Buttermilk Graffiti

by Edward Lee

  Janice is not flashy. She keeps her hair short, like a man’s. She wears the same navy blue T-shirt every time I see her. She never uses an apron. She lets me into her kitchen when she’s not busy. Everything is cooked in the four dented pots and two large skillets hanging above her stove. She talks in poetic lyrics, never full sentences. Sometimes, I jot down the things she says and make poems out of them. I once asked her to define what soul food is. She had this reply, which I transcribe here word for word, though the line breaks are mine:

  Always greens, always mac’n’cheese

  Always bunch o’ fried things

  Beans and starches

  The fat you not supposed to have

  Grease, a lot

  More heavy on the salt

  And you ain’t gonna find as much sugar

  But in the cornbread and tea

  And Kool-Aid is a flavor

  Janice was born in 1950. She grew up on Walnut Street, in downtown Louisville, which was more integrated back then. She remembers growing up with white kids in her neighborhood, though everyone was poor. When Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, a lot of people burned their local businesses. The city tore down the buildings under a policy of urban renewal but also created a system of urban segregation. Everything was different after that, she tells me. Janice worked for General Electric and then as a private nurse. She watched the civil rights movement play out on the sidewalks in front of her home. Today, she lives less than a mile away from the street she grew up on. She has fond memories of that neighborhood and of her neighbors, both black and white.

  I wonder out loud if that is where she learned to cook with sauerkraut, which is not typically an ingredient you see in a soul food restaurant. She tells me all the black folks ate sauerkraut when she was a kid. Pork neck and sauerkraut was a pretty common dish at the dinner table. She makes it occasionally at the restaurant. It’s not on the menu when I visit, but I know that if I ask her for it, she’ll tell me to come in next week and it’ll be ready. It is one of my favorite things to eat. Rich, unctuous pork falling off neck bones and swimming in a briny liquid with strands of softened sauerkraut that disintegrate in my mouth. There are chilly autumn nights when I fall asleep dreaming about it.

  Her restaurant is closed on the day I show up with a bag of neck bones and sauerkraut so Janice can show me how she makes it. She is surprised by my request. All I do is boil it, she keeps telling me. Her kitchen is small and cluttered. She doesn’t even have a steam table. She heats everything to order.

  “I don’t deal with people getting all fussy with the food. I don’t like people pointing at shit and telling me what to scoop up. You feel me?”

  I tell her I do. It’s more work this way, and she has little room to cook, but she prefers it. The food tastes better. She cares little if her customers have to wait.

  “Sometimes they curse me out, and then they always ease back in here ’cause they like my food.”

  I like Janice. I like the way she deals with people. Her manner is not always nice but it’s always honest.

  She tells me to hurry up with the neck bones. She hasn’t got all day. I unwrap the bag with the pork neck pieces, and she instructs me to rinse them under cold water.

  She starts with a pot of boiling water, then adds the neck bones and waits until the water comes to a boil again. She lets it boil for about ten minutes. She then changes it out, adding fresh water. She adds salt and lemon pepper, measuring it out with the palm of her hand. She adds a little garlic powder, quite a lot of onion powder, and a few bay leaves. When the water comes to a boil again, she places a lid over the pot and turns the heat to low. That’s it, she says. She’ll add the sauerkraut in about thirty minutes and then let it all go until the meat breaks off when you stick a fork in it.

  I’m surprised at how simple the recipe is. I’m not sure what I was expecting. It just seems almost too easy for a dish that comes out so meltingly tender and flavorful. I ask her again if that is really all there is to it.

  “That’s it. No magic here. Just food.”

  We sit down at a table and talk while waiting for the pork to braise. Janice used to be married, but they divorced after they had Antoinette. She is still friends with her ex, but she didn’t like being married. She has always felt more comfortable being alone than sharing a house with a companion.

  “God made me a square peg and then put me in a round world.”

