by John T. Edge
VENESIAN INN
Opened in 1947 by Germano Gasparoto, a native of the Veneto, this forthright restaurant—terrazzo floors, beaded board ceiling, oak wainscoted walls—serves lacy fried chicken and house-made spaghetti noodles in a red sauce. What’s more, the onion rings are gossamer, and beer is served in a frosted pony glass. By the register, proprietor Linda Mhoon sells wheat rolls and angel hair pasta.
582 HIGHWAY 412 WEST / 479-361-2562
War Eagle
WAR EAGLE MILL
For much of the past century grist mills were small-town fixtures, humble buildings set hard by the town creek or river, where folks from the surrounding countryside brought their wheat and corn, rye and oats to be ground into meal. Most everyone lived within a morning’s wagon ride of their local mill.
Since the first mill was built at War Eagle in the 1830s (and washed away in 1848) this bucolic little valley village in the Ozarks has been the home of three successive mills, the latest of which was constructed in 1973 by Zoe Caywood and family. As it now stands, War Eagle Mill is a three-story, red clapboard building sidled up next to a dammed river, the current from which turns an eighteen-foot, undershot cypress waterwheel morning, noon, and night. Spanning the War Eagle River—and framing the scene—is an elegant, steel-buttressed bridge with plank flooring.
Inside, toward the back of the building, powered by the wheel, is a Rube Goldberg assemblage of pulleys and gears linked to a shimmying red metal box, inside which turn two buhr stones incised with deep furrows. Keep the stones close together, and when hard corn passes through, it comes out the other end as grits. Ratchet the stones down just a bit for a finer grind and you get cornmeal; tighter still, and the product is corn flour.
Upstairs Zoe puts these products and many more to good use at the Bean Palace Restaurant, where each morning you can pull up a stool to a trestle table flocked with a red and white checkered tablecloth, and feast on dark, sweet buckwheat pancakes served with a metal goose-handled pitcher of syrup, and thick, yellow grits capped with a dollop of pale gold butter. For lunch, mugs of beans and ham are served on graniteware plates alongside wedges of soft cornbread made from meal ground just hours before. Above, tacked to the eaves, are old flour sacks advertising Southern Daisy and Dixie Darling cornmeal, Navajo Maid and Sleepy Eye spring wheat flour—peculiar, sad reminders of days long past.
Off Highway 12, thirteen miles east of Rogers / 479-789-5343
Tontitown Salad
an homage to Mary Maestri’s
Serves 4 to 6
Back in the old country, in Italy, the vinegar was likely balsamic and the oil was crushed from olives, but in America, new adaptations were made, new tastes forged. This vinaigrette-dressed salad, adapted from the house salad at Mary Maestri’s, will remind you of other Southern-Italian salads, say the one at Lusco’s in Greenwood, Mississippi, but the garlic whomp is stronger here.
Dressing
1 cup apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoons very finely chopped garlic
2 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1 tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 cups canola oil
1 head of iceberg or romaine lettuce
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Garlic powder
To make the dressing, combine the vinegar, garlic, Parmesan cheese, salt, and pepper in a large glass jar or jug, preferably one with a narrow opening. Shake well to combine. Add the canola oil a little at a time in four batches, shaking well between each addition.
To core the iceberg lettuce, hold the head core end down and rap it firmly against a counter or tabletop. (The pressure forces the core into the head, making it easy to lift or twist out with your fingers. Or, simply cut out the core using a stainless-steel, plastic, or ceramic knife, as carbon steel will cause discoloration.) If using romaine lettuce, cut the tough end off and tear the lettuce into bite-sized bits.
Rinse the lettuce under cool running water. Tear apart and place in a salad spinner or kitchen towel to dry. Place dry lettuce in an oversized bowl with salt, pepper, and garlic powder, to taste. Add a little dressing, tossing to coat. Taste and adjust seasoning for salt and pepper. Serve immediately. The remaining dressing may be kept covered in the refrigerator for up to one week.
North FLorida
ullet and oysters and shrimp. Travel through northern Florida offers untold opportunities to feast on all three. Milk-marinated fillets of mullet at Chet’s in Pensacola; oysters on the half shell, served on a lunchroom tray from the raw bar at Indian Pass; locally caught shrimp, reverse-butterflied, rolled in cracker meal, and not so much fried as poached in oil, from O’Steen’s in St. Augustine — a world of trencherman feeds awaits, far from the land of air-conditioned nightmares perpetrated by condo commandos.
