Get into Deep

There aren't many cuisines where you need an iron, but I thought the Deep South was one. My White Trash cook book got me through college with Jailhouse Chilli (hamburger meat, chilli and a bottle of ketchup) rivalled only by Edna Rae's Grill Cheese (two slices of Velveeta, two slices of white bread 'sayndwiched' in a good hot iron).

Now London's come over all Southern, with Bodeans, Buba's and now Ashbells. Is it time to crack open the corned beef?

'Easy now,' counsels Ashbell McElveen, owner of Notting Hill's Ashbells. 'There's two types of Southern cuisine - fast, fried Southern fare and slow, regional food from the Plantation houses. We're talking food that came over with the Irish, Scottish and British 350 years ago, back when food was still good.'

Food like Maryland crab cakes - lightly spiced parcels of meat, bound and browned with cornflour and served with a portion of coleslaw that bears as much resemblance to Sainsbury's slaw as sirloin does to Pepperami.

Food like Charleston seafood gumbo - a shoal of fish with shrimp, fish fillet, crabmeat, okra, tomatoes and onions served over polenta-style grits (that's ground maize kernels boiled with water or milk). What it's not is rocket food. What it is, is simple food, cooked slow, but with soul.

Crab a bite to eat

Case in point, I paw a handful of dark and white mixed crabmeat (make sure it's meaty, not shredded. No Maryland crabmeat? Use standard, shop-bought Cornish). Season it and roll it into patties in that Southern staple - cornflour. Ease into a pan-slick of oil to warm through, not shallow-fry. Then repair for moonshine Martini.

Ashbell shreds cabbage and mixes up a slaw sauce with leisurely languor. We take the crab cakes off the heat, let them settle, then re-heat. The whole thing takes ten minutes.

The results are divine. Edna Rae wouldn't know whether to eat 'em or frame 'em. But let's give her her dues. Whitetrash heritage gave us Southern greats like Bourbon balls and Resurrection pie, which was 'essentially just poor people coming up with inventive stuff, sayin': "That pound cake's stale. Let's toast it, soak it in liquor, put it in a pie, then try it."'

Plantation cooking's patient and bountiful. Trailer food's fast, recycled, nasty and delicious. And a good Southern kitchen has both.

'I won't lie to you,' says Ashbell, 'sometimes nothing hits the spot like pork belly and twice-fried, back-fat biscuits.' He'll not be evicting Edna's trailer from the Plantation plot any time soon.