But the high is 57 in South Bend...

It's been a while, because truthfully, not a whole lot happens in Mississippi. Aside from an occasional encounter with native wildlife (like, for example, my almost drowning a green gecko in the compost bucket when I was rinsing it out with the hose a couple of days ago), little more than what happened to us in lovely South Bend. It is nearly time for me to teach the little ones, so I'm drinking coffee and puttering around the internet while Ed is sleeping. The cats are scratching in their litter box. Birds are chirping, and it looks like it'll be a lovely day. I can only speak for myself, but I'm feeling rather pastoral. On that note, the weather has shifted slightly and actually feels like Fall might be coming, in the next couple of months maybe. I'm hoping by January or so it'll feel Fallish. We shall see. Here's our 10 day weather forecast, because it's interesting to me:

http://www.weather.com/weather/tenday/39401?from=36hr_topnav_undeclared

Palmetto Bug: 1, Cats: 0

This:



found scuttling menacingly around our kitchen last night. One of our cats, the fearless Brian Boru, sits watching it with an intensity that can only be seen when a cat stalks a bug. I, en route to making us a snack, drop everything and shriek. Ed comes running. Approximately half an hour ensues of Beth and Ed chasing the bug from one side of the room to the other, both cats (Moon has since entered the kitchen to see what all the fuss is about) batting at it, then backing away in fright when it comes near them, Ed kicking it back toward them in the hope that their hunting instincts will take over and they will rid us of the beast. No such luck. Finally, Ed, in one of his most impressive Deep South moments yet (second only to his making the untamed mess outside our door passable as a lawn), scoops up the bug with a large spoon and tosses it outside. We slam the door and return to our evening, but not without first admonishing the cats for their pathetic yellow-bellied cowardice. Here's hoping we never have rats...

We're all going to be fat and dead.

Some disconcerting news about our new home state:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070828/ap_on_he_me/obesity_mississippi

Among the Pines

They drone steadily from the tall trees and possess the ventriloquist's gift of projecting their voices, so that predators have a difficult time locating them. Every seventeen years, one species of them makes an invasion of sorts, blanketing trees, buildings, and telephone poles from the eastern seaboard to Indiana and south through Tennessee. They are cicadas.

Every so often, you will find a cicada shell lying on the ground in parts of the southern half of the United States. This is because cicadas, not atypically, go through a development stage that requires the shedding of an exoskeleton.

What Beth found on the campus of Southern Mississippi last week was something slightly more unusual. A cicada corpse, if you will, lying on the ground and perfectly preserved. She naturally picked it up and took it home, but the question was what to do with it...Frame it and hang it on the wall? Paste it to a trivet and feature as a dining table centerpiece? She decided, instead, to box it and send it in the mail to an artist/filmmaker friend with an interest in insects.

And so, it is currently on a mail truck somewhere, or in the reliable hands of some anonymous postal worker who will let neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stay him from the swift completion of delivering a dead cicada to its appointed destination.

House Wine of the South, pt. 2

Person B (the one who lived in North Carolina for fourteen years and likes hushpuppies) responds to Person A (the dyed-in-the-wool Yankee): sweet tea, when made well (in other words, after some practice) can be quite tasty. Yes, it provides one with an unnatural amount of sugar that is most certainly not healthy, and yes again, using less sugar is almost as certainly a better path to take when one is attempting to make such a beverage without risk of going into hyperglycemic shock. I can't argue that it's a health tonic by any means. I must say, however, that our arrival in the state of the Great River has brought with it, on my part at least, quite a burgeoning love for the beverage. Then again, I also loved Circus Peanuts as a child...
P.S. Just to head off any confusion, the state drink of Mississippi is actually plain old wholesome milk.

The House Wine of the South

Having mentioned yesterday that we will be including local recipes in this blog, I should get out of the way one particular recipe that is a southern institution, but a serious health threat to the unsuspecting. Sweet tea.

Yesterday, I made my first pitcher of this year-round beverage. It was a brief marriage that ended badly. Upon drinking a glass, I believe I nearly went into some sort of insulin shock, though the root of the problem probably lies closer in the near-toxic combination of sugar and really strong black tea. All I know is that, for a few minutes, I felt quite yucky.

Here’s the best way to describe sweet tea. Think of your typical pitcher of iced tea: the kind they serve in Minnesota, Oregon, Vermont, etc. Then imagine a gigantic vessel of some sort: say a giant pail typically used to dispense swill to barnyard animals - or one of those earthenware vases balanced on the heads of young Indian women for the purpose of transporting sizeable quantities of water from the River Ganges - or a wading pool. Now imagine this vessel filled to the brim with sugar, dumped into your pitcher of iced tea, and stirred about for a few seconds. Voila. You have sweet tea.

