I started my Monday morning by picking squash, cucumbers, some tomatoes, a handful of strawberries and what my Oklahoma family calls “a mess of okra.” Okra is a favorite at our house. My Oklahoma grandmother, Momo as she preferred, served it breaded and fried with nearly every meal as long as okra season lasted.
I first tasted the little pods at a family reunion when I was 10 or 11. The crunchy tidbits hit the spot, along with fried chicken, followed by Great Auntie Ola’s cobbler made from peaches she had picked that morning from the tree in her backyard.
My husband has southern family, too. Uncle Bob was a tall, lanky Texan who relocated to Louisiana when he married Charlotte, a lovely Cajun lady an inch short of five feet tall. Uncle Bob always had a large garden with a generous patch of okra.
Four years ago, we drove through Texas to their place in Baton Rouge. On that trip I discovered that just about every café, diner, and restaurant in that part of the country features okra as a side dish. Sometimes it’s stewed with tomatoes, sautéed with onions, or delicious in gumbo. But it’s always offered as an alternative to French fries, coated in a corn meal mixture and deep fried.
Often Bob and Charlotte would take us out to eat at one of the local eateries. One of our favorites was the Fish Shack. They served steaming crawdads piled in front of folks seated family style, at long tables covered in butcher paper. You popped the meat out and tossed the shell on top of the growing mass in the middle.
My husband ate his fill of crawdads, crunchy okra and my favorite, hush puppies, little morsels of deep-fried corn bread with lots of chopped onions. While I love most southern food, I never developed a taste for crawdads. But the Fish Shack served other delicious things including the best ever blackened catfish.
Eating the local food is part of the adventure of traveling, if you go no farther than to the neighboring state, halfway across the country, or to another continent. My daughter has taken food-based adventures, France one year and Italy another year. This September she will spend her birthday trip in England and Spain, sampling the food and meeting the people.
My own journeys have been limited to the U.S., but it’s always fun to taste the local specialties. Sometimes we find something we like so well that we look for it locally or even plant some in our own garden.
Four or five years ago Uncle Bob sent us several packages of okra seeds. We had never thought of growing them, thinking they were a southern plant that needed sustained heat. When we opened the package, we laughed a bit, but decided to give it a try. Much to our surprise, we ate a lot of okra that season and it has done well every year since.
This morning, when I picked that mess of okra, I remembered the last meal we shared with Bob and Charlotte. Uncle Bob was quite ill, pale and shaky, but he still told funny stories and never stopped teasing me. When he thought no one was looking, he snuck one of the hush puppies off his plate onto mine.
Every year I look forward to the “first fruits” — the first zucchini, the first Armenian cucumber, the first Pine Mountain Gold tomato, the first okra. Uncle Bob died this last winter at 91, but his gift of okra is with us still, and will be for as long as we have a garden.
Pamela Tinnin writes from her ranch on Pine Mountain. She can be reached at [email protected].
