Eat Arkansas

Green salads with a little protein on top. Cold sesame noodles. Tuna or egg salad, thoroughly chilled before spreading on whole wheat. The greek salad from Boulevard. Cold marinated cucumber, onion, and tomato salad.

The frozen sugar water stand just past Burns Park close to MacArthur and right by the railroad tracks has the best icee/snowcone/cajun snow/whatever your name for it I've had. Their prices are also the best in town.

Homemade gazpacho. Salade nicoise. Chicken salad or pimiento cheese on a cracker with a glass of light white wine. The traditional accompaniment to a farm dinner: a platter of sliced cucumbers, cantaloupe, tomatoes, and onions, with buttermilk and cornbread for those who need more sustenance. A platter of oil-cured black olives, salted roast almonds, dolmades, and caponata with good French or Italian bread. A slice or two of chorizo and a glass of medium sherry with ice and a slice of lime. A Vietnamese chicken salad with peanuts and fish sauce. Shrimp remoulade.

Or just don't eat, and dream about all of those good dishes and more, you've eaten on a hot summer day.

An entire lemon ice box pie to go from Izzy's. I think I'll head downstairs and have another piece....

To beat the heat, we have to retrieve some of the logic of Southern food, as our foreparents cooked it. Our traditional foodways make sense in our climate, given our land, given the ethnic blend that makes us who we are.

The traditional Southern table was vegetable laden, and the vegetables came either fresh from the garden or fresh from vendors or the market -- or from country cousins who brought care packages to city ones. It was not only picked fresh: it was cooked fresh.

The tired old cliche of over-cooked fat-laden vegetables misses the point of our traditional cuisine. Those "overcooked" vegetables were hundreds of times fresher than anything we can buy in supermarkets today. They were raised with a minimum of chemicals. Their inbuilt nutritional value was higher than anything we get in our lightly cooked "fresh" vegetables today.

Whether our foreparents knew of Jefferson's famous dictum that meat should be eaten as a condiment, they practiced it, especially in summertime. With the abundance of fresh things from the garden, meat made its appearance on their tables mostly as a seasoning for the vegetables -- the crowders, purple hulls, Kentucky wonders. A little pork sliced into the beans or field peas gave them the taste and mouthfeel of a meaty dish.

The eggplant and summer squash breaded with cornmeal was fried in meat drippings, adding more of a meat flavor to a meal revolving around vegetables. The cornbread and fried corn, the okra and tomatoes served with rice -- all were seasoned with enough bacon grease to give them the flavor of bacon, without actually including meat.

When meat is not the main dish around which everything else revolves, it makes sense to add meat or grease as a seasoning. It's also not as unhealthy as eating huge portions of meat at each meal.

And such meals are easier to digest in a hot climate than are heavy meat-based ones. With platters of fresh sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, cantaloupe, and onions to accompany the cooked food, our foreparents had meals ideally suited to the hot climate of the South in summertime.

Relishes like chowchow or piccalilli played an important role not just in preserving the last of the fall garden, but in perking up the taste buds when one's desire to eat flags in hot weather. They're perfect accompaniments to a plate of crowders and cornbread.

Our foreparents also knew how to beat the heat by cooking these meals in the cool of the morning. At both of my grandmother's houses, the noonday meal (dinner) was started as soon as the breakfast dishes were washed. The food then sat on the stove until noon arrived.

Granted, this way of eating is designed not only to beat the heat, but to provide a filling hot meal for people laboring outdoors on a farm, and our lives and schedules have changed. But it makes sense in a hot climate: it's much more logical to eat the large meal at noon, snooze a little afterwards, and then return to work, than our current living pattern. Almost all hot-weather societies in the world have a pattern of this sort.

And, with the large meal eaten hot in the middle of the day, it also makes sense to eat light and cool dishes in the evening. Our foreparents often kept dinner on the stove all day long, and what was left was there for the taking, lukewarm, in the evening.

Or it was combined with some cooked tomatoes into a nourishing soup for the evening. Nothing went to waste.

Ot for those who had no appetite for cooked food at all, there was always cold buttermilk and cornbread, the latter crumbled into the glass of buttermilk and spooned out for supper.

