by John T. Edge
That was back in 1943. In the intervening years, precious little has changed at this gray brick reliquary of Southern cookery, save the banishment of roomers in the 1960s. Each morning at 11:00 sharp the dinner bell rings and a horde of hungry eaters jockeys for position at one of the round oak tables spread with a cornucopia of country cooking: soft whorls of mashed sweet potatoes brightened with a bit of lemon; black-eyed peas swimming in a porcine potlikker; creamed Irish potatoes spiked with mustard; collard greens, squash casserole, creamed corn, stewed okra; and platter after platter of crusty fried chicken, gooey chicken and dumplings, and rosy, country-cured ham. But don’t reach for that fork before a member of the Wilkes family says the blessing. All heads bow, all kitchen clatter ceases when he or she steps to the center of the low-ceilinged dining room and pronounces, “Good Lord, bless this food to us. And to us thy service. Amen.”
107 WEST JONES STREET / 912-232-5997
SAVANNAH SOUL
Nita Dixon has long been heralded as the queen of Savannah soul cookery. She started out in the 1980s, peddling lunches to dock workers. Over time, she parlayed her success into Nita’s Place, a shoe-box restaurant with a steam table full of back-of-the-stove favorites like smothered shrimp and stewed okra. Nita enjoyed a good run in the 1990s. Locals and tourists alike flocked to get a taste of her food. It helped that Nita was the kind of cook who, apropos of nothing but her mood, would belt out an a capella gospel number.
But the tourism boom catalyzed by John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Evil, and later Paula Deen’s omnipresence on Food TV, left Nita in the lurch. By the early oughts her restaurant was closed and Nita was working again as a peripatetic cook and caterer.
On a recent trip to Savannah, I failed to track Nita down. Word had it that she was cooking at Shabazz, a fried fish take-away. After a platonic breakfast of Nita-worthy smothered shrimp and eggs at the relatively new Mom & Nikki’s, I traveled the length of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, stopping here and there in search of her.
When I arrived at Shabazz, she was not at the stove. Seated at one of the four picnic tables, arrayed on a concrete apron, beneath the boughs of a moss-draped live oak, I consoled myself with a brow-beading sandwich of cayenne-spiked deviled crab on toasted wheat. For dessert, I ate bean pie, a Muslim riff on the sweet potato standard.
After a quick detour to the Rib Castle, a hutch of a place in business since the 1950s, with a hickory- and pecan-stoked pit embedded in the side wall and a deserved reputation for the best ribs in the city, I regained focus and reacquainted myself with an old haunt, Walls Bar-B-Que.
Set on a narrow dirt lane at the heart of the historic district, Walls dates to 1943. That’s the year Dick Walls asked his wife, Janie, whether she would prefer he build her a beauty salon or a restaurant. When she chose the latter, he threw up this clapboard two-story.
It’s as forthright a barbecue joint as you’re ever likely to see: The creosote-framed pit is back left. Seating comes by way of three orange plywood booths, liberated from a fast food restaurant. There’s no air-conditioning, and on a recent summer day the wall-mounted thermometer was pegged somewhere north of 95° F.
Contrary to the name, barbecue is not the Walls family’s forte. Deviled crabs are. Studded with celery and mounded on tinfoil-crafted faux shells, they taste like the kind of dressing you always hope to find in a stuffed flounder dish. In other words, they’re great. And so are the collard greens, pleasantly leathery and punched with cured pork. As for the tomato-strafed red rice, a signature dish of Savannah, while the Walls family take on that dish may not match my memories of Nita’s, the pleasant reality dished hereabouts satisfies.
MOM & NIKKI’S / 714 MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. BOULEVARD / 912-233-7636
WALLS BAR-B-QUE / 515 EAST YORK LANE / 912-232-9754
THE FISH CAMP OF YOUR DREAMS
Fish camps and fry houses are fast vanishing: victims of customers who prefer to eat their fill in modern air-conditioned warehouses, rather than tumbledown, tar-paper and cinder-block shacks; and restaurant owners who care more about country-cute interiors and nightly cash register receipts than creamy coleslaw and onion-flecked hushpuppies.
