With the holiday of Shavuous just a few days away, planning
and shopping are done. All that is left is going elbow deep in the cooking.
Of course, not a lot will actually be cooked for this
holiday, which celebrates the giving of the law at Sinai.
We were in Philadelphia this past weekend for the death of
my beloved aunt, and spring was in its full glory there. Back home in Georgia,
the colors are quickly changing from spring green to a darker, verdant hue. By midsummer,
a drive down a shady street will be reminiscent of a prehistoric rain forest,
so heavy will the kudzu and wisteria fall across the sun and create shadows.
It’s already hot, and that calls for cold food. Luckily, the
tradition at Shavuous is to serve dairy products, so that opens up some tasty
possibilities.
I’ve decided to start with cold cucumber-dill soup, followed
by a salade Nicoise and then two kinds of lasagna – white with spinach and zucchini
(the scourge of midsummer) and a more classic variety called Hadassah-style. It
is the traditional meatless dish served at Jewish women’s club meetings for
decades and actually includes muenster cheese instead of the more Italian
mozzarella. Dessert will be tiramisu.
At this point, you may be thinking: “Why is she writing
about this on the blog. There is nothing Southern about this, except maybe the
south of France.”
I can understand your concern but keep reading, and I’ll
explain.
It all starts with supper. Many theories have been offered
as to why, in the past, Southerners had dinner and supper instead of lunch and
dinner, as in more sophisticated regions. Some posit that it has to do with a
farm schedule; men needed a big meal during the day to work until dark. Others
suggest it has to do with the region’s English roots, at least in the coastal
areas; Southerners just turned high tea into supper and put some ice cubes in
their cups.
While both of those ideas are likely true, I think it also
has something to do with summer weather. Without air-conditioning, it is
theoretically possible to cook a hot meal in Georgia before noon, after which
the thermostat moves from stifling to sizzling on summer days. Cooking the meal
at 4 or 5 p.m., on the other hand, would be inviting heat prostration.
Growing up in south Georgia, we always had a big meal at
lunchtime, winter and summer. Dinner was never much of a production, but, in
the summer, it became even simpler. Sometimes it would be cold chicken or roast
beef left over from lunch and eaten on a slice of delicious Gottlieb’s Bakery
pumpernickel. Other times it would be a dairy meal, with the centerpiece a pan
of biscuits prepared by our beloved housekeeper before she went home from the
day. My mother would fire up the oven just long enough to get the succulent
biscuits brown and then serve them with butter and syrup.
The other ingredients would come from the refrigerator,
which included certain staples in the summer different from the rest of the year.
There usually was a large purple jar of beet borscht (sometimes left over from
Passover) and occasionally schav, the bitter Eastern European soup made from
sorrel. Those were often accompanied by a glass container of pickled herring or
herring in cream sauce. The Breakstone sour cream vessel, tucked somewhere
behind the sweating metal pitcher of sweet tea, was giant instead of large. The
same usually was true of the Kraft mayonnaise jar, sometimes bent from overuse
in making tomato sandwiches with the fresh produce left in carport by our
friends with green thumbs.
That plus the biscuits would be the makings of our supper.
Sometimes we actually had lox or whitefish imported from Savannah or beyond. (And
therein is the explanation for the blog’s name.) More often, albacore tuna and
herring would accompany the salad, fresh vegetables and cold soup dolloped with
sour cream. Sometimes, my mother would even open a can of black olives.
Are you beginning to see a pattern here? Salade Nicoise
traditionally is lettuce with tuna, new potatoes, green beans, anchovies and
whatever vegetables are fresh, topped with vinaigrette.
I’m not saying all Southerners ate the same cold food as we
did. Some of our non-Jewish friends sang the praises of biscuits floating in
cold buttermilk. Others waxed eloquent about bacon, lettuce and garden-grown
tomato sandwiches. None of us, however, was putting together a hot evening meal
in the summer heat.
So, to go back to the Shavuous meal, what I’m serving is
just a slightly more Mediterranean version of what I grew up eating on hot
summer evenings.
Also, when describing the menu, I left out one dish. The
first good watermelons are coming out of Florida and Texas now, and I couldn’t
resist serving one.
Now, admit it, serving watermelon at Shavuous is both Southern and
Jewish.