There was a logic to the way we used to eat, and it fit our land, our lifestyles, and our climate. We're forgetting that logic, and in the process, forgetting much of the wisdom our elders had about beating the heat.

Lots to learn from other hot-weather cultures, too:

Mint. Chopped into yogurt, it provides a wonderful cooling accompaniment to hot, spicy dishes. A few sprigs thrown into the pot in which the tea is steeped for iced tea transforms a drink we take for granted into blessed tonic for the hottest days.

Cucumber. Slice it as thin as possible, sprinkle it with salt, let it sit awhile, and then wring it out in a colander, rinsing the salt. Add some fine-chopped onion, a good bit of fresh chopped dill, and yogurt, and you have one of the best hot-weather accompaniments for almost any meal -- or a meal in itself.

German-speaking cultures beat the heat by eating nothing hot at all in the evening: the meal centers around bread (Abendbrot). With substantial, well-baked bread, who needs more than a bit of cheese or sausage, a few relishes, some sliced radishes and salt, on a hot day?

The Germanic peoples also know how to beat the heat by mixing beer with a little lemonade (Alsterwasser in some parts of Germany, Radler in other parts), or by taking cool white wine and spritzing it with mineral water. Nothing is more pleasant on a hot day in a German city than to sit at a sidewalk table or a beer garden beside a lake, and sip one of those drinks -- especially if the white wine is from the Mosel or a Gruener Veltliner from Austria.

Closer to home, we can always learn something from our neighbors to the South by making quick tacos in the evening. Several companies make good canned refried beans that have no fat -- check the label for purity of ingredients.

Quickly heated in the microwave with a few tortillas (Mexican-made ones are best), served with a simple coleslaw made with thin-sliced cabbage, grated carrots, a bit of cider vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, and a pinch of sugar, and what more do you need for supper than some grated cheese and salsa to go on top?

I find the Mexican-made salsas better, cheaper, and containing purer ingredients than many of the American brands. They may need a little fresh cilantro, garlic, lime juice, depending on taste, but otherwise, they're usually very good.

Why the sugar and/or corn syrup in so many American salsas?

Good post muddling. The first "food education" lecture I attended 20 years ago, headed by an homeopathic doctor reminded us that traditional southerners used meat as a condiment. Meat is processed via strenuous physical activity
which few of us get today. Eating meat produces systemic tension in the body whole. It is released via activity. Without activity stress is released thru alcohol or drugs, the kind the Md must prescribe for you.
Salt is the most tension producing substance you ingest. Use it judiciously. If you want to see the potency of salt dissolve some in water and pour it on any grass you want gone. Much more destructive than herbicides.

The homeopath remarked that without air conditioning there would be no way to process fried chicken in hot months.
Potato salads were always prevalent when I was a kid in addition to all the sensible, fresh foods you mentioned.

Our little okra patch and tomato patch reminds me that back then seems just about everyone had a "kitchen garden" from which you couldn't "make a meal" but you could dress it up nicely and the best bonus was freshness.
We're still fortunate to have "country cousins" who keep us in fresh eggs. The flocks have a rooster in them, meaning the eggs are fertilized and hence living food, the same living food people once ate before their unfertilized eggs were kept in coolers for 2-3 months before they were sold.

Unfortunately "shelf-life" is now the mantra of food marketing. And what better way to extend shelf life than making the food nuclear, destroying any living enzyme it may contain.

Lwood, there's an interesting rabbinic story that human beings were originally made to eat fruit, grains, pulses, and vegetables, but after the fall (of Adam and Eve), began to eat meat. This tradition assumes that humans are meant to be "discriminate" meat eaters, since we have teeth primarily designed to eat other foods, and only secondarily designed to eat meat.

Interesting to me how this story parallels Jefferson's insistence that meat should be eaten as a condiment, if at all. I've always thought that this is especially true in hot climates, because meat taxes the whole system, to digest it.

Not to mention (and you allude to this): it's not easy to preserve. My grandmother used to tell me that her father (who farmed just southeast of Little Rock) only rarely slaughtered a beef when she was little, and when he did so, would share quarters of it with all the neighbors. They, in turn, did the same when they killed a cow.

