Sunbonnet Soliloquy

By Jewell Ellen Smith

The Way to Eat an Elephant

The way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time!

It is a good thing to know how to eat an elephant, especially in early January, when the Air is thick with New Year’s resolutions, all difficult to keep. Any difficult feat requires persistence, perseverance.

Speaking of eating and of resolutions, why not treat yourself to one easy resolution that would be fun to keep! Learn how to prepare special Alabama dishes, say one per month from now through next December!

Just to get you started, here’s how to make the filling for Alabama’s famous Lane Cake, as told to me by Evelyn Hollis of Clintonville, the oldest community in Coffee County:

Stir together 3 egg yolks, 1 cup sugar, 1/8 stick butter, and cook over very low heat until creamy (stirring constantly); add 1 cup pecans, ½ cup raisins, ½ cup coconut, ½ cup wine, and a pinch of salt. Spread between layers and on top and sides of cake. Sprinkle extra grated coconut on top of cake. This is enough filling for three layers. To make the layers, use a standard recipe for white cake.

Merle Tilley Carroll of Ozark, writing in her delightful history textbook called “This Is Alabama,” tells the story of how a group of young French brides learned to cook Alabama foods -- long before Alabama was Alabama.

Briefly, the story is this:

Early in 1702 the French established a settlement north of what is now Mobile, Alabama and called it Fort Louis de la Mobile. Among the colonists were many single young men, but no French girls for them to marry.

So, when the governor of Fort Louis -- one Bienville LeMoyne, who was a French Naval officer -- sent his ship the Pelican back to France to bring over missionaries, carpenters and soldiers, he arranged for twenty-three eligible young girls to board ship and come too.

Each young lady brought all her belongings in a small trunk called a “cassette.” Thus they became known as “the cassette girls.” Within days after the Pelican docked, twenty-two church weddings were held, the first in Alabama. Some say the twenty-third girl was too hard to please; others say she married later.

It wasn’t long before a group of the new brides staged a “petticoat rebellion.” Their complaint to Governor Bienville was not about savage Indians or the crude log cabins in which they had to live. It was about having to eat too many oysters and “this runny corn meal ... and this stringy old bear meat!” The brides threatened to go home to France unless they were given some good food.

Bienville hit upon the perfect solution. He persuaded his good French cook, Madame Langlois, to teach the brides how to prepare New World foods.

“Madame Langlois,” writes Merle Carroll, “taught the brides how to make a good soup, called gumbo ... from corn and okra and Mobile Bay shrimp and oysters. She taught them how to grind corn and bake it into hot, crisp, yellow cornbread. She taught them how to dress a big fish or squirrel and stuff it with sweet-smelling herbs ... how to roast it over the glowing coals of a hickory wood fire. She showed them how to make cakes and candy, sweetened with wild honey. Soon the brides were happy with these strange, new foods.”

Now there’s no Madame Langlois around to teach Fort Rucker wives how to cook Alabama foods. But in recent years it seems that everybody and her cousin has put out a local cookbook. Ask for them in area bookstores. Better still, get acquainted with some of the friendly Wiregrass ladies who are good cooks.

Even I could show you how to boil up that soup called gumbo.

But don’t ask me how to cook an elephant!

Published January 1979. Click your browser’s “Back” button to return.