Of Pokeweed and Smother-Fried Squirrel

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings cooked what she found in Florida

The novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was an authoritative cook. Born in Washington, D.C. and educated at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Rawlings married and moved to Kentucky. She started her writing career as a syndicated columnist for the Louisville Courier Journal. Her column was titled “Songs of the Housewife.”

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings porch at Cross Creek

In 1928 Rawlings used a small inheritance to buy a 72-acre orange grove in Hawthorne, Florida–a wild area of dense scrub and meandering rivers and creeks. She soon took up hunting and fishing with her backwoods neighbors and struggled against the elements to succeed in the citrus business. She continued to write, now more about her colorful Florida neighbors and their hand-to-mouth way of life.

At first she turned out several short stories, encouraged by Maxwell Perkins, the editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, who was also working at the time with Thomas Wolfe, Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. Her first novel, South Moon, was a Pulitzer finalist in 1933 (the same year she divorced her first husband who never loved the rough life in Florida). The novel was based on the moonshiners Rawlings met and bird-dogged on their exploits through the hammocks and waterways.

Of course, Rawlings is best known for The Yearling, the novel set in Florida that she drafted while spending a season in Banner Elk in the North Carolina mountains. That novel, now considered a classic young adult story, won the Pulitzer in 1939 and was made into a film, which improved Rawlings’ economic status considerably. At Max Perkins’ urging, Rawlings then turned to writing a memoir called Cross Creek, a book describing a full year devoted to planting, harvesting, hunting, and cooking with her Florida neighbors and guests. 

The pantry with original items

Among Rawlings’ guests was the extraordinary folklorist and writer Zora Neale Hurston. Though Rawlings was slightly more enlightened than many of her white neighbors on the cruelties of Jim Crow, she nevertheless hewed to community norms of segregation and did not invite Hurston to sleep in the guest room of her cottage. Instead, Hurston stayed in the tenant house with Rawlings’ “maid,” Idella Parker, who later published two memoirs about her years with Rawlings and lived to be 101. (Rawlings died at 57.) 

Following the success of Cross Creek, Rawlings published Cross Creek Cookery, one of the most readable and wide-ranging southern cookbooks I’ve ever studied. It gives a flavor of the Florida-inspired dishes and the strong woman who prepared but did not always invent them. Unfortunately Rawlings only gave credit for three of the recipes that Idella Parker shared in her employer’s kitchen, though she does generally credit other neighbors, friends, and family for their recipes that appear in the book.

Rawlings presents more than a dozen soup recipes, including Cream of Peanut and Florida Soft-Shell Cooter (a.k.a. turtle). She explains how to prepare steaks from Alligator-tail and Bear; how to make Datil pepper sauce; and how to make jelly from local Mayhaws, Guavas, and Kumquats. She discusses the finer points of preparing Smother-fried Squirrel, Watermelon Cake, Au Gratin Chayotes, Parsnip Croquettes, Rabbit in Sherry, Loquat Chutney, and Florida Backwoods Biscuits.

Before laying down the recipe for her Tangerine Sherbet, Rawlings sells it to her readers with a wry caution: “Friends cry for it. It is to my winter what mango ice cream is to the summer. It has an extremely exotic flavor and is a gorgeous color. Actually, it is very simple, and the only tricks to it are in having one’s own tangerine trees–and the patience to squeeze the juice from at least a twelve-quart water bucket of the tangerines.”

Rawlings had many firm opinions. She preferred “finely chipped raw onion” mixed in her hushpuppy mix (so do I), short biscuits, strong coffee made over an open fire, and most anything cooked in a Dutch oven outdoors. She believed in mixing mustard greens sparingly with turnip greens to make both better, though cooked collards were her favorite of the three. She prepared the tender spring shoots of pokeweed by cooking them like asparagus and serving them “on buttered toast with a rich cream sauce poured over, and strips of crisp breakfast bacon around them.”

Rawlings declared okra “a Cinderella among vegetables” and served only tender young pods, stem uncut, cooking them “exactly seven minutes in rapidly boiling, salted water.” She arranged them in a sunburst surrounding a bowl of Hollandaise for dipping–to be eaten “much more daintily than is possible with asparagus.” She also noted that the only Hollandaise she ever tasted that compared with her own was at the Ritz Carlton, though it nevertheless lacked adequate lemon. 

Two years ago, after attending a November wedding in the sandy woods near Orlando, Donna Campbell and I took off early the next morning and drove north to visit Cross Creek, now a state historic park. It was a Sunday, and remarkably, there was an energetic tour guide, Rick Mulligan, wearing clothing from the 1930s, and ready to squire us around at 10 a.m. We practically had the house and grounds to ourselves. We were reminded of the North Carolina home of poet Carl Sandburg in Flat Rock, chock-a-block with the paperwork and equipment Mrs. Sandburg used for goat breeding and the pasteboard boxes of books, manuscripts, and magazines on the floor and tables of her husband’s studies, both upstairs and down. 

At Cross Creek it’s as if Rawlings has just gone for a walk with her short-haired pointer, Pat, down the sandy lane arched over with live oak and palmetto, the same road where she sometimes saw rattlers and coral snakes at dusk, taking their time to cross before sliding back into the scrub. The artifacts of her yard work echoed those of my grandparents from the same era–the dented buckets used to gather the harvest, tin watering cans, galvanized pipe fitted for railings on the steps to the porch, heavy timber potting tables, green water hoses coiled about, and a lemon yellow Oldsmobile, worse for wear but still parked under the carport.

With this scenery firmly in mind, I went back home to read the memoir, Cross Creek, and in hindsight, that reading and the visit to Rawlings’ homeplace would help to inspire my new book on North Carolina heritage foods due out from the University of North Carolina Press next year.   

I can still conjure up Rawlings and Parker in their aprons, watching pots on that woodstove in the small kitchen we visited–both occasionally staring out the window into the orange grove and worrying on the threat of a hard early frost before the citrus would be ready at Christmas. With the well-honed craft of a novelist and the make-do of local lore, Rawlings and Parker gave us northern Florida on a platter, cooked up in the days when the term foodie was as yet unspoken.