Book Review: White Trash Gatherings
From Scratch Cooking for Down Home Entertaining
Tanya A. Brown

The cheerful red-and-white gingham motif on the cover of "White Trash Gatherings" might remind you of Betty Crocker, but one glance inside at the beef jar candle holders, recipes for pinto bean pie, and shoe polish remedies for poison ivy and it's clear you're headed on a trip to a far different place.
As author Kendra Bailey Morris says in her treasury of recipes and tips for down-home socializing, "before you know it, you'll be pickin' the banjo after dinner."

"White trash" is rarely applied to people themselves these days, being used more to describe the food and other cultural aspects of people from poor Southern roots, and as a synonym for redneck or hillbilly. In the not-too-distant past, though, "white trash" was an ethnic and social slur that was delivered with a sniff and a wrinkled nose, as though one had smelled something foul.

If you were white trash, you weren't merely poor - you were a crude, drunken, trashy, downwardly-mobile cousin-marrying lout. You lived in a decrepit apartment or trailer - not even a double-wide - stored furniture and rusty old cars on your lawn, and blew whatever money you got on liquor and lottery tickets. You were a little unclear on where babies came from, so there was perpetually a tangle of half-naked, unwashed brats in the back seat of your Bondo-encrusted Camaro.

The War on Poverty in the 1960s did much to eliminate the worst pockets of desperate rural poverty, particularly in Appalachia, and "white trash" has lost most of its original sting. There aren't many people left in the U.S. who have to eat squirrels to survive, even in the mountains of West Virginia where Morris hails from. But the author did get a fine recipe for squirrel from her family, along with a treasure trove of others, like Drunken Weenies. (Cocktail weenies, brown sugar, ketchup and bourbon. Those people know how to party.)

In addition to a childhood spent helping grandma make sausage gravy and fried pies, Ms. Morris has an MFA in Writing from Virginia Commonwealth University, is an instructor at Sur La Table Culinary School, and serves as a restaurant critic for Style Weekly Magazine. In other words, she's no grit-slinging hillbilly naif. The woman knows her food, all the way from applesauce cakes to French cuisine, and her focus on Southern regional cookery is made with a wink and no small amount of affection.

This culinary training comes in handy as she chronicles decades of family recipes, laboriously transforming pinches and handfuls into teaspoons and cups. However, despite a pitch for fresh ingredients in the introduction, she remains faithful to the original recipes in all of their canned-good-laden glory. Cream and butter might taste better, but evaporated milk and shortening are what people had to cook with.

In the grand tradition of church-charity cookbooks, which this book is a distant cousin of, many recipes include at least one ingredient that makes you say "bleah!" There's the chicken fat pie crust, for example, and the macaroni salad that includes sweetened condensed milk. A holiday cheese ball includes cream cheese, onion, green pepper, bacon - and bizarrely enough, crushed pineapple.

There's also the pinto bean pie, an oddity which is exactly what you might suspect: a sweet pie based on pinto beans and seasoned with cinnamon and cloves. "This pie tastes very similar to pumpkin pie and gets even better when your guests don't quite know what they're eating," Morris tells us, "Serve with a side of Beano."

Accompanying the oddities are some genuine rib-sticking comfort foods - potato rolls, strawberry pie, oatmeal molasses bread. There are also a number of salads of the suffix type, meaning that they're really mixtures of something other than lettuce or greens but have the word "salad" stuck on the end for good measure.

If the meat of Morris' book is the recipes, the accompanying stories are the seasoning. These are included throughout the book and pepper many of the recipes. One memorable tale involves a hapless breaded fried rat which, like the author's family, appreciates a batch of freshly ground, high-quality corn meal and comes to a tragic - and disgusting - end. That wouldn't be so likely to happen these days - most of us buy corn meal rather than grind it ourselves. Still, isn't it nice to remember the good old days when things were simpler and more wholesome?

Rounding out the guide are a number of home remedies, such as a tonic for a sore throat which includes chamomile tea, apple cider vinegar, honey, a crushed clove of garlic, cinnamon, and fresh ginger. These treatments hark back to a day when the doctor didn't get called very often, and then only when things were really serious. If you got a cut, maybe you poured a little kerosene on it. If you got a sprained ankle, you wrapped some strips of brown paper soaked in vinegar around it.

Maybe these treatments didn't help, but hopefully they didn't make matters worse and they'd at least let you feel like you were taking action. (Morris says the vinegar wrap really worked, at least for her.) As a bonus, they'd let you know if your kid was really sick or not - if he downed an entire dose of tea with garlic and honey without complaint, you'd know he was seriously ill and it was time to call a real doctor. Also not to be missed are the decorating projects, including napkin rings made from bean-encrusted toilet paper rolls and the "obscenely large fake ice cream centerpiece". The latter is a behemoth of styrofoam, spackle, and paint and sounds like a darned fine project.

"White Trash Gatherings" may not have you playing the banjo after dinner, nor whipping up a big batch of grape jelly meatballs for your loved ones. But you'll get a great introduction to the people who did, and still do.

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