  It is a profoundly sad thing to say out loud, but Janice rattles it off as if she were telling me the weather. I ask her if she has friends. Her customers, she tells me. I ask her what she does on her days off. When she’s not working, she doesn’t cook. She likes to eat chicken wings and stromboli. She does her own thing, she says, but won’t tell me what that is. Being here four days a week, she is surrounded by customers who all want a piece of her, so she likes to be alone on her days off.

  “Most people like me because I am blunt. They come here, and there’s comfort in knowing the truth. I got no reason to lie to you. I got a lot of people talking to me more than my own child does. When the week’s done, I’m tired of people.”

  There’s so much overlap in the things she says and the things I feel. I know my life and Janice’s are so different in so many ways, but there is something universal in running a restaurant.

  “I get tired of people, too,” I tell her. “Sometimes a carrot is all the company I need.” This makes her laugh.

  We commiserate over stories of bad customers, a topic that restaurant people never tire of. Then we talk about the neighborhood and about how life in West Louisville has changed. On the television, the news is on; a crime reporter is talking about a shooting not far from here. I ask Janice if things are better or worse now than when she was a kid.

  “Economically we are doing better; spiritually we are worse.” She turns the channel to a game show.

  When the pork smells done, we look inside the pot. Janice takes a fork and pierces the meat. It is good, she tells me. She makes me a plate and tells me to sit down. She’s not eating.

  She tells me I have to eat it with cornbread. She makes a quick batter and spoons it onto a skillet. She calls it cornbread, but it is more of a corn pancake. It is light and fluffy, but with a gritty texture that tells you this is homemade food. It comes out hot and steaming. She tops it with a little pat of butter, and it immediately melts into a pool of gold that seeps into the corn cake. This is the way she likes it. It’s fast, and she can make it all day long without getting tired.

  I have had cornbread a thousand different ways. Soul food restaurants usually serve it on the sweet side. Some people, such as Ronni Lundy, will strangle you if you put sugar in your cornbread. Chain restaurants serve corn muffins and call them cornbread. High-end restaurants use stone-ground meal from places such as Anson Mills. Community restaurants use the cheapest cornmeal they can find on sale at the grocery store. There is a natural assumption that the cheap stuff is bad, but I have been to the Kroger in the West End and watched as bags of dirt-cheap cornmeal flew off the shelves. Cheap or not, when it’s sold this fast, it’s fresh. The supermarket brand may not be from heirloom corn, but the lingering smell of sweetness tells me it has not been long since the corn was milled.

  Janice’s cornbread is a reflection of her. It is efficient, tasty, and in a generous enough portion to take up the entire plastic plate. The taste is sweet but not too much. It is salty, and smells of cheap butter and a little pork fat. It’s not flashy. It doesn’t seem like anything special while I’m eating it, but the next day, I can’t stop thinking about it.

  I devour my food in seconds. The corn pancake is perfect for sopping up the liquid on the plate. Janice has disappeared for a long time. When she reappears, she tells me she’s gotta go. Her demeanor has changed. It’s her day off, and I’ve taken up enough of her time, she tells me.

  “Okay, Janice. I’ll see you next w
eek, then.” I give her a hug that she doesn’t return.

  She tells me to stop hanging out with old people. She gives me advice about how to raise my daughter. I help her lock up and then watch her walk briskly down the street to wherever she’s going. I watch her all the way to the corner to see if she’ll turn around to look at me. She doesn’t.

  Exactly eight and a half miles east of Hosanna’s, Shirley Mae runs her namesake café and bar in Smoketown. This Louisville neighborhood was named for the old factories that used to make bricks. The factories were so busy that the smokestacks filled the sky with a permanent thick, dark smoke. The neighborhood has gone through its ups and downs over the years, but recently the city has shown a renewed interest in making it safer and more livable.

  When she’s not in the kitchen, Shirley Mae can be found sitting in the small vestibule of her restaurant, smoking Marlboros and drinking Coke. She wears a hairnet over her silver hair. She has a strength in her hands, the kind that comes only from a lifetime of picking and counting. When she lights a cigarette, her fingers tremble ever so slightly. Everybody greets her as they walk in to get their food.

