White Trash Cooking

It won't always make your mouth water but it's fun. My favourites are:

1) Pore folk soup - crumbled soda crackers in warm milk!

2) Cooter pie, where the recipe begins: "First you take a live cooter and wait for him to stick his head out from under his shell. When he does, you grab it and whack it off."

There is also MOCK cooter stew, of which Mrs Ina Filker of Sandfly, Georgia, says: "Give you a silver dollar if you kin tell the difference."

Let's hope her confidence is well placed. In my local supermarket, real cooters are in awful short supply.

Ernest Matthew Mickler also wrote Sinkin Spells, Hot Flashes, Fits and Cravins. Both of these could have been condescending, mean-spirited takes on the food habits of the working poor. Certainly the names of these books would lend credence to the belief that that's what one would find in them. And I bought them because they looked amusingly kitsch-filled. But I was wrong. This isn't kitsch. Mickler loved these people. He had affection for their food. This was the written equivalent of the field recordings made of rural musics by Alan Lomax and his father. Mickler was preserving these artifacts, this ephemera. I wish he hadn't died. I think he was just getting started. I think he was just getting started. He died in 1988 of AIDS - the show more day after this book was published.

There's a wonderful article about the books here: http://www.oxfordamericanmag.com/content.cfm?ArticleID=46&Entry=Extras show less

A cult American spiral bound from the 1980s. A few great photographs with recipes which are of a time and place - reading rather than cooking material but no less diverting for that.