The Delights of Vegetable Mixes

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Late summer, with the high country edging into the often stifling heat and humidity of Dog Days, finds mountain gardens at their peak of productivity. It’s a season when folks living close to the land traditionally have been as busy as the bees populating their hives and pollinating their crops. There are all sorts of vegetables to be harvested and put up; pickles to be made; green beans to be strung for leather britches and peaches to be dried for wintertime fried pies. Taste treats in such varied forms as watermelons and mushmelons, ground cherries and huckleberries are to be enjoyed.

Hard work dealing with bountiful harvests translates to hearty appetites, and while today’s world sees far less in the way of manual labor, treasured foodstuffs of our forebears retain their enduring taste appeal. Certainly that holds true for mixed vegetable dishes that salute this season of plenty. What follows is a sampling of such offerings, all featuring vegetables common to area gardens or seasonally available from your farmer’s market or grocer. These are dishes likely to evoke a comment I often heard as a boy when some old-timer, more often than not my paternal grandfather, after taking substance following morning hours of hard work—and with more lying ahead in the long, hot afternoon—would push back from the table with a heartfelt: “My, but that was fine!”

Roasted garden vegetables vinaigrette

During the heart of the summer, mountain folks of old sometimes faced a welcome problem which still exists today; namely, their gardens threatened to produce so much they didn’t need to put up any more. Since neighbors were likely in the same situation, they couldn’t even give it away—stories of folks hiding when they saw you coming with a bunch of zucchini might be apocryphal, but they convey an underlying element of truth. The answer to overabundance came easily to our ancestors—when the hogs were slopped daily they got some welcome variety in their diet, and chickens allowed free range in the garden did the same.

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But other than extra hog and chicken feed, in pre-refrigeration days folks sometimes faced a “too-much-of-a-good-thing” problem. Other than baked goods, sweet potatoes, soup beans, or dishes that could be placed in the warmer of a wood-burning stove, not much was kept from dinner to supper, much less until the next day.

The advent of ice boxes and then refrigerators changed it all, expanding the functional level of the family spring house in a major way, especially with cooked vegetables. Early in our marriage, my wife came up with a dandy way of using vegetables for a hot meal at dinner, placing the leftovers in the fridge, and then utilizing them for a cold meal come suppertime. Here’s what she did.

Slice vegetables such as Irish potatoes, Ichuban eggplant (the long, thin kind, which I prefer to the big globular types), yellow squash, and zucchini. Add in whole green beans (strung) or asparagus, onion slices, and, if you wish, sections of bell pepper. Brush everything with olive oil and roast in the oven until tender. Eat a hearty portion of the result hot and fresh from the oven, and then cover the remainder with your favorite vinaigrette. Leave in the refrigerator for a few hours or even overnight. The leftovers, atop a lettuce base or on their own, offer a real summertime treat.

Stewed turnips with greens

When I first visited Scotland many years ago as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh, long before I became a recovering professor who wrote full time, local folks there kept talking about “neeps” as a basic item in daily diet. I had no idea what they meant until I had my first taste, when neeps were served as a side dish in a local restaurant. One bite was all it took for a culinary epiphany—neeps was just their colloquial word for turnips.

Call ‘em what you will, stewed turnips are dandy in my book, but they become even more delectable when cooked with their tops or a mixture of turnip and mustard greens. Wash and then peel several turnips. Cut into fairly thin slices or dice, and place in a large sauce pan or pot. Pack thoroughly washed greens on top and add a slice of streaked meat. Cover with water and cook until both the greens and pieces of turnip are tender. Drain, salt and pepper to taste, and dig in.

Smokies style slaw

  • 1 medium head of cabbage
  • 1 Vidalia onion or other sweet onion
  • 1 tablespoon sugar
  • 2 to 3 tablespoons white vinegar
  • 3 cayenne peppers (optional)
  • ½ bell pepper (optional)
  • 1 or 2 diced raw turnips (optional)
  • Several slices of bacon or streaked meat
  • Salt and black pepper to taste

In the sense that both use piping hot grease from bacon or streaked meat, this dish is similar to kilt lettuce. Both offer a marriage of vegetables.