  Shirley Mae is older than Janice by half a generation. She grew up an only child on a farm in College Grove, Tennessee, and a lot of the farmwork rested on her. She carried in wood for the stove. She fed the hogs and chickens. She picked the greens from the fields. The most lucrative crop they grew was tobacco. Shirley Mae would follow along after her father in the field, picking the small tobacco leaves he missed. They would lay the leaves out in a barn to dry. Every two weeks, they would take them to the tobacco house in the city to sell them. It was good money, she recalls.

  I never go to Shirley Mae’s unless I know I’ve got a lot time. She makes her hot water cornbread to order, and it can take twenty minutes sometimes. She boils water in a small pot. In a bowl, she spoons out cornmeal with a little bit of sugar. She slowly drizzles the hot water into the cornmeal and works the wet meal with her hands until she gets a dough that feels right. Then she breaks it into small nuggets and fries each one in a cast-iron skillet with a deep pool of hot oil. She watches each piece of cornbread carefully, and flips them with a spoon. When they are ready, she takes them out and lets them drain for a few seconds before loading them onto a paper tray.

  “It’s important not to fuck with them too much,” she tells me. Shirley Mae curses a lot. If I ask her a question she doesn’t like, she looks at me like I’m crazy, lights a cigarette, and shakes her head, all the while probably asking herself what the fuck I’m talking about.

  The cornbread comes out with a golden-brown crust that is sweet and chewy. You have to let it rest a moment or you’ll burn the roof of your mouth. When her cornbread nuggets break open, they let off a violent puff of steam. The bread inside is crumbly and dense. I have tried to make hot water cornbread just like hers but I can never mimic the perfect texture she gets right every time.

  “Originally, I was making old-fashioned corn muffins. Then one day, early on, these two drunks come in and they order pig’s feet and slaw. They was eating one of my muffins, and I overheard one of them say, ‘This sure would be good if we had some hot water cornbread.’ And the other guy said, ‘I bet she don’t even know how to make it.’ Now, this pissed me the fuck off. I went back, made the hot water cornbread, and just slid it right in front of them. They both looked shocked. They ended up fighting over the last piece. I been making it ever since.”

  It is getting dark. Outside, motorcycles are racing down Clay Street. A bar across the way opens its doors and plays music out into the night. Every few minutes, someone walks by and asks Shirley Mae if she’s got anything left to sell. Shirley Mae closes her place by 9:00 every night. She’s closed, she says, but she tells them to check with her daughter inside.

  She stubs out a cigarette and takes a deep breath. “This is the same food that my mamma cooked for me. I learned just by watching her. She only cooked in a skillet. So I do the same. She cooked by feel. She had me do a lot of shit in the kitchen. I worked my ass off. But I had a happy childhood; they taught me love. I loved being with my mom and dad. I was always with one or the other of them.”

  As a child, she went to a one-room schoolhouse with about forty kids. The bathroom was an outhouse, and the only heat source was a potbelly stove. Annie May Storm was her one teacher all through childhood, until Shirley Mae’s family moved to Nashville when she was in high school. She smiles as she tells me about her life on the farm. But it was a hard life, she insists, and she’s glad to be living in a city now.

  An argument breaks out in the kitchen. Shirley Mae’s daughter is fed up with people asking for food after closing time. The dispute takes a long time to die down. Everyone is told to get the hell out of the restaurant. It feels like this might be a nightly incident. Shirley Mae is just too nice ever to say no to a customer. And they love her food. Everyone comes by and gives her a hug and a kiss and tells her how good her food is.

  “My husband was Templeton Simpson,” she tells me. “We had five kids together. There was nothing else to do. Back then, you only had three channels, and on Saturday nights, the TV would go off at eleven p.m. What else were you supposed to do after dark but enjoy yourself? He’s gone now. I miss him from time to time, but I got my work to keep me busy.”

