Image: Emma Lee for the Guardian/Mateusz Karpow
My father moved from Yazoo City, Mississippi, to Holly Bluff, a farm a few miles west that’s been in my stepmother’s family for years. It is surrounded by acres and acres of white cotton bolls; white fluffy fields as far as the eye can see. Beyond that and over a dirt road, there are cypress-lined swamps and kudzu vines wrapped around everything that doesn’t move and overtaking the swamp banks. I’d have my last meal there.
In the yard, under the pecan trees, there’s a huge banquet table that my father had crafted by a local Amish fellow out of oak. It must seat 20 people and it’s where we always have our family feasts.
For this occasion, we would set it in a really classic way – big heavy pewter platter, white linens, frilly china plates, candelabras. The Southern US and British aesthetic has a lot of crossover.
It would be late summer, when you can still get all the best produce – tomatoes, okra, watermelon – but it’s cooled down just slightly. It’s still hot and sweaty, but the evenings are perfect.
It would be a real Southern feast … a slow pit-roasted hog that we hunted a few days earlier. Summer salads, tomatoes, beans, watermelon, biscuits, many pies of all sorts of summer fruit: peach, blueberry, my dad’s famous pecan pie. Old-fashioned hand-churned strawberry ice-cream for my daughter, plus chocolate ice-cream for my wife. And gallons of sweet ice tea are obligatory. This is the food of my heritage; real soul food. This is the food I crave; it’s festive. You can’t be sad eating it.
The sky would be filled with a billion stars; there’d be a bonfire and festoon lights in the trees. Fireflies dotting the sky, kids catching them in jars.
With me I’d want my wife, Molly, and my kids Maren and Magnus, and my parents. We love a family dance party. I’ve also been fortunate to make so many friends who are now dotted all around the world. All these people would somehow magically be able to hop on flights to Mississippi in an instant. And I’d want a Mark – either Twain or Bolan.
If Marc Bolan can’t get T Rex back together, then I’d want a real bluegrass country band with fiddles, banjos, a bass and a washboard … this music has a way of moving from party/dance music to a funeral procession. It is my last meal after all ...
Brad McDonald is head chef at the Lockhart, London