Some have closed—Edisto Motel Café in Jacksonboro, South Carolina, and Pritchett’s in Columbus, Georgia. Others coast along, sustained by reputations won years before. And yet there are survivors, places where the sweet, white fish shatters beneath your teeth and the beer is so cold it makes your molars ache, where battered plywood walls are covered with graffiti, and fish are fried in cast-iron skillets the way God intended them to be.
Problem is, such places keep a low profile. They rarely advertise. There’s no need; the gravel parking lot is packed every weekend. Locals guard their secret haunts with a fervor. When I told a friend I was planning to write about one of his favorites, he said, “Go ahead write about it all you want. Just don’t give out the address and phone. If you do, I’ll string you up. It’s hard enough to get a table in there now.”
One of the best such fish camps is down along the Atlantic shore, an hour or so south of Savannah.
Shellman Bluff
SPEED’S KITCHEN
Speed’s is—how should I say this?—rustic. Set in a trio of trailers—two double-wides and one single—it’s a dive, pure and simple. Country music on the jukebox; lusty seafood on the menu. Flounder stuffed with fresh, local crabmeat; milky oyster stew chock-full of fat, sweet mollusks; and crab au gratin, rich with cheddar cheese and buttered bread crumbs: you won’t find better versions of these coastal staples. Service is sassy. On my last visit I was talking with the fellow at the next table when our waitress plopped his platter of fried chicken down with a flourish. “Here you go—one half of a dead bird,” she said with a wink and a sneer. Maybe she was disgusted with him for ordering chicken in a seafood joint; I didn’t ask. Speed’s can be a bit difficult to find, so you had best call ahead for directions.
912-832-4763
Statesboro
VANDY’S
One taste of the orange-tinged, mustard-kissed sauce that they slather on sand-wiches at this Statesboro institution, and you’ll take to wondering if there isn’t a South Carolinian tending the pits, for it is there that mustard sauces are most often savored. Turns out that founder Vandy Boyd was indeed a South Carolina native, born and raised near the town of Aiken, says his son Doy Boyd.
“Daddy made that sauce up himself,” Doy tells me. “But he only lived in South Carolina when he was young. By the late 1920s he was running a little barbecue stand over in the town of Portal, here in Georgia. After a while, the family went to sharecropping, but when I went off to World War II, well, he couldn’t get the crop in like he used to so he started barbecuing full time. He opened up here in Statesboro back in 1946, in a back corner of the Bargain Corner Grocery. He and my momma were cooking open pit, over oak.”
By 1953 Boyd had moved his stand to new digs, a peach-colored concrete-block building with a separate pit house set on a Statesboro side street. In the intervening years, the restaurant weathered a few storms including a desegregation suit brought by the U.S. Justice Department in the late 1960s and a family squabble in the early 1970s that resulted in Doy opening a separate location known as Boyd’s.
Today, the Boyd family operates neither Boyd’s nor Vandy’s, but the good open pit–cooked pork ’cue endures, thanks in part to the long service of dedicated employees, such as Charlie Pierce, who’s been smoking shoulders and butts to a turn since 1973. And what of that South Carolina-style sauce? Same as it ever was. Vandy’s son Carl still stirs it up by the gallon for the current owners.
22 WEST VINE STREET / 912-764-2444
Potlikker Soup
an homage to Mary Mac’s Tea Room
Serves 4 to 6
Think of this soup as a ham hock and collard consommé. That’s what it looks like, what it tastes like. And keep in mind: despite what you may think, this is a delicate potage, appropriate for a ladies-who-lunch habitat like Mary Mac’s
. Pepper vinegar, drizzled upon serving, sharpens the flavors, bringing collard to the fore.
Greens
5 cups water
1 ham hock
2 pounds collard greens
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Pinch of sugar
Soup
1 ounce fatback, diced (about 3 tablespoons)
4 cups homemade chicken stock or low-sodium chicken broth
1 cup cooked collard greens with juice
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Pepper vinegar, for serving
Cornbread, for serving
To make the greens, heat the water in a large pot over high heat. Add the ham hock and reduce the heat to simmer. Cook, stirring and turning the hock occasionally, until the water is well-flavored, about 45 minutes.
