Most people who’ve read “The Help,” the bestselling novel by Kathryn Stockett (Putnam) didn’t seek it out because of the references to Southern food. But the real nature of a place is found in its everyday meals, and Stockett has preserved a kind of South
ern life as surely as if she preserved Mississippi 1962 in amber.
In “The Help,” three women narrate their overlapping lives. They are Skeeter, an intelligent beanpole of a white woman, just graduated from Ole Miss; dignified, tireless Aibileen, an African American cook and maid who lovingly raises the children of white employers–right up until the kids get old enough to go along with segregation; and Minny, also African American, a cook/maid and Aibileen’s best friend. Minny is young, wide, and possesses a fast brain and smart mouth that keep her on the edge of disaster with her mean-spirited white bosses.
Stockett’s characters are so real that closing the book in mid-chapter feels downright rude. This is an important story of the South, and the cast is almost entirely female: maids, housewives and the wonderfully alive Skeeter, a would-be writer who convinces the maids to help her describe their lives.
The food the black cooks bring to the tables is everyday stuff: green beans, potatoes, black-eyed peas; chicken, pork chops, turkey and ham. Cake, pies, iced tea, coffee. Food is a common language, and despite the harshness of living with Jim Crow, these working women make it for their employers with care, every day.
Some of the best bits are about the Southern comfort food many of us grew up eating; in my case a long way from the geographical South, but in the same house with a cook from below the Mason-Dixon line.
One of my favorite bits in the book concerns a birthday breakfast that Aibileen makes in secret for her three-year-old charge, whose mother can’t be bothered:
“In the kitchen I fix some grits without no seasoning, and put them baby marshmallows on top. I toast the whole thing to make it a little crunchy. Then I garnish it with a cut-up strawberry. That’s all a grit is, a vehicle. For whatever it is you rather be eating.”
The wide-ranging magic of much-maligned Crisco is described by Minny:
“Ain’t just for frying. You ever get a sticky something stuck in your hair, like gum?…Spread it on a baby’s bottom, you won’t even know what diaper rash is…Clean the goo from a price tag, take the squeak out a door hinge. Lights go off, stick a wick in it and burn it like a candle.”
Not all the food is such forbidden, lard- and grit-based stuff, which is a tiny part of Southern cuisine, however colorful. Every page has the taste of this time and place done to perfection.
–Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett
