DATE: Tuesday, November 25, 1997            TAG: 9711250001

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B9   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Perry Morgan 

                                            LENGTH:   74 lines

SOUTHERN DELICACIES: A THANKSGIVING WITHOUT A TURKEY WAS NOT SUCH A LOSS

For a long time in large areas of the South, turkey was not a part of Thanksgiving. The bird and solemn Pilgrims showed up around school blackboards, of course: Also, during the 1930s, live turkeys as promotional items were tossed from the roofs of small-town stores, including Elder's in Senoia, Ga. No customer was known to have caught one there.

Mr. John Barnett opined that Elder's was not tossing three turkeys as advertised but was tossing the same turkey three times at 15-minute intervals - which, indeed, was time enough to recapture a lumbering squawky bird floundering in brushy oaks at the edge of town, and return him to the roof.

But no matter. The crowd's attention turned. A $5 bill hailed to the top of a greased poll seemed, in all respects, more attainable and desirable than a hysterical turkey that maybe was mostly feathers anyway. If he'd had any brains, the bird would have steered away from trees that offered no room for large-wing movement.

Miss Tootsie North's opinion of turkeys was that ``the Pilgrims would have eaten something else if they'd had a choice in the matter.'' This rather discriminating view rested on the fact that, even in the leanest of Depression times, Southerners had a fine choice of food both delicious and nutritious.

Little ceremony attended the choice; mulling over menus was a waste of time. It was the habit of farm women ``to get up and put something on to cook.'' And the work was handled with dispatch.

Although dozens of dishes could be fashioned from sweet potatoes, including the difficult grated pudding, nothing really surpassed a sweet potato simply baked and buttered. Their flavors already released and crystallized by frost, collard greens needed only to be nestled under a chunk of sidemeat and sprinkled, after long simmering, with pepper sauce.

Country ham came to table after a year of curing, seasoning and aging; all its perfection required was a bit of frying or a long boiling. With taste taking care of itself, cooking mostly was a matter of management.

Despite the abundance of food, there could be deprivations. When many adults showed up for Thanksgiving dinner, children had to eat at a second table. Time stood still.

To get away from the odor of fresh pork tenderloin cooked over kraut and served with baked apples, hominy, potatoes, creamed onions, baked apples and cracklin' cornbread, they wandered in cold barnyards - feeling aggrieved, neglected and cast out.

They took short runs through painted woods, and stood where there was sun to stand in. For distraction, they leaned against weathered barnsides to hear mules sorting through their own feedboxes, also empty.

There was much sniveling. Then a door opened and the blessed summons came. And the children were clamoring, clattering and straining to push themselves through the door and into seats at a table heaped anew with choice meats from the season's first hog-killing. As they ate, the children were like roistering puppies collared gently by drowsiness and shoved downward in their chairs where, like large stuffed toys, they stayed as grown-ups lifted plates up and away.

President Franklin Roosevelt, who changed much in the country, including the time to celebrate Thanksgiving, said the South of his time was ill-fed, ill-housed and ill-clothed.

Only the last two descriptions necessarily applied in the rural South. At Thanksgiving, pantries and smokehouses were full; so were the potato hills silvered in morning frost. There was game in the woods. Even if these stores had been leaner, most families had ``old hens'' to kill. And if they boiled an old hen, they had in the broth an elixir that worked magic in the mixture of cold cornbread, biscuits, onions and celery known as cornbread dressing.

Many long-in-the-tooth Southerners would agree that if one had enough cornbread dressing to eat on Thanksgiving, being ill-housed and ill-clothed was a condition quite bearable. The modern South has a severe shortage of cornbread dressing and a terrible surplus of ill-conceived and misnamed substitutes. Most of these are contaminated and overcome by use of sage which, as Miss Tootsie always said, should be kept in the smokehouse and used there only to season sausage. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former executive editor of The Virginian-Pilot.

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