Meanwhile, fill the sink with water. Add the greens and agitate in the water so the grit will fall to the bottom of the sink. Remove the greens and drain the sink. Clean the sink and repeat the process until no grit remains. Cut away heavy ribs and discolored spots from leaves. Chop the greens into bite-sized ribbons. Add the prepared chopped greens to the ham hock broth. Season with salt, pepper, and sugar. Cook until very tender, 45 minutes. Set aside.
To make the soup, heat a large pot over medium heat. Add the cubed fatback and cook until brown, about 5 to 7 minutes. Drain the rendered fat. Add the chicken stock and greens with juice. Season with salt and pepper. Bring to a boil and reduce the heat to simmer. Cook for about 5 minutes for the flavors to combine. Taste and adjust for seasoning with salt and pepper. Serve in small bowls. Pass the pepper vinegar and corn-bread for crumbling or dunking.
KeNTuCkY
ere in the Bluegrass state, they cure and smoke pork hams until they are rosy and salty, sweet and smoky. Doug Freeman from up around Cadiz may well be the best ham man in Kentucky. An audience with him is the chance of a lifetime. Across the state on the banks of the Kentucky River, tavern cooks fry up messes of banana peppers and pack crocks full of pungent, garlicky beer cheese. I can’t get enough of either.
Bowling Green
**Duncan Hines** Flying the American Roadways
More than just a name emblazoned on a box of cake mix, Duncan Hines was America’s pioneer restaurant critic. Long before the Zagat folks were on the scene, before Jane and Michael Stern penned their first sentence of polysyllabic praise for a highway hash house, this silver-haired printing salesman was plying the American roadways in search of good food and clean lodging, making note of which North Carolina restaurant broiled the best T-bone steak and who baked the best pecan pie in Alabama.
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The finest lemon pie I ever had was in a town of fifty people. It cost ten cents.
”
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At first he just shared his finds with friends and colleagues. But in 1935 Hines compiled a list of his favorites and mailed out 1,000 or so copies as a Christmas card. The next year, he published an enlarged version titled Adventures in Good Eating. And by 1939 he was selling more than 100,000 copies of the guide a year, more than enough to quit his sales position in Chicago and return home to Bowling Green, Kentucky.
At a time when auto-owning Southerners were first taking to the highways en masse, Hines’ no-nonsense reviews were a balm to the anxious traveler worrying where he might find a good hot meal so far from home. Like his readers, Hines was not a man easily seduced by linen napkins and silver cutlery. “The finest lemon pie I ever had was in a town of fifty people,” he once said. “It cost ten cents. One of the poorest was in a large New York hotel. That cost forty cents.”
Not long ago, no well-stocked glove box was without a copy of Duncan Hines’ guidebook.
An admirer presents a love offering of cornbread muffins.
Travelers trusted Hines, could identify with his simple appraisals, his blunt writing style. “The food is plain but wholesome,” he wrote of the Mimosa Tea Room in Baxley, Georgia. Of New Orleans’ famed Arnaud’s, he noted only, “This restaurant is a favorite with native New Orleans people. Superb shrimp dressing is in demand.”
Though Hines prided himself on his integrity—arriving unannounced at restaurants and paying for all his own meals—late in his career he did agree to an endorsement deal, lending his name to a line of cookware and foodstuffs. In 1956, three years prior to his death, Procter & Gamble purchased Hines’ cookware and foodstuff lines as well as the right to market his guides and plaster his visage on their pasteboard boxes of cake mix.
JUDY’S CASTLE
I spent the better part of one winter morning seeking out a Bowling Green restaurant which I imagined would earn Duncan Hines’ approval. He was a particular cuss, and the search was not an easy one, for Bowling Green now boasts one of the largest ratios of chain restaurants to people in America. But by lunchtime I found my spot, Judy’s Castle. Their motto: “No hassle at the castle.”
