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            As far as I’m concerned, there are no rules when it comes to cooking.  Yes, there are some common sense principles to guide us so that we don’t outright ruin the food – we must be teachable – but rules are optional.  When I originally began pondering this idea, I was fresh from watching an Iron Chef America episode where chocolate was used in every course.  It was especially intriguing, given that there was very little dessert offered among the courses.  Chocolate in a savory dish?  Isn’t there a rule against that? Apparently not, according to the Iron Chefs.  

Shortly after that rule-smashing episode I went exploring at the grocery store and came home with sun-dried tomatoes and banana pepper rings.  I had no recipe in mind – I just dig ‘em.  For lunch that day, we decided to have tuna salad   and I thought it would be fun to add both the tomatoes and peppers, with a splash of spicy brown mustard.  For The Wife this was a bit of a stretch – thankfully, it was a successful stretch. You see, I come from a loaded tuna salad family: sweet pickle relish at a minimum, sometimes eggs, apple if we got really ambitious, and pecans if Younger Brother and I were not involved in the meal.  Then I married into a family that defined tuna and mayo thrown together in a bowl as tuna salad.  So for a while I lived in the least common denominator rather than make two different batches.   When we lived overseas, tuna and mayo were easy to come by, but sweet relish was a rarity, so it turned out to be an easy paradigm to live under.  On the other hand, during our first week as expatriates in that Kingdom of Far, Far Away we were treated to tuna salad with mandarin oranges and raisins.  I was thunderstruck.  A fruit other than apple in my tuna?  It was so simple, yet added so much flavor.  Perhaps this is where my interest in grilled fish with fruit salsa was born.  You never know.

Have sun-dried tomatoes and banana peppers ever been used in tuna salad before?  (Or since?) I don’t know.  And it doesn’t really matter.  I branched out, I enjoyed it, and I would do it again.  But in the interest of full disclosure, there are also times I branch out and enjoy it but don’t do it again.  As the Iron Chef judge said about her chocolate entrée, sometimes once is enough.  On that matter I just have two words: lamb fries.

They were great. Once.

The premise behind my rant is this: there’s a first time for everything.  Not a very original phrase, I grant you, but I can’t think of a better way to say it, either.  As the historians surmise, men ate raw meat before lightning struck it once – or perhaps they dropped a bit of wooly mammoth in the fire and realized it was better that way.  I’m sure Glug thought his neighbors were crazy when he saw them dropping their meat in the fire at the All-Day-Grunting-And-Dinner-In-The-Cave meeting the following week.

Who was the first person to pour milk on their cereal?  I pondered this as an older child, and decided to try Cranapple juice on Cheerios as a snack.  Sure, it was different, but it was a good different – I ate/drank it many times after that and have good memories of the combination.  My experiment was completed long before Googling was possible, but since then I have searched and discovered that others have followed my lead in breaking the cereal/milk rule.  I found references to orange juice, coffee, yogurt, Bailey’s Irish Cream, and melted butter – just to name a few – all poured over dry cereal.  I felt vindicated.  (And for the record, I offer this disclaimer: I am not recommending that anyone eat a bowl of Bailey’s and Wheaties in the morning – certainly not the breakfast of champions.)

Even Son has been subtly trained in the idea of “almost anything goes.”  When I was but a youngster, we were gifted a shaker of Tony Chachere’s Cajun Seasoning, and began to use it in just about everything that required salt and pepper.  I brought that habit to the marriage, and eventually bought a separate salt-shaker just to add a little class to our Tony’s on the table.  The Wife didn’t understand – she thought that if I was adding Tony’s to her food, it must mean I didn’t like it.  It took a while to convince her that it was just like adding salt –   the label even says so – and I was only enhancing the already wonderful flavor of her meal.  Son, who didn’t like to use common toothpaste because it was too “spicy”, soon picked up on the Tony’s habit. Go figure.  He went through a phase when he would shake it on his breakfast toast, his cheese sandwiches.  Daughter, not to be outdone in the rule-breaking category, eats a Nutella-on-white-bread sandwich several days a week.  (No Tony’s.)  No rules.

Put it on the pedestal it deserves.

In the end, can we just agree that rules are relative?  Most chefs turn their collective noses up if steaks are cooked much beyond medium, but my Maw-in-Law doesn’t know that rule.  If her steak doesn’t get confused with a charcoal briquette, she sends it back.  Rules or not, it is still wise to employ common sense.  If you live in a pork-free zone as we did for ten years, and you get your hands on a Boston butt, you take exquisite care of it and don’t play.  It’s not worth the risk of ruining it with over-experimentation.  But if you live near the Piggly Wiggly and can afford to toss a failed experiment in the trash if necessary, I say go for it.  Put some chocolate in your casserole or glaze your ham with a Cranapple juice reduction.  Just go easy on the Kahlua in the morning – that’s not what they mean by Special K.

