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Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Cooking up a Tinker Day feast

By Lindsey Nair

food writer Lindsey Nair

Food writer Lindsey Nair

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Last week, while hundreds of Hollins University students sweated and hiked in celebration of the 111th Tinker Day, 62-year-old Alma Basham was busy in the Hollins kitchen, preparing the next day's meals.

She was paying homage to a Hollins tradition of another, even older, kind: behind-the-scenes service.

Basham went to work in the Hollins cafeteria more than 40 years ago. She remembers getting a special work permit to serve dining hall food at the age of 16.

Alma's mother, Lenore Morton, also worked for 40-plus years in the cafeteria, where her cornbread was legendary.

During her first 35 years at Hollins, before she got sick and had to slow down, Lenore didn't miss a single day of work. One of Alma's first memories is of her grandfather, Junior Morton, shoveling coal into the college furnaces.

It's very likely, in fact, that some of the first people who cooked and cleaned for the Hollins students when it opened in 1842 were Alma's ancestors. Many were slaves brought by the enrolling students. "I never knew because my relatives never talked about it, but I imagine they were," she said matter-of-factly.

Like her mother before her, Alma has fried thousands of pieces of chicken for the annual mountaintop feast. Though she lives in the shadow of Tinker Mountain in a nearby community known as Oldfield -- built on ruined farmland for the black workers at Hollins -- Alma has never gone to the top of the mountain. "I don't care for hiking," she said.

While other cooks took a van to the top of the mountain to serve the students, Alma and her cousin, Barbara Garrison, stayed behind to chop peppers for sweet-and-sour tofu and prepare the next day's spicy beef and rice soup. They referred frequently to recipe printouts furnished by Sodexho, the sub-contractor Hollins now uses for dining operations.

Such nouvelle cuisine is required in this age of sophisticated palates and special food requirements (read: picky eaters). Many Hollins students have food allergies or adhere to vegetarian and vegan (read: even pickier) diets. As chef Dave Williams put it, smiling: "We had one girl ask us which cereal was vegan. We told her: 'It's all vegan -- until you put the milk on it.' "

The day before Tinker Day, Alma enjoyed getting to cook the old way, a throwback to the days when dining was family-style and country cooking was the norm: She oven-fried 260 pounds of poultry for the traditional Tinker Day lunch of fried chicken, red beans and rice, and chocolate Tinker Cake.

"Whoever heard of a recipe for fried chicken?!" she chortled when I asked for one. But finally she explained her method as exactly as she could and with the utmost patience, as if teaching a child her ABCs.

Every Sunday, she makes her skillet-fried chicken and the world's cheesiest macaroni and cheese for her family, including daughter Karen Callaway, who manages The Rat snackbar at Hollins. Alma makes enough to feed the extended family, which still gathers weekly after church in her Oldfield home. She regrets not pinning her mother down on her cornbread recipe before she died last year.

As a Hollins graduate student in 1992, I hiked the mountain on Tinker Day and remember the reward of that hot picnic lunch. I bet I didn't give a thought to the hands that had floured the chicken or stirred the boiling beans.

When Alma retires next year, I hope Hollins throws her a party fit for a million-dollar donor. Let the rest of us fry the chicken, for once, and say to Alma and all the others in the kitchen: Thank you.

Alma Basham’s Fried Chicken

Like many country-style cooks, Alma laughs at the notion of measuring fried-chicken ingredients. As she puts it: “Just shake the seasoning into the flour, you know, a good bit of each — but don’t overload it.”

1 chicken — either a whole one, cut up, or a large pack of drumsticks or wings (a package of chicken breasts works, too)

All-purpose flour, 2 to 3 cups

Seasonings: Mix ample amounts (but not too much) of salt, pepper, seasoned salt, garlic powder, paprika (“for the color”) and Old Bay seasoing.

Vegetable oil for frying

Prepare the chicken by rinsing it in cold water and letting drain in a colander.

Mix the seasonings into the flour then spread seasoned flour onto a cookie sheet or large pan. Roll chicken pieces in seasoned flour to evenly coat.

Pour about an inch of oil in a cast-iron skillet on high heat. (Alma fries chicken the way my mom does — in an electric skillet rather than a stove-top skillet; neither one of them can explain to me exactly why, just as neither can explain why I can follow this recipe to a T, and it never turns out like theirs.)

Fry chicken in batches for about 30 minutes, or until juices run clear, and till it’s the desired level of crispyness.

If you’re cooking for gravy people, pour out excess oil and add some of that leftover seasoned flour (2-3 Tbsp.) to the chicken drippings to make a roux. Alma whisks away until the roux is brown and then adds a cup or two of water, stirring until it’s gravy-thick. My mom makes it the same way but uses milk instead of water and adds a splash of leftover coffee to give it a little color. (Don’t ask me — or her — how much.)

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