South and West

by Joan Didion

"A few signs in Enterprise, Mississippi: SEVEN HAMBURGERS FOR $1. FOOTLONG BARBECUE 30 CENTS. People sitting on porches." 

"I remember whole days spent cooking with N., perhaps the most pleasant days we spent together. He taught me to fry chicken and to make a brown rice stuffing for fowl and to chop endive with garlic and lemon juice and to lace everything I did with Tabasco and Worceshtershire and black pepper." pg. 8

"One day we drove from Oxford over to Clarksdale, to have Sunday lunch with Marshall Bouldin and his wife, Mel. Lunch was served promptly at noon, a few mintues after our arrival. There was fried chicken and gravy, white rice, fresh green peas, and a peach pie for dessert. The heat was so intense that the ice was already melted in the Waterford water goblets before we sat down at the table." pg. 91

"Throwing chicken on the floor, or the artichoke. Buying crab boil. Discussing endlessly the possibilities of an artichoke-and-oyster casserole." pg. 9

"We went to dinner at Boyt's, a roadhouse in the next crossroads over. On Boyt's menu: 'Italian or Wop Salad.'" pg. 102

"In Durham we had one room with kitchen priviledges in the house of a lay minister whose children ate apple butter on thick slabs of bread all day long and referred to their father in front of us as 'Reverend Caudill.' In the evenings Reverend Caudill would bring home five or six quarts of peach ice cream, and he and his wife and children would sit on the front porch spooning peach ice cream from the cartons while we lay in our room watching our mother read and waiting for Thursday." pg. 11

"One day on the eastern shore we spent hours making shrimp bisque and then had an argument about how much salt it needed, and because he had been drinking Sazeracs for several hours he poured salt in to make his point. It was like brine, but we pretended it was fine." pg. 9