Southern Belly
Page 4
1512 GREENSBORO AVENUE / 205-345-8239
MARIE RUDISILL
You may have known Marie Rudisill as the Fruitcake Lady from the Tonight Show. She first appeared onstage with Jay Leno in December of 2000, teaching Mel Gibson to cook. Marie, who had just written a book, Fruitcake: Memories of Truman Capote and Sook, was sassy. She was bawdy. She did and said things that only a nonagenarian can get away with. In 2001 she returned to Burbank to stuff a turkey with Hugh Grant. While the cameras rolled, she cupped Grant’s rear and, judging its curvature, called it—if my memory serves—“a nice little biscuit.”
In 2002 the native of Monroeville, Alabama, began serving as the show’s advice columnist. In a recurring segment, “Ask the Fruitcake Lady,” Marie—dressed in a severe black suit, her gray hair pinned in a bun, her talon-like fingernails lacquered red—addressed matters of fidelity, grooming, and bathroom etiquette. She was combative. She did not suffer fools. She used decidedly unladylike words like “pecker” and “lazy son-of-a-bitch.”
Her performance was camp. But her outré Southern pedigree came honestly. Marie was the sister of Truman Capote’s late mother, Lillie Mae Faulk Persons Capote, who committed suicide in 1954. Capote called Marie “Aunt Tiny.” She helped raise him. And like her nephew, who was a Johnny Carson–era Tonight Show favorite, she employed cathode rays to her advantage. But, as was the case with Capote, Marie will not be remembered by the demimonde for the flame and spittle and slur captured in television appearances. Nor will she be remembered for the fruitcake book.
Marie Rudisill will be remembered as the author of a slim 1989 volume, Sook’s Cookbook: Memories and Traditional Recipes from the Deep South. Using plantation daybooks from the early 1800s as her primary sources, weaving in character studies of friends and neighbors and relatives from Monroeville, she wrote one of the best cook-books to hit Southern shelves. It’s a portrait of place. It’s a portrait of people. It’s full of recipes for green olive jambalaya and watermelon-rind preserves and poinsettia cake. And, sadly, it’s now out of print.
I love that book, but my recollections of Marie are more personal. After I helped with a book-deal negotiation, Marie phoned. She was, at the time, eighty-nine. And she was effusive in her thanks. “I’ll do anything for you,” Marie said, her tone raspy, her timbre bright. After a three-beat pause, she added, “Except sex.” A hail of cackles followed. And soon after, a dial tone.
Winfield
CAR LOT BAR-B-QUE
Tacked to the back wall of this unlikely restaurant is a framed newspaper ad from the 1976 grand opening of Roger Guin’s Oldsmobile dealership. Ask Roger about those days and he’ll tell you he made a good run of it, sold more than a few cars, treated his customers with respect, paid his people fairly. But somewhere along the way, the car industry changed: “I got out when the getting was good.”
But he couldn’t stay away for long. Back in the mid-1990s he opened a little used-car lot. “I wasn’t aiming to get rich,” he’ll tell you. “I just wanted to keep my hand in the business.” Late-model pickups, four-door sedans with low miles and good tires, and, every once in a while, a souped-up Camaro or Firebird: he sold what the folks of western Alabama told him they wanted. Business was steady. Not great, mind you, just steady.
And then one day back in 1998 Roger had a flash of inspiration. What did politicians do when they wanted to draw a crowd? Why, they’d hold a barbecue. Throw up a tent, smoke some meat, stir up a kettle of sauce, and soon the world would beat a path to your door. In short order, Roger built himself a pit, right in the side of the car showroom.
Best place in the South
to get a Chevy and a sandwich.
Despite an early sales spike, the car-buying public never came calling. Today, though he still sells a vehicle every once in a while—recent offerings include a cherry Ford F150 pickup, a Chevy Blazer with monster truck tires, and a Pontiac Bonneville with a new pearly white paint job—the old showroom has given way to a dining room where locals feast on pulled pork that spent fifteen-plus hours cooking over hardwood coals. Last time I went through town, I fantasized about stopping off at Roger’s place to do a little business—figured I’d trade my old junker for a lifetime supply of his barbecue sandwiches.
