Meridian, Miss., begins the official last leg of my drive. Before I reach its “city” limits, I’ll stop at one of the gas stations right off I-20. Here is where I buy flat jerky to tear up and scatter for the stray cats guarding the front door. Here is where I fill up my tank, stretch my back and reward myself for being alive by palming three round candies from the basket that sometimes resides next to the register in gas stations from here to the bayou and well into Texas.
It’s true that you can get a bad praline. But once you get past Meridian, it’s nearly impossible.
Of course, there are mass-produced pralines, the kind made in factories, sickly sweet. But if you’re lucky, and maybe at a smaller gas station, you’ll find yourself with one that’s more lovingly produced, one that feels just sandy enough upon first contact with your tongue and then immediately goes smooth as it dissolves, with a perfect pinch of salt, thoughtfully toasted pecans and a touch of cream to balance sugars that might ordinarily overwhelm. These pralines, made by local family businesses, typically come packaged with someone’s name, usually a woman’s, on their simple bag. The labels bear regional addresses, the ingredients and a price — around $2.
Pralines, like so much of the Southern-baking canon, were historically the handiwork of Black women, both enslaved and free. The European-style praline was made with almonds and sugar, but resourceful Southern praline makers, collecting stray pecans from the ground and using abundant Louisiana cane sugar, changed that recipe to suit their needs. The pralinières of New Orleans were women who perfected this art and walked the French Quarter in aprons and tignons, their baskets full of pralines brewed in copper pots in kitchens and backyards.
Boiled sugar and foraged pecans can hold power. To my mind, these little candies, with all their unassuming qualities, represent self-sufficiency in the South, a place where cottage industry thrives and enables people to survive. Pound-cake slices, pickled eggs in a jar, fried pies, boiled peanuts, local ham, fishing bait are displayed up front in quick marts and gas stations.
Sometimes these efforts are not in stores at all. The underground, neighbor-to-neighbor exchange of goods is alive and well in Southern communities — it is how I earned half my living for a few years when working for pennies at a 9-to-5 job that made no sense against day-care costs. The other half was made waiting tables at night, where I grew from “scrappy self-taught baker slinging strudel out of a stove that hadn’t been calibrated in 50 years” to “professional.”
