Vicksburg

is what we have been promised, but I will believe it, my friend, when I see it.

It's almost New Year's, bah humbug. I have never seen the point, but numerous folks have, down through the centuries, and who am I to question the popular vote? Me. I am me. I have just never understood celebrating the advent of a New Year, which will be just like the old year...I told you Bah Humbug.

And so I bake. Many women friends have told me that the start of the Christmas season (right after the Fourth of July celebrations), is when they feel like making tasty morsels. I put it down, practically, to the heat of the oven. A small cold snap, after a global warming summer, is enough to send many women into the kitchen to cook that first vat of pinto beans.

For those of you not located in The South (southern states of the US), the accumulated ceremony of the first vat of pinto beans can be hard to explain. Mama did it, Granny did it, and no doubt, her mother did it too. Cause that's all them Yankees left us to eat when they left The Old South after The Occupation that signaled the physical end of The Civil War. Whew.

In the world of The South, only women know the exact moment it is right to cook the first batch of pinto beans. It is always accompanied by corn bread. I don't know any Southern woman who makes the mistake of premature pinto beans cooking, except for yours truly. I love pinto beans and eat them year round.

Anyway, the right moment...there is a cold snap, but it's still not time. It will get hot as blazes after the first 20 cold snaps. So there is an artistry, not only in the making of the pinto beans, but in the timing. If one makes them too early, they will go to waste, and then you'll be mentioned in the same breath as That Woman down the street who pulls her shades at noon and smells like mouthwash when she goes to the grocery store.

No, the 'cold' must have settled in good before the first batch can be made. But once that perfect moment makes it's advent, there is a rush for the finish. Southern women will make huge vats of the stuff, to give to their friends, after all, we are all in this together, only to find out their friends have also made the obligatory vat themselves and don't need any of your beans. Although cornbread. No one will turn down cornbread. But this fact comforts Southern women. They have made the right decision as to timing, and we laugh, comforted by our insight. The world, The South, civilization itself, will go on.

Sometimes, with Very Close Friends, one will exchange a batch, just to see how the other half lives. It is viewed as living on the wild side, and pulling 'Mary's' beans out of the frig to be heated up takes on the taste of riotous adventure. And you have to be careful whom you exchange batches with...what if they use meat in the beans and you don't? No, no. Adventurous as you are, that would never do. My mother never used meat, but salted well, and made the best cornbread this side of Atlanta. One of my best friends uses sidemeat to flavor her beans, and I just can't go there, even for her. My very bestest friend in the whole world uses no meat, just like me, and so her beans are to be trusted. No surprises there. Which is the whole point...

After all, the first vat of pintos is a tradition, a sacred trust, handed down from the ages, from one woman to another. Like the rare stories, growing rarer still, of that dear, departed Uncle, who bought it at Vicksburg. The time is long past when those who knew that Uncle turned to dust, but their recipe for pinto beans lives on...