N.B.: This book covers northern Florida, with a dip down to accommodate the inclusion of Ted Peters Famous Smoked Fish near St. Petersburg.
Roadside relic from 13 Mile.
Apalachicola
FRESH OYSTERS
Tommy Ward, steward of Buddy Ward and Sons, a family enterprise in business since 1930, is a curator of local maritime history, an unapologetic booster for Apalachicola oysters. Look into his eyes, listen to his raspy voice, and you’ll know he speaks a truth when he tells you: “I’ve been out to Oregon, to Washington State and California. I’ll put my bay, my water, my oyster up against anybody’s. No contest.”
Tommy manages a ragtag coterie of oyster catchers. Some, like the fellow who works a green skiff painted with the slogan “Old Goat,” tong for bivalves in public waters. But others like Joey, Tommy’s brother, work the family’s leased oyster beds, piloting a cultivator machine that while spinning round and round like a marine take on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride scoops oysters from the bottom without need for tong plunges.
No matter the manner in which the oysters make it from the depths to the dock, Tommy ensures that they make it from the dock to the tables of Apalachicola. Oysters from Apalach end up in some of the country’s best seafood houses. But even a grand plateau de fruits de mer devoured in a temple of culinary pursuit like the Oyster Bar in New York’s Grand Central Station can’t match eating a dozen at a cinder-block joint on Florida’s Forgotten Coast, where the commute from water to table is just a few miles on a lonesome bayside blacktop, flush with palmetto, shaded by pines.
Before you slurp, you should know that the oysters of Apalach are ephemeral products of maritime geography. Put another way, Apalachicola Bay is cordoned from the salt water of the Gulf of Mexico by the necklace strand of St. Vincent, St. George, and Dog Islands. And the bay is bisected by the fresh water–bearing Apalachicola River. So depending on the way the wind is blowing, the bay is either taking on salt water through the passes that cut the islands or it’s taking on fresh water by way of the river.
And since oysters are efficient filterers of water, their character is always in flux. A salt-bearing west wind means salty oysters will likely arrive on the docks at 13 Mile. East-wind oysters will probably arrive fresh, which, in local parlance, has nothing to do with time elapsed from water to the bar and everything to do with oysters that lack a briny punch.
To get a bead on such as this, snag a stool at Papa Joe’s, a workingman’s bar and restaurant at Scipio Marina, and James Hicks will shuck you a dozen or three. He was born out near Tommy Ward’s dock and shuck house, a place some, owing to the distance from town, know as 13 Mile, and others, in homage to Tommy’s mother, Martha Pearl, and her cousin Fannie Pearl, know as—you guessed it—Pearl City.
James is a garrulous man, pushing seventy. He’s worked the water most of his life. (It’s a family tradition. Oddys, his wife, arrives at 13 Mile at 3 A.M. each weekday to shuck gallons for Tommy.) Trust James. He’ll give you the scoop on saline. His blade work is clean, his oysters always free of effluvium and well matched to a sauce of catsup, horseradish, and lemon juice. And the longnecks he slides your way are
frostbitten.
Indian Pass Raw Bar, the other great oyster emporium hereabouts, is a few miles west of the Ward docks, in the opposite direction from Apalach. This means that, condo encroachment aside, it’s in the boonies.
Opened in the early 1900s as a commissary for a turpentine camp, the clapboard building has, since the 1980s, been the oyster bar of choice for the countrypolitan set. In the wake of Hurricane Kate in 1955, owner Jimmy McNeil devised a plan to transition the family wholesale oyster business from harvesting for others to selling on the half shell.
Today, Jimmy and company pull oysters from his family beds as well as a few leased beds, pop them open by the dozen, and serve them on plastic trays. In addition to raw oysters, Jimmy also serves broiled ones, topped with butter and Parmesan cheese, but truth be told, these bivalves taste best with no embellishment save a spritz of lemon, maybe a dash of horseradish.