I’ve had an idea for a while, and a few weeks ago I got the ball rolling.  My maternal grandmother – aka Granny, Miss Ruth, or Mrs. Etha Mann – turned 97 years old last June.  At the Carrington Nursing Center last Mother’s Day, she was declared the oldest mother in the place and she was downright proud of that distinction.  The idea was to pick her brain, essentially interviewing her about the kinds of foods her family ate and how they were procured and prepared back in the early part of the 20^th century.  Her memory slipped from time to time, but she could tell tales of her childhood and quote large volumes of poetry from her many years as an English teacher at Belmont High School.  I figured she would easily be able to pull out some food stories from those days as well.

When I mentioned this idea to her, she said something along the lines of “Oh, law…”, as if she wouldn’t be able to recall anything – then she launched immediately into a story.  As a young girl, she told me, they would put butter in a bowl at the table and smooth it out so that it was perfectly rounded on top.  When they had mashed potatoes, they prepared them in much the same way – rounded on top – and the two bowls looked almost exactly alike.  As the story went, another little girl was visiting one day and Granny spotted a bowl of potatoes,  told her friend it was butter, and proceeded to eat a big spoonful.  Apparently this elicited the desired shock from the friend, and a gleeful giggle from Granny, then and now as she told me the story.

I’m thankful that I got that story, because she left this world just a few days after that visit.   I will remember her for a lot of things – calling me Dr. Pudding Reed (and by admitting this publicly I am NOT giving any of you permission to call me that), correcting my grammar and pronunciation on a regular basis, making sure I knew she “loved me good” – and food stories that I didn’t have to ask about because I was there.  I may have told a few of these stories before, in some form or fashion, but this time I think it’s okay – Granny liked to tell the same stories over and over again, too.

Mann-Reed-Keys Family Holiday Photo, Circa 1986

Granny was known first and foremost in the family for her iced tea.  It wasn’t anything fancy, but it did approach addictive.  Three or four family-sized tea bags, a small can of frozen lemonade, and at least a cup of sugar – that’s the basic recipe for a gallon of tart-sweet joy.  These days it is harder to find the smaller can of lemonade, and I suspect she put more than a cup of sugar in there most of the time, but the key ratios are there.   A few years back several of us in the family met for a pre-game tailgate at Hotty Toddy U, and as has been known to happen in the Grove, there was family silver on the table.  We only had one token piece – a silver pitcher full of Granny’s tea – perfectly appropriate for the occasion.  And I have some in my refrigerator now.

Beyond the family she became somewhat famous for her fish fries.  Until recent years when she was unable to navigate the kitchen as well as before, I can remember very few visits when we did not have fried fish, hushpuppies and slaw at least once.   Oftentimes we were involved in catching the fish – bream or catfish, usually – after which we would sit on the back porch with my grandfather, Pappy, and clean them.  Okay, we would watch him clean them.  What we didn’t eat would be dropped into empty milk cartons, filled with water, and frozen until we visited again.  She cut the whole catfish on each side so that you could easily pull off a bite at a time with your fingers.  At her table I learned to enjoy the salty crunch of a fried fish tail.  And if I ever master her hush puppies, I will know I have arrived.

There were always lots of desserts to choose from, and Granny was almost always thinking of me when she made them.  As a child and on into early adulthood, I would not get near coconut or pecans.  (The coconut is still abhorrent to me, but I have learned to tolerate and even enjoy pecans in some forms.)  If she was making something with pecans in the recipe, and it was possible to do so, she would make half with nuts and half without.  Chocolate sheath cake in particular was always lumpy on their side, smooth on mine.  She made a great caramel cake, too, and that is no easy feat.  The penultimate dessert at Granny’s house, however, was the Purple Cow:  Nugrape soda over vanilla ice cream, preferably in a Therm-O-Ware tumbler.

The Perfect Purple Cow

Granny also brought food into the little sayings she would repeat now and again.  If someone complained, “If I just had this, then I would do that” her automatic reply was, “If I had some ham, I could have some ham and eggs, if I had some eggs.”   I confess I have adopted that one.

Granny was bedridden for the last two years, so she hadn’t sat at the Thanksgiving table in a while, but we’d still take her a little plate and spend some time at her side.  This Thursday I expect it’ll be a little tough for us, but we know she is feasting at a spectacular table, one that she can walk to on her own power, where she won’t have to worry about her sugar level, and with Pappy at her side, who’ll be happy to take his dessert right in that little puddle of pot liquor on his dinner plate, thank you very much.