In an attempt to catch up on the writers of my new home state, I looked up Carson McCullers’s essay “The Great Eaters of Georgia.” I aspire to be one of the greats and read, willing to take instruction.
I’m behind in my study of Georgia writers. But I know the food. Southern cooking is a regional possession. It doesn’t pay much attention to state boundaries. The best part of McCullers’s essay is on the eating of watermelon.
Ideally, it should be opened and eaten on a cool back porch with newspapers on the table. It should be frosty, cold to the touch on fevered summer days. When the man of the family is poised with the knife there should be a hush around the table, a breathless and pleasant anxiety. Then when the knife plunges there should be a faint crack of the splitting fruit, then the anxious craning to see if it is properly ripe.
McCullers emphasizes that it’s an occasion, requiring performance from both the carver and the eaters. I think that’s the way it should be, although I’d prefer to hear a “distinct” crack instead of a “faint” one when the melon is cut. If you can imagine the crack of a baseball bat, I’d want to hear a double, rather than a single.
• Source: “The Great Eaters of Georgia” is in Carson McCullers: Stories, Plays, & Other Writings; New York: Library of America, 2016, pp. 457-63. It’s online in Library of America’s Story of the Week collection:
https://loa-shared.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/McCullers_Eaters_Georgia.pdf
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