PAPA JOE’S OYSTER BAR / 301-B MARKET STREET / 850-653-1189
INDIAN PASS RAW BAR
INTERSECTION HIGHWAY 30-A AND INDIAN PASS ROAD / 850-227-1670
**John Gorrie** The Iceman Cometh
* * *
With its Rube Goldberg assemblage of tubing and condensers, it looks like a marriage of a sewing machine and a locomotive, retro -fitted for use as a still.
* * *
Along one wall is a faux aquarium, flush with taxidermied hermit crabs and horse conchs, lightning welks and hog chokers. I’m not quite sure what purpose such a display serves in a museum dedicated to local luminary John Gorrie, the man who pioneered mechanical refrigeration and the manufacture of ice, but those queer names do make me smile.
Front and center is the true focal point of this grandma’s attic–style museum, opened in 1957 by the state of Florida: a model of Gorrie’s ice machine, built to three-quarter scale. With its Rube Goldberg assemblage of tubing and condensers, it looks like a marriage of a sewing machine and a locomotive, retrofitted for use as a still. By way of the original, Gorrie laid claim in 1851 to U.S. Patent 8080.
A doctor by training, Gorrie arrived in the port city of Apalachicola in 1833. He wasted no time. By 1837 he was mayor. By 1841, flummoxed by a yellow fever epidemic that claimed as many as 70 percent of its victims, he began eradication experiments. Gorrie was convinced the fever was caused by decaying plant matter, moisture, and heat. In response, he oversaw the draining of wetlands and began toying with the concept of artificial cooling.
His machine was built on the principle that the evaporation of liquids and the resultant expansion of gases would lower the temperature of brine to below freezing. After submerging metal boxes of unadulterated water into the brine, the water froze into blocks of ice.
Although Gorrie foresaw his invention as a response to the ravages of malaria, food and drink applications arose quickly. The story told most often is of a Bastille Day stunt, staged in the miasmic heat of a Florida summer, wherein Gorrie and compatriots served champagne, chilled by blocks of artificial ice, to a coterie of dubious European visitors.
More plebeian, but perhaps prophetic in a region of the South that would, in coming years, build an economy based on the shipment of shellfish and oranges, was Gorrie’s baroquely phrased prediction that “animals or fruit, when divested of life, may be preserved entire with all their juices in low temperature; this principle of producing and maintaining cold might be made instrumental in preserving organic matter an indefinite amount of time, and thus become an accessory to the extension of commerce.”
JOHN GORRIE MUSEUM AND STATE PARK
46 SIXTH STREET / 850-653-9347
Cross Creek
MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS HISTORIC STATE PARK
Dragonflies swoop through the yard, darting among the orange trees. Roosters strut and peck for feed in the crabgrass. Clothes dry on the line in the summer sun. Planters, crafted from eviscerated truck tires, erupt with riots of daisies. A dog scratches at the screen door of a clapboard Cracker-style farmhouse.
Cross Creek, the community that writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings claimed as home in 1928, has, in the years since her 1953 death, awakened from its slumber. But Rawlings’ house appears, in large part, as she left it. In the company of a docent who talks of Rawlings like she were a kindly aunt, I wander the grounds and ramble the house.
We pause on the screened front porch, where Rawlings wrote the works that garnered her a Pulitzer Prize. In the living room we admire the pendant chandelier she made from a white mixing bowl. And in the kitchen we ponder the cook stove where Rawlings and Idella Parker, the woman she called “the perfect maid,” stirred pots of oxtail pilau and baked skillets of cornbread and pans of biscuits. (Rawlings once wrote that her literary ability “may safely be questioned as harshly as one will, but indifference to my table puts me in a rage.”)
The book that begat the cookbook.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings came south in search of a muse. She found what she sought at Cross Creek, the place she called “half-wild backwoods country,” the place where she wrote The Yearling and Cross Creek.
Rawlings aspired to write big-picture fiction by way of a tight-focus look at her new surroundiings. And she succeeded. What she didn’t intend was to become a cookery writer. Yet her descriptions of time at the stove and at table proved so compelling that her publisher commissioned Cross Creek Cookery, a 1942 compendium of recipes and lore whererin she offers recipes for soft-shell cooter soup and Crisco-cut biscuits.