Fry several slices of bacon or streaked meat and, when done, remove the meat from the pan, reserving the hot grease. As the meat is frying, chop or dice a head of cabbage, along with a sweet onion, and place in a large bowl. Add a tablespoon of sugar and 2 or 3 tablespoons of vinegar (more if you enjoy a vinegary slaw). If you relish a bit of “bite” or heat in your food, chop in two or three fresh cayenne peppers. Alternatively, incorporate some diced bell pepper. Stir the vegetables thoroughly to make sure the sugar and vinegar are evenly distributed, then pour the hot grease over the cabbage and mix quickly to spread the oil evenly. Add salt and black pepper to taste. The hot grease, something readily available in mountain homes of yesteryear, takes the place of mayonnaise.

For variety or a slightly different taste and texture, mix some diced raw turnip in with the cabbage.

Cornbread salad

  • ½ pone of leftover cornbread
  • Raw garden vegetables such as tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, cucumbers, and summer squash
  • Soup beans (pintos or Navy beans) or leftover, cooked crowder peas
  • Raw corn cut from the cob, or leftover stewed corn
  • 2 or 3 cayenne pepper pods (optional)

To prepare cornbread salad, crumble leftover cornbread into a large bowl and mix with whatever vegetables from the ingredients list above you happen to have available. Stir everything together and top with ranch dressing, a splash of buttermilk, or oil and vinegar dressing. Alternatively, mix in some sour cream. Once gently stirred, let the salad bowl sit in the refrigerator for a few hours so the ingredients can mix, mingle, and marry.

Succotash

  • 2 cups canned corn or corn cut fresh from the cob
  • 2 cups lima beans
  • Crowder peas (optional)
  • Shelly beans (optional)
  • Yellow summer squash or zucchini
  • 2 slices streaked meat (bacon can be substituted)

Although closely identified with Native Americans—not just Cherokees but many nations—Lima succotash is prepared in so many versions, and its ingredients vary so dramatically, that pinning it down as a specific dish is purt nigh impossible. While traditional Cherokee succotash recipes use pumpkin, that ingredient has never been part of the dish as I have known it in the Smokies. Instead, the key ingredients have always been corn, some type of summer squash, and lima beans, along with the ubiquitous streaked meat. Other ingredients such as what we knew as “shelly beans” (green beans which had been allowed to get too big for the hulls to be eaten but that could still be shelled out), okra, crowder peas, or indeed pretty much whatever the garden is yielding in abundance at a given point in time can be included.

Fry streaked meat or bacon in a large skillet and remove the meat. Place the various vegetable ingredients, which should be readied in advance, in the hot grease and cook until the vegetable are done. Alternatively, if you want less grease, just place uncooked streaked meat in the pan along with the vegetables and cook until the vegetables are done.

Vegetable soup

  • 3 to 4 cups fresh tomatoes, scalded to remove the peels and then cut into quarters
  • 2 cups tomato or V-8 juice
  • 1 cup corn
  • 1 cup field peas
  • 1 cup green beans
  • 1 cup fresh lima beans
  • 1 cup carrots, chopped or diced into small pieces
  • 2 stalks celery, chopped in small pieces
  • 2 diced potatoes
  • 2 cups beef broth
  • Any leftover vegetables you might have in the refrigerator
  • 2 pods cayenne pepper, chopped fine
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients in a large soup pot and bring to a rolling boil, then cut heat to a slow simmer. Allow to cook until all the vegetables are tender (the carrots and potatoes will be the last to reach this point).

This soup can be easily altered to vegetable beef soup through the addition of ground beef or small cubes of beef that have been browned in olive oil. Add the browned meat to the soup mix along with a half cup of barley and allow to simmer for another 45 minutes.

About the author: Jim Casada’s latest book, which just appeared on the market, is Fishing for Chickens: A Smokies Food Memoir. Signed copies are available from Casada through his website, jimcasadaoutdoors.com, or it can be ordered from the publisher, University of Georgia Press, or through standard book sources.

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