with garlic or sweetened with honey as well as salted cheeses shipped to Rome from across the empire, perhaps to be eaten with the hams imported from Belgium. We have chemists today to make fancier processed foods, but maybe that’s just progress.

Even without scientists, our ancestors were pretty clever when it came to inventing new foods. For instance, yogurt, tofu and most of the cheeses we enjoy today have been around for thousands of years. What I finally have come to understand is that Velveeta is really just another in the long list of foods that start with milk. Not my favorite to eat on crackers, but a good ingredient in some recipes.

Like Rhonda’s Rice and Broccoli Casserole which makes six to eight servings of a delicious side dish.

INGREDIENTS:

3/4 cup white rice
1 1/2 cups water
Scant 1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 lbs. broccoli crowns
4 T butter
1/2 cup chopped celery
1/3 cup chopped onion
1 can condensed cream of chicken soup
1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
1/2 lb. Velveeta cheese

PROCEDURE:

Rinse the rice, then put it in a saucepan with the water and salt. Bring to a boil, then stir and reduce the heat to a low simmer. Cook the rice covered for fifteen to twenty minutes until the water is absorbed. Remove the pan from the heat.

Prepare the vegetables while the rice is cooking. Wash the broccoli, discard the tough bottom part of the stems and divide the crowns into bite-sized pieces. Clean and chop the celery and onion into a quarter to half-inch dice.

Preheat the oven to 350º.

Blanch the broccoli in a microwave oven or covered saucepan with a little water for four or five minutes until it is crisp but tender. Drain and set aside the broccoli. Cut the Velveeta into half inch cubes.

Melt the butter in a two quart saucepan over low heat. Add the celery and onion and cook them for about four minutes until they are soft. Add the undiluted soups and Velveeta and stir until you have a smooth sauce. Remove the sauce from the heat.

Spread the cooked rice evenly over the bottom of a two quart baking dish. Spread the broccoli on the rice and spoon the sauce over the broccoli. Put the dish on a center shelf in the oven and bake the casserole for about thirty minutes until the rice is bubbling around the edges and the sauce is just beginning to brown.

NOTES: Rhonda’s recipe calls for two ten ounce packages of frozen broccoli spears and butter or margarine. I prefer butter and fresh broccoli when you can get it.