Of the latter Rawlings opines, “It’s an old tale that the South is known as the land of the hot biscuit and the cold check. Yet a part of the placidity of the South comes from the sense of well-being that follows the heart-and-body-warming consumption of breads fresh from the oven. We serve cold baker’s bread to our enemies, trusting that they will never impose on our hospitality again.”
In her neighbors, Rawlings found inspiration for her fiction—and her table. When you drive through the Big Scrub to her home, you, too, will have the chance to commune with her Cracker muse.
THE YEARLING
Chances are good that Marjorie Rawlings, a devotee of Cracker home cooking known to present fried catfish on Wedgwood china, did not serve her guests duck confit. But that’s what the screened porch–fronted Yearling, in business since 1952, aims to do. And, oh yes, they have fried gator, too.
Gone are the days when the core menu was cooter, catfish, and frog legs. Now, the Yearling, a cozy restaurant with wood-paneled walls and galvanized tin ceilings, festooned with all manner of Rawlings memorabilia, is best appreciated as a place for a snack, maybe a cup of tomatoey seafood chowder and frosty mug of beer. Or you might opt for a slab of prime rib. J. R. Jenkins, grandson of Rawlings employees Will and Martha Mickens, still works the grill, cooking sixteen-ounce buck cuts and twelve-ounce yearlings.
14531 COUNTRY ROAD 325 / 352-466-3999
Gainesville
LOUIS’ LUNCH
Born in Sicily in 1896, Louis Pennisi landed at Ellis Island in 1914. After settling in Gainesville, he shoveled coal into boxcars before working the streets as a peddler. Ice cream was the good of choice. Soon he was churning his own, and Louis’ Pure Ice Cream was born.
Inside, a haze of burger grease hangs in the air.
In 1928 Pennisi opened a café. He sold ham sandwiches and hamburgers. The latter, a combination of beef, turkey, breadcrumbs, and spices, was an homage to his mother’s meatballs. Pennisi just squashed them flat and stuffed his burgers inside slices of white bread.
By 1935, he built a block and stucco building with an L-shaped counter front and center. Not much changed in ensuing decades. Pennisi added egg sandwiches in, say, the thirties. Then cheeseburgers. Fries, later still.
When the lunch rush hit, Pennisi was ever at the stove, although somewhere around his ninetieth year he curtailed his hours. By the time the elder Pennisi died at the age of 106, his son Tommy, born in 1937, was at the helm.
Today, Tommy is still there, frying his grandmother’s meatball burgers in a cast-iron skillet puddl
ed with vegetable oil. (They emerge crusty at the edges and sort of creamy at their core and are comparable to the dough burgers of Booneville, Mississippi.) Working alongside is Joyce Philman, the woman he married in 1973 and divorced in 1974, as well as their daughter, Emily Cheves.
Seated at a counter stool, beneath the beaded board ceiling, I imagine Tommy—charmingly old-school in his black shorts, black socks, and black shoes, wearing a paper skiff—marking his ninetieth birthday within the spartan confines of this working-class café, dishing burgers to the great-great-grandchildren of the men his father first served.
I try to relate as much, but it seems that Tommy’s hearing is shot. (When I compliment the pleasant crunch of his burger, he responds with directions to the bathroom.) Tommy’s legs, however, appear strong. And that’s what a great grill man requires, firm calves and an unshakable resolve to stand tall by the stove each day. I figure Tommy inherited that—along with the business—from his father.
436 SE SECOND STREET / 352-372-9294
Jacksonville
BEACH ROAD CHICKEN DINNERS
Ken and Tena Ferger, owners of this circa 1939 institution, set on the old beach road, think enough of their chicken to sell the dregs—brittle crumbs of salty batter that tend to flake off the deep-fried birds and settle at the bottom of holding vessels—for about a buck a bowl. And judging by my experience, the Fergers are not inclined toward hubris.
In the red and yellow main dining room, at a table set family-style with a platter of thinly crusted drumsticks and thighs, a bowl of cream-sauced green peas, and a basket of homemade biscuits, I spoon tawny dregs that taste of schmaltz into a bowl of gravy-capped mashed potatoes in need of oomph. And the dregs do the trick, adding texture and nuance and salt. The bird parts, on the other hand, need no help. Fried to a greaseless crisp they are models of the thin-crusted and lightly seasoned form.