Locals recall the days when Herb and Maxine Lowe ran the little diner back in the 1960s. “Herb used to call everybody Dingler,” a fellow in a corner booth told me. “And his wife, Maxine, well, she ruled the place with an iron fist. The Castle was the place we skipped first period class to eat biscuits and hang out. They were yeast biscuits, and in good weather, they rose up to two or three inches high. In bad weather, they were flat as they could be. It didn’t matter.”
Today, the Durbins, a husband and wife team, are in charge, with Paul at the stove and Felicia working the dining room floor. Salmon patties on Monday, chicken and dumplings on Tuesday, stuffed green peppers on Wednesday, and white beans cooked to a porridge, sweet potatoes in a citrusy syrup, and dressing full of sage and celery most every day: the menu reads like a hit parade of honest country cooking. And though the setting is far from grand, the Durbins keep a clean Castle, likely to win Hines’ seal of approval.
Biscuits made every morning from scratch rarely last until lunch, but I was lucky enough to snag the last one, a slight disk of bone-white bread with a high crown and a cottony interior. “I learned from this ole bowlegged good ole country girl by the name of Tina Potter, who used to work with the Lowes,” Paul told me. “That was the first thing I did when we bought this place, was ask her to teach me how to make the biscuits. My customers would have run me out of town if I hadn’t learned how to make them. We respect the reputation this place has built up over the years. When we bought it back in ‘94, all we changed were the locks.”
1302 HIGHWAY 31 WEST BYPASS / 270-842-8736
Burkesville
CORNER POOL & LUNCH
I am willing to hazard a guess that chocolate gravy is a dish most often enjoyed in the upland South. Though I have heard of it being served in the Arkansas Delta and also in the piney woods of southern Georgia, in my travels I have seen it on but two restaurant menus: the Kountry Kitchen in Moulton, a town in the foothills of Alabama, and the Corner Pool & Lunch, in the southern Kentucky town of Burkesville.
Of those two spots, only the Corner Pool & Lunch, a onetime bus stop–cum–recreation parlor and now a tidy café, raises chocolate gravy–drenched biscuits to a high art. Owner Azure Grider starts from scratch, laying a foundation of homemade biscuits on the front counter for all to see. On the stove, a cast-iron skillet of creamy sausage gravy burbles; beside that rests a battered tin pan half-filled with water, in which floats a second pan, brimming with chocolate gravy, rich as sin, dark as Satan’s black heart.
I order a chocolate gravy biscuit and watch Azure spring into action, retrieving a warm biscuit from a soup kettle where he keeps his stash. A twist of the wrist and the biscuit cleaves in two. Azure places the biscuit halves on the plate, interior sides down, “so that they don’t turn to mush from soaking up the gravy, and so you can cut into them easy with your fork.” Azure reaches for a ladle of molten chocolate, enrobes the biscuit halves, and slides it onto the counter. I sink my fork into the goo, noticing only now that there is a freckle-faced kid sitting thr
ee stools down with a wide-mouth vessel of chocolate gravy before him, a spoon in hand. Somewhere beneath the brown lagoon that fills his bowl, I assume there must be a biscuit.
500 COURT HOUSE SQUARE / 270-864-2735
Cadiz
**Doug Freeman** Ham Man
The Italians wouldn’t put up with this. Imagine some governmental agency coming between the good citizens of Rome and their supply of prosciutto di Parma. And you can be sure that the French would raise a ruckus if Parisians were cut off from their artisanal sources for saucisson sec.
But for the most part, we Southerners just knuckled under when the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared that unless a ham is cured in a USDA-inspected facility, it cannot be commercially transported across state lines or served in a restaurant. In other words, Trigg County ham producers like Doug Freeman and Charlie Bell Wadlington, Tennie Vanzant and Kerry Fowler, who like their fathers and grandfathers before them put up hams the old-fashioned way, could no longer ship their product to customers in the Carolinas, much less California, nor could they sell their hams to the local café.
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My wife and I used to sell our hams to pay our fertilizer bill. Those days are gone.
