Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Not my part of the state

From a May 1, 1961 article in Sports Illustrated about the Kentucky Derby:

"The big do of Derby Saturday -- besides the race itself -- is breakfast. At the Derby Breakfast given each year by Barry Bingham, who runs the Louisville Courier-Journal, a buffet is set under a canopy of white and pink dogwood trees on a lawn overlooking the Ohio River. The breakfast guests are served mint juleps in silver julep cups, and plied with creamed sweetbreads and Kentucky ham (which, says Louisville's naturally partisan cookbook author, Marion Flexner, is so tender that is makes Virginia ham seem like chipped beef). Sliver-dollar-size cornmeal-batter cakes are served with pitchers of melted butter and cane syrup. There is a salad of avocados with Kentucky Bibb lettuce -- a tender product of the soil that makes bluegrass grow."

For the record, I've also never had burgoo.

5 comments:

  1. Burgoo was always the dish of choice at Keenland and of course I used to work growing hydroponic bibb lettuce. When I was living in that part of the state everyone always joked about giving those stupid ignorant Yankees those awful mint juleps, made of course with cheap non-KY bourbon, while we secretly sipped at our Makers Mark.

    Also the interesting thing to me about the Derby was that I never knew anyone who went. I had some friends from Louisville who had worked the Derby to make some money, they hire a bunch of temps for the day, but no one who actually went to the Derby.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It was all the talk on Joe B and Denny this morning, so I gave up and moved on to www.Oldies1480.com from Cadiz.

    I just bought a bourbon done in Owensboro. It's really cheap, and it's fine.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I do have two julep cups, by the way--monogrammed and given to us as wedding gifts. Love them.

    I'll bet the ham that the SI writer had was from the Broadbents in Cadiz, by the way.

    ReplyDelete
  4. By the way, I didn't realize burgoo was at all a Kentucky deal until I lived in Owensboro for a while in the early 1990s. I always thought of it more as a west-side-of-Evansville thing.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I don't think I've ever eaten burgoo, and I'm pretty sure I had never heard of burgoo until I read about it five or six years ago.

    I think it's great that Matthew knew people in Lexington who didn't like UK basketball, and he knew people from Louisville who didn't go to the Derby.

    ReplyDelete