I exaggerate a little, but most contemporary recipes I have found for the stuff give a proportion of sugar to water that is roughly 1 - 1 1/2 cups to a pitcher. That’s a lot of sugar.

The history of sweet tea reveals a bit more restraint. The first documented recipe for sweet tea comes from Housekeeping in Old Virginia, a collection of 1700 recipes from 250 Virginia families compiled in 1878 by Marion Cabell Tyree, the granddaughter of Patrick Henry. (Actually, the full title is Housekeeping in Old Virginia, Containing Contributions from Two Hundred and Fifty Ladies in Virginia and her Sister States, Distinguished for Their Skill in the Culinary Art, and Other Branches of Domestic Economy. For brevity’s sake, HOV will do).

The recipe, from page 66, reads as follows:

Iced Tea. After scalding the teapot, put into it one quart of boiling water and two teaspoonfuls green tea. If wanted for supper, do this at breakfast. At dinner time, strain, without stirring, through a tea strainer into a pitcher. Let it stand till tea time and pour into decanters, leaving the sediment in the bottom of the pitcher. Fill the goblets with ice, put two teaspoonfuls granulated sugar in each, and pour the tea over the ice and sugar. A squeeze of lemon will make this delicious and healthful, as it will correct the astringent tendency.

Two teaspoons of sugar in each goblet. Sounds reasonable, depending on the size of the goblet. An interesting note, beyond the fact the tea apparently took all day to make and that it was made with green tea instead of black (black tea really only took root in America during World War II, when Indian black tea had a greater availability than Far Eastern green tea), is that it is called "Iced Tea".

Iced Tea gained nationwide popularity during the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, when the extreme summer heat led one ingenious pavilion manager to "ice" the free cups of hot tea he was offering. The subsequent split between Southern Sweet Tea and Northern "unsweet" Iced Tea is much noted, but difficult to pin down in its history, a result perhaps of traditional cultural factors that made heavily sweetened tea in the South a cheaper and more socially acceptable alternative to morally lax beverages such as wine and stronger spirits.

And that is sweet tea. A drink that is certainly a matter of taste.

What? No recipe, you say? I refer you to the excellent Mrs. Tyree and her two teaspoonfuls of sugar. Anything more contemporary, and my conscience would be troubled with the prospect of some poor person stumbling upon it, and actually making it. That would never do.

Oh, and finally, I refer you to Michigan State University's online library called Feeding America, which contains dozens of early American cookbooks in PDF format, including Tyree's Housewives of Virginia. It is a very interesting collection.

Why we're here

If you’ve stumbled upon this weblog and found it enjoyable but curious, or wondered – perhaps indignantly – what it’s doing here, like someone finding the tusk of a wooly mammoth in the middle of a city park, the answer quite simply is that it’s a running diary of a young couple who has just moved to Hattiesburg, Mississippi and wish to record and share their experiences in this new and interesting habitation. That, I think, is as sound a reason for blogging as any that I have found navigating the various straits and narrows of the web.

Along the way, you will undoubtedly find tales of interesting people and places, as well as jottings about various recipes, wild animals, and gardening tidbits. Anything that fleshes out just a little the kind of place this is. Given that we are both interested in literature, undoubtedly there will be a Faulkner or Welty post or two.

Oh, and one other thing. One half of this couple – the one that’s writing this – has never lived farther south than the Michigan-Indiana border, while the other has lived fourteen years in North Carolina and another four years in Virginia. So, it’s little wonder that person B cries excitedly at finding hushpuppies at a local eatery, while person A wonders what the fuss is because they look like golf balls dipped in batter. This difference in perspective will certainly be reflected in the tone of the posts.

All right then.

What we've seen

Outside our side door that leads from the kitchen to the carport, this little creature can be seen at night, scurrying across the wall. It is a gecko.

A long, hot summer

We arrived August 6, 10:30 central daylight time.

The first rain: August 19, 11:45 am.

The first breeze: August 19, 7:20 pm.

November cannot come soon enough.

The Move: Two Hyperboreans reach Hattiesburg

From that glacial outpost of Indiana - South Bend - two travellers meander their way to Hattiesburg Mississippi. One a wandering scholar, eager to study with the gambling brothers Barthelme; the other, your friendly scribe, a jack of all temporary employment trades. The outlook is promising, if utterly dependent on the efficiency of their AC.