Arri London muttered....


>
> Ah but that's a feature of much American cooking to us foreigners.
> There is a pervasive sweetness in things that weren't sweet at 'home'.
>

a collateral track...

My father's mother, orphaned as a child and raised on a hardscrabble West
Texas ranch near Buffalo Gap aspired to some gentility and the props and
affectations of same in her old age. After my grandfather's death, she
kept her house, and in the 7th and 8th grades I walked two blocks from
school three days a week to lunch with her.

For the first few weeks, lunch always includedd "store bought" light bread.
I had a heck of a time convincing her that I would be more'n happy with
biscuits and even happier with cornbread, especially the "hot water" sort,
"fried", at which she excelled. She had served light bread because she
truly believed in indicated a higher social status or level of
sophistication.

Back in the early 50s, produce was still seasonal, and many of the meals
would have been classed as vegetarian except for the standard additions of
"side meat" to the cooking process. In this climate, the hardier greens
are available well into the Winter, but dried bean season starts in October
and runs thru April or so. Except for canned tomatoes, I don't remember
ever having a store bought canned vegetable except for beets (always a
"salad"). I still buy "real" hominy, the dried sort, attempting to recrate
the miracles she could perform with a food most popular those who couldn't
afford cornmeal.

Having white sugar, brown sugar, molasses and sorghum syrp available and
affordable had given her a sweet toooth in later years, souvenir of a
sugar-deprived childhood, and sweeteners were in many of her recipes,
especially for yeast rolls, which put me off them for years.

TMO