A down-home Sunday dinner with all the trimmings
CHOCOWINITY, N.C. - My Aunt Lil died last summer, and besides missing her dearly, I miss those big, southern Sunday dinners she had been fixing for half a century. After church, the extended family would assemble at her table for a feast: ham, roast beef, or fried chicken, green beans, black-eyed peas, okra, a platter of tomatoes and biscuits, all washed down with tea so sweet it would make your teeth ache. Then on to pound cake - chocolate for special occasions.
I moved north some years ago (that's what you get for marrying a Yankee) but visit the South regularly to see family and friends, and to tuck into a Sunday dinner wherever I can find one. Though there are a few Southern-style places in Boston, they're amateurs. They don't do red-eye gravy. Ask for sweet tea and you'll get a puzzled "huh?"
So on a recent trip to North Carolina, when friends invited me to a Sunday dinner in this hamlet near "Little" Washington, I was practically in a swoon. An extra mouth at Mrs. Verna Faucette's was not a problem; she rises at 5 a.m. to feed four generations of family every Sunday, and often hosts her preacher, the local newspaper publisher, and anyone else who wants to come from church. The price of admission: You must wash your own dishes when you leave, to make way for the next shift. (No, she wouldn't dream of an electric dishwasher).
Mrs. (pronounced "Miz") Faucette grows all her own vegetables and fruit in the field next to her house, relying on the Farmer's Almanac to tell her when to plant and harvest collards, beets, carrots, onions, beans, tomatoes, strawberries, cabbage, and rutabagas. She gets up there on her tractor and plows it all herself. If a snake comes around, she'll fetch her hoe and go after it. Pesky possums and squirrels have been known to meet their maker at the end of the shotgun she keeps on her back porch. She's said to be a dead-on shot.
Mrs. Faucette is 93 years old, a widow many years now.
The day I ate at her small ranch house, she had all four burners on the stove going, and her table was loaded down with platters of fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, roast beef, and mutton. There were butter beans, collards, salad, okra, mashed potatoes and gravy, pickled beets, sweet pickles, plain biscuits, and her famous cheese biscuits. The fried chicken was perhaps the best I've ever tasted (forgive me, Aunt Lil). I asked Mrs. Faucette how she knew when it was done.
"I listen to it," she said. "I can tell by hearing it fry." And for pies, she'd never use a timer, not when she's got her own eyes.
Naturally, she doesn't follow recipes or measure; it's a pinch of this and a handful of that. She's been cooking for 80 years now, since she was a girl growing up on a farm where the family raised everything they ate, including pigs and cows.
My Southern friends tell me that the Sunday dinner is a dying tradition. I hope it's not true. At Mrs. Faucette's, and at my Aunt Lil's, dinner celebrates so much more than the food, however wonderful it may be. It's a day of family and community and connecting and catching up, bringing generations together. Advice, gossip, and recipes are exchanged, along with the pitchers and platters.
When I dined with Mrs. Faucette, the 20 or so guests included babies, teenagers, young adults, middle-aged, and senior citizens. One shift included her daughter Jo, 70; granddaughter Wanda, 48; and great-granddaughter Kelly Jo, 21 - four generations of one family. "She loves doing it because she knows where there's food, there'll be people," said Jo.
I looked around the table with envy, listening to laughter and clinking forks. Typically Southern, there were lots of "Yes, ma'ams" and "Yes, sirs" from the younger generation as they addressed their elders. I inhaled a piece of heavenly pie, the pecans fresh from her tree. There was pound cake, too, and pineapple cake and carrot cake; Mrs. Faucette allows guests to bring a dessert, if they like. I sampled each, knowing this would be my last Sunday dinner for a while. I washed it all down with very sweet tea. And then I rose from the table and went in to do my dishes.
Mrs. Faucette stopped me. "We don't allow people to wash their dishes the first time," she said. "Next time you come, you can do yours." And she took that plate clean out of my hands. 