This was in part because there was no way to preserve beef as easily as pork could be preserved, with smoking and salt. Beef was a rarity in the traditional Southern diet, much more so than pork.

Chicken was reserved, so I recall my grandparents telling me, for Sunday dinners, when you hoped the preacher didn't apepar, since he ate the best pieces. If you think about it, it makes sense to preserve your chickens, which provide eggs, and your cows, which provide milk, than pigs, which were raised primarily for the meat they provided.

You're right about salt. I remember reading somewhere in one of M.F.K. Fisher's books that when she felt low, she would eat something very salty, to whip up her whole system. I also remember reading in one of Edna Lewis's cookbooks that salt and sugar, in judicious combination, form the seasoning basis of all Southern cooking.

In my family, sugar was used sparingly except for desserts, but it did have its use to balance the salt in a dish, when a pinch was added to something like collard greens. Sugar in cornbread was pure heresy, though. We preferred our cake after dinner and not with it. Smothered squash seems to me to need a pinch of sugar, too, along with the onion and a good dollop of butter -- and lots of black pepper.

We tend to think of our traditional cooking as unsophisticated, but in my experience (watching my grandmother and aunts and mother cook), it took a great deal of time and patience, as well as care, from the preparation stage through the cooking and seasoning stage to the serving stage. There was a lot of balance and care about appearance, texture, combinations, every bit as much as in good meals from any other culture that pays attention to food.

There was also a lot of care given to the quality of the food itself. My mother wouldn't deign even to try to fry corn unless she got it fresh from a field and brought it home then and there to fry. And it was field corn, not the too-sweet garden corn that is now about all anyone can find for sale.

Muddling, if you're still reading this I strongly suggest a book on eating entitled "Eat Right 4 Your Type."
The author, d'Adamo, says that 0 blood types are the meat eaters, but never in large quantities, like 4 oz is sufficient. But to accompany this meat eating he indicated you also needed plenty of dark greens and at least a 30 min a day strenuous workout, for 0 blood types.

Jews evolved food rules long ago for survival reasons. The prohibition on pork was valid. None of our 4 blood types can successfully process pork. Additionally pork is susceptible
to many diseases which when they enter humans bring on a slow death.

Lwood, thanks for the recommendation of the book. That's a fascinating subject to me, and I'll read with interest.

There is definitely accumulating evidence that certain foods seem to be more palatable to or digestible for certain genetic types, and DNA work is confirming that. There are suggestions that we need to return to the "deep roots" of the food our ancestors ate, since we've evolved in such a way that we digest those particular foods better.

For instance, put some Scandianavians on the supposedly healthy Mediterranean diet -- deprive them of milk, butter, cheese, and lots of meat -- and they actually become sick, more prone to diabetes. There seems to be evidence that Africans and African Americans are more sensitive to salt than are Caucasians, too.

My problem in returning to the deep roots of my own ancestral lineage is that I'm not really sure what that means! Should I be eating oatmeal and milk (with a bit of whiskey along the way) as my Scottish forebears probably did? Or do I return to the diets of my English and Irish ancestors?

DNA studies of my paternal and maternal lines show both of them descending from the very earliest humans to come into Europe, folks who settled in the Iberian peninsula, perhaps, and then made the leap aeons ago over to the British Isles, where they were hunter gatherers.

There definitely does seem to be accumulating evidence that if most of us returned to a diet more based on nuts, grains, vegetables, pulses, and fruits -- maybe we can call it the hunter gatherer diet? -- we'd probably be a lot healthier than we are now, with our heavily meat-based diet.

I also notice, interestingly enough, that I find it a whole lot easier to control my weight when I cook and eat at home rather than in restaurants. And it's not even a matter of what I eat in restaurants, since I usually choose vegetables and salads.

I'm convinced that most prepared foods have too many chemicals, too much salt and too much fat, to be healthy for us. Not a stunning new observation, that, but a reminder that the way our folks used to cook and eat at home was probably a lot healthier than the food snobs have led us to believe, even when they used bacon grease lavishly and cooked vegetables for a long time.