Southern comfort
On a N.H. farm, three generations do home cooking Carolina-style
HINSDALE, N.H. -- It's late on a rainy Friday afternoon, and Deb Pettengill is making supper. She stands over an old Garland range, blond hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, moving around cast iron pans and cooking for a crowd with the nonchalance of someone whipping up morning eggs. As usual, real Southern cooking is on the menu: country-style steak, buttermilk biscuits, pan-fried okra, pokeweed, tomato and melon salad, and peach cobbler.
Pettengill's 86-year old mother, Mary Ellen Stewart (Mert to everyone), stands at the sink, washing dishes, and staring out into the woods behind the house. Tall and slim, she's homesick for her little house in rural South Carolina. Pettengill's daughter, Olivia, 18, fresh out of Stoneleigh-Burnham School in Greenfield and headed for Hampshire College in the fall, slices potatoes and checks on a peach cobbler she's baking. Son James, 21, also at Hampshire, is home for the summer and in the woodlot, building a little cabin for himself. Peter Pettengill, Deb's husband, is working in his print shop next to the barn with a visiting artist. ``They're always hungry when they come back from the shop," says Deb.
In this household, that usually means they're getting Southern home cooking made with local ingredients: steak with pan gravy, airy biscuits fresh from the oven. While families around her may be turning to lighter fare in the warm weather, Deb Pettengill sticks to dishes she has enjoyed since girlhood.
Pettengill and her mother were both raised in Easley, S.C. Peter comes from Greenfield. When Deb and Peter moved here in 1985, they built a house on the edge of Peter's family's 60-acre farm. Peter is a part-time printmaking professor at nearby Smith College. He spends his days in the studio, working his antique etching presses and playing the role of producer-engineer for the artists who come to work with him. Deb teaches art at the Bement School, a private elementary and middle school in Deerfield, and uses her free time to cook , garden , and make folksy sculptures in her basement studio.
Even with Peter's New England roots, this family's table is often Southern, especially now that Mert is here. A few months ago Mert moved to Hinsdale to live with the Pettengills and the adjustment to New England life hasn't been smooth. Mert has cooked and gardened all her life and from the time she was 16, worked in the textile mill in Easley, weaving and testing yarns and fabrics. Her late husband, Ralph, oversaw the mill's spinning room. ``I have slowed down a good bit," says Mert. Now widowed, she misses her Southern Baptist church, her flower garden, and social time with her old friends.
Most nights mother and daughter, and sometimes granddaughter, cook together. ``I've been dancing around Mother in the kitchen all my life," says Deb. As a girl she hunted squirrels and rabbits alongside her father and stood by as he butchered the family hog every fall.
``Daddy's sausage was the best in the world," says his daughter. ``He would send canned sausage out to me when I was living in Berkeley [Calif.] and all my foodie friends would just go nuts over it." Mert grew vegetables in a big garden and taught Deb how to cook with the seasons and put up food for the winter. Her grandmother showed her how to make pies and biscuits. She says that Grandmother's egg custard pie was so light that it felt like it was going to float off the plate as she ate it. ``I learned from the best," she says.
These days the family dines on Mert's recipes interpreted by Deb and Olivia. Country - style steak begins with sirloin or round steak, fried in a big, hot cast-iron skillet in plenty of peanut oil. At the end of cooking, Deb adds more corn oil to the drippings in the pan and stirs in flour, then water or milk, to make a rich gravy. That gravy cooks with the meat in the oven for 1 1/2 hours. ``I think this is the recipe that people ask Mother for more than anything else," says Deb. ``You don't even need a knife with this. It's really amazing."
The family biscuit recipe makes rounds that are big and fluffy and golden brown. While many Southern biscuits are made with self-rising flour, Mert's recipe uses unbleached flour, shortening, and buttermilk. ``Don't overwork them," Deb advises. When she rolls them, she sprinkles on plenty of flour. ``Careful not to roll them out too thin." She stamps them out, dipping a plain round cutter into flour as she goes. ``The trick to making these biscuits really beautiful is to paint a little bit of buttermilk on top of each one before they go in the oven."
When Deb was growing up, Mert made fresh biscuits every morning before school. Deb shakes her head recalling those days. ``I can't believe that Mother used to get up and make those biscuits first thing," she says. ``You were a real go - getter, weren't you, Mother?" Mert shrugs.
If she didn't have time for biscuits, Mert made hoecakes with leftovers from the night before. A hoe cake consists of all the unbaked biscuit scraps patted together into one big round and fried in a cast - iron skillet, says Deb. ``I guess back in the old days, the farmers used to cook them on their hoes when they were hungry out in the fields."
Some of tonight's dinner is growing wild around the house. Deb heads outside to harvest pokeweed from the edge of the woods. In the South, pokeweed grows wild in the early spring. Deb says that back home older women spot it from their cars and pull over to fill grocery bags. In New England, poke is around for several weeks in June. Deb scoots around the farm picking bunches. It looks like shiny spinach, and tastes like a cross between mint and arugula. While South Carolina women would boil the poke, then cook it with bacon fat and green onions, Deb tosses it in a skillet of hot olive oil with garlic and onion.
The okra is from her garden, grown last summer and frozen until the new crop comes up. ``Daddy loved okra," says Deb. ``Grilled, boiled, fried -- it didn't matter." Deb's method is to dredge the okra in white cornmeal and pan-fry it in olive oil. ``The smell of okra cooking is so green and wonderful," she says. ``I also like it in vegetable soup. Or okra and tomatoes with garlic. Sop it all up with cornbread. Now that's good."
When the hot food is cooked, Deb slices tomatoes and basil and cantaloupe. Basil is new to this traditional mix of ingredients. ``In the South, melon is always served with the meal," she says. ``It's that sweet and savory thing that people love."
Deb spreads out the food on a side table buffet style. Peter is in from his studio. James has taken a break from building. Everyone takes a plate and the family sits around the dining table telling stories about art, food, and music, and drinking beer.
After dinner, they gather in the living room, flop down on soft sofas to chat some more, and dig into Olivia's cobbler. The windows are open, and the damp night glows with flickering lights from the drive-in movie theater next to the farm. Peter switches on the TV and turns the Red Sox game down low. James puts on a Neil Young record. Mert falls asleep on Deb's shoulder. Deb falls asleep on Peter's shoulder. Olivia strums her guitar.
Maybe in the morning, Mert will turn the biscuit scraps into hoecakes. 