235 BANKHEAD HIGHWAY / 205-487-2281
West Indies Salad
an homage to Bayley’s
Serves 4 to 6
Some restaurants guard their trademark recipes. Not Bayley’s, down near the shore, where West Indies salad was born. Bill Bayley appeared on the local morning shows, telling everyone how to do it. He gave the recipe away to charity cookbook publishers, too. Soon it was popping up every-where, from the Sahara in Montgomery to Wintzell’s, just down the road in Mobile. Many ditched the ice water step, thinking that would dilute the brackish whang of the crab. Yep, that’s where they probably went wrong.
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 pound fresh claw crabmeat, picked through for shells and cartilage
1⁄ 2 cup vegetable oil
1⁄ 4 cup apple cider vinegar
1⁄ 2 cup ice water
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Spread half the onion over the bottom of a large bowl. Cover with separated crab lumps and then remaining onion. Season with salt and pepper. Add the oil and vinegar. Strain the ice water through a sieve to remove the ice cubes; add the well-chilled water to the salad. Cover and refrigerate to marinate for at least 2 and up to 12 hours. Toss lightly and taste and adjust for seasoning with salt and pepper before serving.
ArKAnSaS
ies, pies, my goodness the pies. Coconut cream, chocolate meringue, pineapple cream, egg custard, lemon, pecan, chess, and apple. Arkansans are a pie-mad people. They also dote on stone-ground grits from the War Eagle Mill, battered deep-fried pickles from the town of Atkins, and sloppy barbecue sandwiches slathered with sauce from old man Shadden over in Marvell. Speaking of barbecue, make sure you pay homage to Lawrence Craig of De Valls Bluff, a veteran riverboat cook who took to the pits more than fifty years ago. His story is one for the ages.
Atkins
STALKING THE FRIED DILL PICKLE
Southerners have had a long love affair with all things fried. We eat fried chicken by the tub, savor fried oysters drenched in hot sauce, munch fried okra like popcorn, and still relish a mess of fried chitlins now and again. But dill pickles? Fried? Despite the empirical truth of their vinegary and greasy goodness, there are some things that give even a Southerner reason to pause.
And so it was when I first encountered fried dill pickles. I paused—long enough to ask three questions: Why would anyone do such a thing to a perfectly good pickle? Who was the first brave soul to drop a mess of pickles in hot oil? And, when did this great event first take place? Simple enough questions—or so I thought.
Two restaurants claim to have been the originators of this gastronomic oddity. According to the owners of the Hollywood Café in Robinsonville, Mississippi, fried dill pickles made their debut in 1969 when a desperate cook, confronted by a dining room full of patrons, a vat of bubbling oil, and a scarcity of catfish, reached for an industrial-sized jar of dill pickle chips. The story goes that he rolled them in the batter intended for the catfish, served them to a crowd of incredulous but famished diners, and then sat back to savor the praise.
It’s a good story, parroted by many. But, according to Bob Austin of Atkins, Arkansas, “It’s a damn lie.” Bob claims to have invented the fried dill pickle in 1960 while operating the Duchess Drive In, directly across the street from the pickle plant in Atkins. “I had an inspiration one day and just started working on the batter,” he says. “Staring out the window at that pickle plant all day, your mind gets to wandering. So I sliced some pickles and fixed up a batter. My batter beats all. And I’m not telling anybody what’s in it. I’ll sell it to the right person, but nobody’s getting it for free. The rest, they’re all imposters. Nobody has been able to duplicate it since.”
A few years ba
ck the Duchess closed. Bob retired. These days, those “original” pickles are available only during Picklefest, Atkins’ annual spring celebration, when the local VFW hall sets up a booth and sells them on the street. “Yep, they’re the only ones that I let use my recipe,” says Bob. “That’s your one chance if you want to try the real thing.”
