Zen Ironing
Kathryn Bright Gurkin
Humor/EssaysISBN 1-930907-25-7
88 pages, $15Review by Steve Smith of The Pilot
About Zen Ironing...
Kathryn Gurkin does not give simple strokes—and she will never, never, stroke simps.
This acid-tongued and insightful daughter of The South says she was born here and will die here—whether of natural causes or by lynching.
So, before any worthy citizens mob up and circle her hidden house in Eastern North Carolina, let it be remembered that the Complete Southern Gentleman, the late, great statesman, journalist and Poet Laureate of North Carolina, Sam Ragan, declared her to be one of the ten keenest intelligences he ever worked with.
Gurkin, certainly as sharp as Mencken at his best, is one of a kind. So is this book. It is smart, and it is great fun, as is its author: nevertheless, before you pick it up I must broadly paraphrase William Carlos Williams: “Fasten your seat belts, ladies and gents, and pour a double. WE are going for a ride!”
Ronald H. Bayes
Writer-in-Residenced
St. Andrews Presbyterian College
Laurinburg, NC
INTRODUCTION
ZEN IRONING is one of those books that gradually accumulated over the years, a collection of my funniest essays published in newspaper columns, on editorial opinion pages, in magazines and on the World Wide Web. Once I discovered that there was a rich vein of humor in what can only be mercifully called “The Southern Experience” and that others had mined it before me and had grown rich and famous, I immediately stopped writing poetry and started making fun of southerners.
For a southern woman, that was a tactical mistake that lost me the good opinion of a number of friends and relatives. It also gained me a fan club. One fan in particular—I named him “The Rainbow Man” for his brightly colored communications—holds an indelible place in my memory. Every time one of my columns appeared in the Fayetteville Observer-Times (now The Fayetteville Observer) my phone would start ringing at 8:00 in the morning.
I particularly want to thank Allen Torrey of the editorial opinion page of The News & Observer of Raleigh, NC, the first editor to take a chance on me, to see through my twisted sense of humor, and to pay me for it. To Sam Ragan, who never lost faith in me, I owe everything a writer can owe a mentor. Ron Bayes has offered an invaluable shoulder to cry on and a telephone to laugh on as we both recovered from heart surgery.
Finally I want to thank the Whiteville Sub Deb Club for black-balling me in the 1950s for my high IQ and the unknown—but very brave—woman or women who put the pink flamingo in my yard in Clinton, NC. It’s southerners like these who made me what I am today—a vicious wielder of the power of the pen against pretension. Without them I might have been just another upper-middleclass consumer playing bridge on Wednesdays and getting my hair teased into death-defying volumes of apricot froth on Fridays.
Kathryn Bright Gurkin
Winterville, North Carolina
April 3, 2003
KATHRYN GURKIN’S COLLARD BRUNCH
Now that I’m convinced that cocooning is here to stay, I am determined to jump on the Martha Stewart bandwagon and write a cookbook. You may have noticed that cookbooks nowadays don’t stop at recipes, but feature color photos of table settings to die for and prescribe the wines and music appropriate to the occasion.
At first I thought about asking all the poets in North Carolina—there are approximately 37.5 poets per square mile in The State of the Arts—to contribute their favorite grits recipes to a special literary edition of breakfast recipes. Then I thought better of it and decided that, since I have never known a poet who could cook any food that is served in a solid state, I dared not risk it.
So I am going to dream up my own recipes for southern living, Sampson County style, and publish them with mouth-watering Polaroids of meals I have made for special occasions like the Sunday after the Super Bowl. Here’s an example.
For Kathryn Gurkin’s Collard Brunch you will need to find enough collards (fresh, not frozen) to yield 2 cups of cooked collards per person. Wash and trim them of thick stems, then boil or steam them with enough water and salt pork to duplicate the taste of those your great-grandmother used to make in the washpot out back. You may have to rehearse this because there are no hard-and-fast rules by which to measure. But you should have recognizable leaves of collards in the pot when they are done. If all you have is mush or liquid, you are probably a poet and might as well give up homemaking and pour some whiskey over them.
To accompany the main dish, you will need a nice Cornpone Frittata, Grits au gratin garnished with Pickled Okra, Tomato Gele, and Moon Pies served with Cajun Coffee, to which you might want to add dollops of whipped cream sprinkled with freshly ground cinnamon for that Old South flavor. Be sure to use a coffee with chicory added; that slight hint of bitterness rounds off the meal with brio.
For the collard brunch I suggest your second-best tableware. Bone china is too refined for the hearty brusqueness of this meal. A hand-thrown pottery would do nicely, with heavier stemware for aperitifs. Iced tea, of course, is served with everything except a true breakfast, and always in jelly glasses or a reasonable facsimile thereof. A brunch, I need not remind you, is not a true breakfast, just as instant grits is not true grits.
A collard brunch requires checked or printed linens for the table. NEVER serve collards with lace or damask napery or you will reveal your upstart origins for the world’s derision. If you can find some antique flour sack dish towels, that would be the very thing. What you are trying to achieve here is an authentic flavor of the real southern mystique, that down home ambiance that is so difficult for the outlander to emulate. But thank goodness you have me at hand to guide you through the intricacies of entertaining graciously.
And the music must be carefully chosen to complement the meal. The most appropriate would be old recordings on vinyl of famous gospel quartets doing rousing renditions of songs written before 1897. Nothing is really an antique until it is 100 years old, remember. Not even music. But if all you have at hand is a 24-CD changer, you can extemporize with gospel-pop and not risk too much adverse criticism from your guests on their way home from the party. And for heaven’s sake don’t make the mistake of playing anything remotely classical. That is the kiss of death for the hostess who aspires to popularity.
If you could only see how delightfully this occasion photographs! Unfortunately this publication does not reproduce Polaroids, so you will have to use your imagination. Try to imagine a winter day with temperatures in the 40s, a cold wind blowing and the log fire burning in the grate. Your guests arrive with pints and half-pints of something bottled in bond and you are impeccably groomed, your apron snowy white without a splotch on it, the table breath-taking in its unique accoutrements, the iced tea at the proper temperature, the grits just semi-solid and the collards steaming in an antique tureen passed down in your family for at least three generations. Could anything be better than this? You whip out the hot pepper vinegar and voila! A meal fit for building a culinary reputation on. I guarantee it.