Southern Red Rice: It's Elementary
Pulaski Elementary School, a short 7-minute walk from our house on Sylvan Drive in Savannah, was my home away from home from first through sixth grade. It was also my first true introduction to soul food. I had no appreciation for it then. Although, clearly, something must’ve stuck.
The lunches we all ate every day in the small cafeteria at Pulaski was a primer in southern cuisine: cornbread (horribly dry), collard greens (so bitter I can taste them in my mind as I write these lines), succotash (I won’t even go there), some type of protein from fried chicken to ham hocks, peanut butter balls, and the ubiquitous red rice. Everything was laid out on these institutional light blue plates divided into 3 compartments. I loved the peanut butter balls. No surprise there. Everything else was an exercise in tolerance. It would be literally decades later before I discovered how good red rice can be.
Actually, until fairly recently, I thought that red rice was a red varietal, much like Carolina golden rice. Also, until quite recently, I thought red rice was rather bland. Who knew just how mind-blowing the combination is of tomatoes, bell peppers, onions, and, in our Etzlenu kitchen, the ever-present homemade cayenne pepper? Who knew this dish could have kick-ass flavor and heat? Who knew what an amazing complement it made as a stuffing for roasted duck (or for bbq tofu for my vegan guests)?
In fact, red rice reminds me, as odd as it may sound, of a whole bevy of literary classics I was assigned to read at an age when I was in no fucking way ready to appreciate them. I thought “The Old Man and the Sea” highly overrated, for example, never appreciating the elegance of Hemingway’s crystalline style. Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Dickens: the list goes on and on. I think, sometimes, we are in too much of a hurry to thrust culture upon our kids. Or as my mom used to say, in one of those complex thoughts I long took for a nice dose of passive aggressive criticism when I was a young father: “We need to let our kids be kids and not be in such a hurry to make them into something else.”
Sometimes, it takes most of a lifetime to understand the richness of a childhood dish.