  Shirley Mae has had this restaurant for almost thirty years. It’s a remarkable accomplishment. Her food is simple—too simple, the way she describes it. I ask what’s in her turnip greens, and she looks at me bewildered. Turnips greens, she says. The recipe for her pig’s feet is pig’s feet, salt, and water. But everything tastes more complex than she describes it. Shirley Mae’s gift is coaxing out the flavors that are intrinsic in the ingredients. She doesn’t see the need to “fuck around” with aromatics and spices. The different flavors of the different muscles, cartilage, skin, and fat of the pig’s feet are complex enough without adding anything else.

  “All this time I been cooking and I never learned to measure things,” she says. “I don’t even know what a teaspoon is. How I measure is with my hand. I only know how to measure from here to here.” She traces the length of her left palm with her right index finger.

  Nowhere in her restaurant is there a reference to soul food. She doesn’t call it that.

  “I don’t call what I do ‘black food’ or ‘soul food.’ It’s just food. I don’t mess with that other shit. When I make turnip greens, I boil up turnips greens. Why do I want ham in that? Why do I want garlic or other shit in there? And I certainly don’t want anyone telling me what to call my food.”

  I ask her if she’s been to Janice’s restaurant. Not in years, she tells me. She’s too busy with her own life. I suspect Janice would say the same thing if I asked her about Shirley Mae. These two ladies, upholding traditions for decades, have never been honored by magazines or given awards or other accolades, yet they are two of the most important chefs in Louisville.

  I’ve been eating at their restaurants for years now, well before the world got hip to Southern food and cornbread. When I first arrived in Louisville, you couldn’t find upscale restaurants that served fried chicken or collards or cornbread. You had to go to Shirley Mae’s or Hosanna’s Kitchen or Big Momma’s Soul Food Kitchen or Jay’s Cafeteria. Nowadays, you can’t throw a stone without hitting a cornbread skillet. And the newspapers are clamoring for the recipes. I hate it that these women, the true guardians of this tradition, are getting overlooked. They are the ones who kept this food alive while the culinary world was busy fawning over European or California cuisine. For Janice and Shirley Mae, food was never about a trend or a concept. It was, and is, their heritage. And because of women like them, we now have an actual flavor profile we can reference when we talk about dishes such as pork neck and turnip greens. It’s a living thing, not just words in a historical text. My first taste of pork neck was at Hosanna’s; my first taste of collards was at Jay’s Cafeteria; my first rib tips were
at a tiny barbecue joint called Finley’s, which no longer exists. I owe my career to these restaurants. And to this day, I’ve had no better cornbread than at Shirley Mae’s.

  It is logical for me to compare the cuisine of these two women and conclude that what they’re doing is the same. They’re cooking soul food. But I would be wrong in assuming this. I learned from Janice and Shirley Mae that each cornbread recipe is unique. I also learned that two African American women cooking food in Louisville aren’t necessarily cooking the same food. Each has a distinct story. Shirley Mae grew up on a rural farm in Tennessee, and Janice in downtown Louisville during the civil rights movement. Janice talks freely about herself within the tradition of soul food, while Shirley Mae rejects the term. Their lives have never intertwined, and their food is as personal and as individual as they are. There is a tendency to speak of them in the same breath, but nothing could be further from the truth. If I can’t see those distinctions, that just means I have more work to do, more questions to ask, more respect to give.

  When I was a young cook in New York City, one of the things that always angered me was the assumption by other cooks that when it was my turn to open a restaurant, it would be an Asian restaurant, because of my race. My ethnicity, in their minds, was something that would define my career toward a path that was both logical and without controversy. So I did the opposite. I’ve always been that way. When my parents urged me to go to church, I grew my hair long and smoked pot. When my high school teachers told me I should be good at math because I was Asian, I flunked on purpose and excelled in literature. When I was lectured by my father to get a job in law or medicine, I became a cook. And when my mom admonished me to marry a good Korean girl—well, that didn’t work out as she wanted, either.