Christmas Breakfast
“Christmas must be a feast, not a feed, from the first light of Christmas morn till the final glass of Madeira has been sipped clean.” There is an ample literature of how southerners of all classes and races celebrated the day of nativity dating from the 1830s until the 1950s. Travelers, novelists, diarists, memoirists, reformers, and newspaper reporters documented the celebrations, whether at the country plantation, the town dwelling, or the shack. Perhaps the most extravagant and unexpected portion of these accounts are the bounties of breakfast. Christmas breakfast was a meal unsullied by the pure grain doctrines of the Kelloggs and Posts. No one counted calories. Methodists, Baptists, and Teetotalers did insure that wines and spirits did not taint the breaking of the fast on the holy day. Since men often went hunting mid-day, one did not favor a neighbor blurred by booze with a finger on a trigger. I’ve looked over about two dozen bills of fare for Xmas breakfast and there is only one controversy that seems to matter: do you serve oysters in the a.m. or wait till the opening of dinner? I have assembled out of the listed offerings, my own favorite Christmas breakfast. No pastries or coffee cakes here.
Bill of Fare
Grilled Grapefruit
Bacon & Greens
Sea Island White Flint corn Grits
Shirred eggs with tomato gravy
Venison sausage
Smoked Mullet
Rice Waffles with Cane Syrup
Biscuits & Sour orange marmalade
Coffee or Assam Tea
A word on Venison Sausage and the Country Christmas breakfast: When we think of president Lyndon B. Johnson’s contributions to American gastronomy there is only one thing that you can point to as significant. He put venison sausage on the culinary map. It was his signature food. In the 1950s he schmoozed his fellow politicians in Texas feeding them venison sausage patties on biscuits. The planning breakfasts he held always featured the sausages processed from deer harvested on LBJ ranch. When he moved into the White House, he generated a blizzard of newspaper stories when he informed reporters that venison sausage was the focal point of his Texas style Christmas breakfast.
Venison sausage for Christmas breakfast was a foodway not invented in Texas, though that state’s venison traditions are old and strong. Archibald Rutledge (1883-1973), the South Carolina sportsman author, documented the typical Christmas breakfast served early in the 20th century on country farmsteads: “snowy hominy, cold wild turkey, brown crumbly corn breads, venison sausage, beaten biscuits, steaming coffee, homemade orange marmalade.” [The State, November 27,, 1949), p8]. The pairing of venison patties with biscuits was ancient—and the use of beaten biscuits almost archaic in its traditionalism. Most southerners were using baking soda and baking powder to work their biscuits in the last half of the 19th century.
About those venison patties—I’ve reproduced below a recipe from the period that Rutledge is recalling. Some comments on it—the use of pork fat as an addition is a hallmark of southern venison sausage making; beef suet is more common in northern states. Because seasoning is where a sausage maker’s personal creativity is registered, it is not detailed in the recipe. There are several seasoning paths: sage + allspice + cayenne with ample salt was a standard home formula. Certain of the custom meat processing plants in the South began in the LBJ era to go for a formula that included salt, black pepper, mace, nutmeg, cloves, allspice and garlic powder. While the processing houses will make fresh sausage, they tend to stuff their sausage meat in casings.
In South Carolina most venison sausage was home made until the latter half of the twentieth century. Then regional custom meat processing centers took over the creation of sausage, making fresh sausage, pickled links (often dyed red), and some long sausages for smoking. Off the top of my head I can think of 301 Processing in Effingham, 601 Deer and Hog Proccessing in St. Matthews (pickled red links a specialty), B&B wild game in Walterboro, Butcher Boys Venison in Summerville, Claussen in Florence, Edisto Outdoors in Cottageville, Hank’s in Barnwell, and Carolina Meat and Game in Ridgeland. There may be others I’ve forgotten. You take the deer you shot to them, and they’ll give loin the steaks and sausage. Some will make venison ham as well.
As for the hominy served on the side of you Christmas venison sausage patties and biscuits it was always white grits made out of sea island white flint corn in the Lowcountry, or white dent grits (like Cocke’s Prolific or Hickory King) in the upcountry. The insistence on white grits was old and emphatic. The Carolina novelist William Gilmore Simms in a Christmas tale entitled “Maize-in-Milk” elaborated the pleasures of a country table in the early 1850s. Some of the dishes appear in every description of a Lowcountry holiday breakfast: rice cakes, rice waffles, cornbread, rye cakes, and biscuits. In Simms’s story, the meats were cold corned beef and boiled venison. But for Simms the most important dish was white hominy—it was the heart and soul of the Christmas breakfast. By hominy Simms means ‘small hominy’ or grits. And he is quite precise in his description.
“Now, your yellow corn won’t do for hominy—the color and the flavor are alike against it. It must be the genuine semitransparent flint, ground at a water-mill, white as snow, and swelling out in two huge platters at convenient places upon the table. A moderate portion of each plate is provided with this vegetable, boiled to a due consistency: neither too soft, like mush, nor too stiff, hard, and dry for easy adjustment with a spoon. It requires long experience on the part of the cook to prepared this dish for the just appreciation of an adept. There must be no rising lump in the mass; there must be no dark speck upon the surface. The spoon should lie upon it without sinking below the rims . . . . The Carolina breakfast-table would be a blank without hominy”, [“Maize-in-Milk,” Marie de Berniere (Philadelphia, 1853), pp. 354-55].
One of the disasters of 20th century agriculture in the coastal South was the loss of the white flint corn that enabled this masterwork of breakfast cuisine. When the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation undertook its restoration of classic ingredients, sea island white flint corn was high on the list of desired items. We discovered that seed survived in in Florida and in South Carolina—maintained by old families. In 2015 Anson Mills made the restored Flint corn grits available again. So if you want to make traditional hominy for Christmas breakfast, it can be done . . .