Perfect pralines

Victoria Scherer is no stranger in a kitchen. Her recipes have been featured before in the Southeast Missourian, usually as a winner in the various contests the newspaper has sponsored over the years.

When I sampled Victoria's New Orleans pralines a few years ago, I thought I had gone to candy heaven.

I have frequently told you how much I love the pralines I used to get at a Mexican restaurant in Dallas in the 1960s. Since then, every praline I've eaten has been measured against those crumbly, sugary confections.

Of course, we all know that our memories can play tricks on us. Sometimes we remember something as being near perfection, and then we get another taste and wonder why we ever liked it in the first place.

That happened to me when I visited Dallas many years after my wife and I had lived there. I had my younger son with me on the return trip to Dallas. I wanted to take him to our old restaurant favorites, providing they were still in business. They were.

One was Red Bryan's Barbecue, a place just north of Love Field, the old airport, that featured, like all Texas barbecue places, beef brisket slathered in its own spice-filled juices.

I can tell you that the brisket sandwiches I ate when we lived in Dallas were the finest barbecue I could possibly imagine -- with the exception, of course, of Arthur Bryant's Barbecue in Kansas City, which to this day remains the gold standard of slow-cooked meats, not to mention the fistfuls of fries that come with every order.

So you can imagine my delight when my son and I found that Red Bryan's was still in business a few year ago. I was a bit surprised, however, that we were the only customers at dinnertime. I urged my son to get the brisket sandwich, reminding him one more time of the taste treat he was about to experience.

We sat in one of the wood-bench booths munching on our sandwiches and fries. After a couple of bites, both of reached for a bottle of store-bought barbecue sauce on the table. Then salt and pepper.

Something had gone terribly wrong. This was not the Red Bryan's barbecue I remembered. My son wondered if his father had gone bonkers. We left without finishing our sandwiches.

Which gave us the perfect excuse to find El Fenix, the restaurant with the heavenly pralines. Thanks goodness these folks had had the good sense to leave well enough alone. The food was as good as I remembered, although the restaurant no longer featured a woman slapping out fresh corn tortillas that were delivered piping hot to your table.

And the pralines ... .

In case you don't know about pralines, they are made with three main ingredients: brown sugar, butter and pecans. Sometimes they are chewy like caramel. Sometimes they are hard like peanut brittle. But the pralines I like, which generally are found in New Orleans, are semisoft and crumbly, and they melt in your mouth, leaving whole pecan halves to be savored before the next bite.

Victoria, who lives in Jackson, makes king-size pralines in muffin tins. They are much too large.

Which means, dear readers, that they are perfect.

This year, without a word of whining on my part, Victoria showed up with a container filled with oversized pralines and delicious chocolate-covered peanuts.

What possibly could be better for the holidays?

Well, there are fruitcakes, of course. I haven't made a big deal about the noble fruitcake this year. I've discovered that after a dozen years of constant reminders, many of you share the bounty of your cooking expertise without any prodding at all. What wonderful, good-hearted people you are.

Thanks, Victoria, from the bottom of my heart for sharing your scrumptious goodies.

May heaven be half as sweet and as eternally delicious as one of your New Orleans pralines.

And if anyone is still wondering what to do with a spare fruitcake, you know where I work.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.