Puttin’ on airs

THE ADVERTISER arrived today — my weekly report from home. Holmes County’s weekly newspaper is a lot less local than when it was shepherded by four generations of the Williams family, especially now that it’s ended up as part of the Gannett empire.

Thank goodness for Hazel Tison.

Mrs. Tison was just beginning her career as an English teacher when I started writing for the Advertiser during my senior year of high school. Now, in retirement, she writes a column for the paper she calls the Happy Corner. It’s always a trip back home, usually featuring familiar people or places or things to eat.

This week her headline was “Recipe for Shrimp Bisque.” That seemed like a highfalutin offering in a rural county where we more often eat fried chicken and butterbeans. The column was a lesson in making substitutions “if you don’t have every little thing they call for” in a recipe. When checking to see if she had the makings for shrimp bisque, Mrs. Tison wrote, she found she didn’t have shrimp stock, so she used chicken stock. She didn’t have leeks, but she had a sweet white onion. She didn’t have tomato paste, but she had a can of tomato soup.

She certainly didn’t have one-fourth cup of cognac or brandy or sherry. “Don’t know what the first one is and don’t have the brandy or sherry,” she wrote. “But there is a little scuppernong wine in the refrigerator left over from the Christmas fruit cake. That’ll do.”

We didn’t know what bisque was when I was growing up in Esto. I’m sure of it. At my first important business dinner after graduating from law school, I found myself dining with a phalanx of big-city lawyers, staring down a French menu. Lobster bisque sounded fancy and surely would impress my new colleagues. So I told the waiter I’d start with the lobster beesque. “Very well, sir, the bisque then.” I turned a thousand shades of red, and I’m certain I heard a few snickers.

All these years and miles later, we still call it beesque in our household, even though it’s really pronounced bisque, as in biscuits.

I should have known.

EARLIER: “From Esto to the Advertiser“