hush puppies Re: Re: Coke deep-fried

[pynchonoid]

When I was growing up in Lafayette, Louisiana (1st 
through 8th grade), my Dad had a guy at his shop put
together a huge steel kettle with a big gas burner and
propane tank, we had it in our backyard. My parents
would invite everybody over - dozens of people,
friends, business associates, neighbors - they'd fill
the kettle with oil, fire that baby up, fry breaded
Gulf oysters, catfish, and hush puppies, wash it down
with Jax or Falstaff beer. (I was just a little kid,
didn't start drinking beer until I was 12, a bit
later, but of course enjoyed the hush puppies.) Had a
really big party one time, with the above-mentioned
deep-fried goodies, plus a whole roasted pig complete
with apple in mouth, a deliciously barbaric spectacle.
 

They'd do that where I got my haircuts growing up,
too, at a place called Ferdinand Stutes' somewhere
outside of Lafayette, late '50s, through the late-60s
(when our family moved to Texas, joining George and
Barbara Bush and their kids over in Midland, my father
being on that same oil biz circuit only quite a bit
lower on the socio-economic scale).  I don't know
exactly how we wound up going there, probably somebody
turned my Dad on to Ferdinand Stutes', which was out
in the general direction of Dad's place of business.
In addition to general store-type merchandise it had a
great bar where the Cajun farmers and their wives and
kids (if you could reach over the bar you could buy a
drink) would dance and drink and carry on; live Cajun
music.  In addition to being a barber, Stutes was also
Justice of the Peace, performed weddings,  had a
memorable Friday night gumbo, and put on a weekly BBQ,
too.  Cool place.

That's down in Louisiana, as in the early Pynchon
story, "The Small Rain." 

Everything connects. ;)


--- David Casseres <david.casseres at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10/12/06, Joe Allonby <joeallonby at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Mmmmmm....
> >
> >  Hush puppies!
> >
> >  They are to all intents and purposes dep fried
> batter. Southern fried
> > South.
> 
> Goddamn right.  My aunt Eleanor, who lived on Edisto
> Island off
> Charleston, used to feed them to us when we would go
> Down South for a
> summer vacation.  Down there with the Spanish moss
> and the catfish in
> the creek.  Hush puppies, yeah.
> 


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