Benton
ED AND KAY’S
Arkansas is a pie lover’s paradise, a land where soft, white mounds of meringue soar heavenward from pie shells ringed with oh-so-flaky crusts, where tart lemon custards jiggle luxuriantly with just the slightest prod from a fork.
Profiles of the best, including Mary’s Family Pie Shop, follow. But there’s no doubt in my mind that, when it comes to meringue, there’s no pie house in the state that piles it higher than Ed and Kay’s, operated by Kay Diemar in this little plank-sided rectangle of a building since 1982.
Plate lunches and dinners are tasty: the stewed cabbage is chock-full-o-pork, the chicken is pan-fried to order, and the soupy squash and cornbread dressing is laced with a good measure of fragrant sage. The Parker House rolls are yeasty and light. They even serve deviled eggs come summertime.
But seated at one of the Naugahyde booths with a laminated place mat advertising the Razorback Car Wash and Quick Lube laid out before you, the pies are what command your attention. There they are, over on the back wall, displayed in a retrofitted, three-shelf, brass greenhouse with a mirrored backing: pineapple cream, coconut cream, chocolate cream, egg custard, lemon, pecan, and apple.
Dead center is the winner, baker Nita Nash’s pride and joy, known around these parts as a PCP or pineapple, coconut, and pecan pie, crowned by a bell-shaped bouffant of meringue that must rise a full foot and a half. The filling is a creamy wonder, the meringue an architectural tribute to the excesses of the baker’s art, done Arkansas style.
15228 INTERSTATE 30 (SEVIER STREET EXIT) / 501-315-3663
Devalls Bluff
**Lawrence Craig** He Chose Cooking
Lawrence Craig was a national treasure, a gentleman of the old school who started slow smoking barbecue in the early 1940s when he was a cook on the snag and dredge boats that plied the Mississippi River, keeping the channels clear for navigation.
I first met him in 1997 in our nation’s capital. He was there at the invitation of the Smithsonian Institution, to cook barbecue on the Mall, to let the nation know how they did it back in his hometown of De Valls Bluff, Arkansas.
As much as I liked his food, his life story was what really interested me. We sat and talked for hours beneath the boughs of a stately oak.
I can still see his face beaming with pride at what the years had wrought.
* * *
“
We kept chickens up on the roof of the boat and when it was time to eat one, well somebody had to kill it and dress it, and I’d cook it up.
”
* * *
“Folks always talk about how black folks are good cooks. There’s a reason for that. Back when I was growing up there were two kinds of jobs black folks could get without being challenged by white folks: cooking and heavy lifting.
“For instance, back before I started cooking, I worked for the U.S. Corps of Engineers on the Mississippi River … Now when I first started out, coal and wood fueled the boat. And it was a black man’s job to do the heavy, dirty work of feeding the fire. But when they started using oil, when all you had to do was turn a knob, well, they got a white man to sit down and turn that knob, and that became a white man’s job.
“So I chose cooking. I figured that no one else wanted to stay in that hot kitchen all day. I figured I had the green light. My mother had been a cook in white folks’ homes and gotten along just fine. So I chose cooking. Back then that was acceptable. Folks thought black folks could cook—same as they thought black folks could sing and dance, that we had rhythm and could play musical instruments …
“When I was working on the dredge boat, we kept chickens up on the roof of the boat and when it was time to eat one, well somebody had to kill it and dress it, and I’d cook it up. We butchered our own cows and pigs, too. When we were on the boat, we cooked ‘em on the oil burning stove.
* * *
“
We did all right. More than fifty years it’s been open now, serving white folks and black folks the same barbecue. I’m right proud of that.
”
* * *
“During the off-season, when I was back home in De Valls Bluff, I started doing a little bit of barbecuing. We’d dig a pit in the ground and lay an old bedspring across it, fill the pit with coals, slap the meat on the springs and lay a piece of tin across the top to conserve heat and concentrate the smoke. You had to stay by the fire all night and all day … When the buses would come rolling into town, we’d meet ‘em at the door and sell sandwiches to everybody.
“By 1947 my brother Lesley and I opened our own barbecue place right down the road … We did all right. More than fifty years it’s been open now, serving white folks and black folks the same barbecue. I’m right proud of that.”
CRAIG’S BARBECUE
While we were together in Washington, I pledged to visit Mr. Craig often. I imagined monthly visits. But time was not on our side. When I did manage to make the trek, we sat in his front yard, talking and laughing, reminiscing about our time on the Mall. Lunchtime came and went and I grew hungry, my stomach rumbling in protest. In time I bid Mr. Craig good-bye, and made my way three doors down to his café, a tidy concrete rectangle with a separate pit house out back. Inside, it looked just as I imagined it would: paneled walls, a few tables scattered about, a bathroom reachable only through the kitchen.
Mr. Craig assured me that the current operators still use his recipes for slaw and sauce, and the pork hams are still slow smoked on the pit he built long ago. I was anxious to taste that sauce of his again. I remembered how he told me they made it: vinegar, mustard, catsup, a lot of black pepper, and a healthy slug of what Mr. Craig called “the meat drippings”—in essence the grease that dripped from the hams while they cooked. And I wanted some of that apple, green pepper, and cabbage slaw piled on my sandwich.
In a short time a waitress came barreling out of the kitchen, my sandwich in her grasp. I took a bite. Perfection. The meat was tender, suffused with smoke, and napped with that fiery sauce I remembered; the slaw snapped with crispness. I said a silent prayer of thanks that Mr. Craig chose cooking.
HIGHWAY 70 WEST / 870-998-2616
MARY’S FAMILY PIE SHOP
Mary Thomas gilding the lilies.
A trip to Craig’s Barbecue is not complete unless you step across the street to Mary Thomas’ Family Pie Shop, a squat masonry rectangle set directly across the street in the backyard of a ranch-style home. Since the early 1980s, Mary Thomas has been baking pies in what was once a bicycle repair shop, winning praise throughout the South for her coconut, lemon, sweet potato, pecan, and egg custard pies. The only sign posted is a jerky “Pie Shop” spray-painted on the front of the building.
Late in 1999 Mary Thomas told me that she was hanging up her apron. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m thinking somebody will take over this place. But I’m not counting on it.” Her flirt with retirement served as proof of the fragile condition of Southern cookery. But hope springs eternal. As of this printing she’s still open, still baking what many believe to be the best pies in the South. “I’ll be here as long as I can,” she told me. “I was sick for a year or so, but with the help of the good Lord, I’ll be here a long, long time.”
HIGHWAY 70 WEST / 870-998-2279
Fayetteville
HERMAN’S RIB HOUSE
Herman’s is a wreck, a woebegone white plaster and brick Tudor relic set in the midst of a gravel parking lot, hard by a four-lane highway. The windows are patched with duct tape and the red-shingled roof looks suspect. There’s not even a sign out front, just “Herman’s” painted on the south wall in a faded, florid script. Arrive at an off hour and you’l
l swear the place is condemned, closed by a building inspector looking out for the best interests of the good citizens of Fayetteville.
But step past the unruly privet hedge that guards the entranceway, let the screen door slap behind you, and soon you’re transported into another world, where cordovan-colored wood paneling glows with an inner warmth, and red wines are poured with a heavy, sure hand. Founded in 1964 by Herman Tuck, this restaurant, like Lusco’s over in Greenwood, Mississippi, belongs to that rarefied coterie of Southern establishments where the tawdriness of the surrounding area and the ramshackle exterior of the building itself serve as insulation against time’s steady progression.
Seated in a captain’s chair at one of the stolid wood tables, a red and white checked tablecloth spread out before me, the modern world seems far away. Up front Nick Wright, the owner, is working the flattop griddle where house-cut T-bones and tenderloins sizzle away. Shelby Rogers trundles back and forth across the dark dining room, taking complimentary baskets of saltines and salsa to newcomers. White men and women, plump and prosperous looking, smoke and drink and laugh with what can only be described as a joy bordering upon abandon.