Southern Belly

by John T. Edge

  ”

  * * *

  Never mind that nary a soul has ever fallen ill from ingesting a true country ham, while outbreaks of botulism seem to be rife in our nation’s baloney and hot dog processing plants. “That’s as poor a law as I’ve ever heard of,” Doug Freeman tells me when I stopped by his farm to pick up one of those teardrop-shaped beauties hanging in the back of his smokehouse. “I remember when I was a boy everybody up and down the road killed their own hogs. My father used to buy his groceries on credit and settled up with the store when he brought in those hams. Some years they even owed him money. My wife and I used to sell our hams to pay our fertilizer bill. Those days are gone.”

  Traditionally the cycle starts sometime around November, soon after cold weather sits in for good. After the hogs are butchered and the lard rendered, hams are trimmed of excess fat and submerged in a vat of salt with perhaps a little sugar added to the mix. There the hams rest for a period of two to five weeks before being wiped down and hung to cure.

  Ask twenty folks what is best done next and you’re likely to get twenty different answers. Some smoke their hams for a few days over smoldering hickory while others like Freeman add a bit of sassafras wood to the mix. Most agree that hams must go through what are called the summer sweats, wherein excess moisture not coaxed out by time spent in the salt trickles away during the infernal heat of summer.

  * * *

  “

  A butcher with one of those saws will spray the ham with dust. But if you do it yourself and you’re real careful, you can slice it up nice and clean.

  ”

  * * *

  Nearly a year passes before Freeman pulls his hams down from the rafters of the family smokehouse. Curing a country ham takes patience, but with the first bite you will soon resolve that it is worth any amount of money, any length of wait, for the meat is as sublime a treat as you are likely to ever sample: smoky, sweet, and bracingly salty if sliced and fried, salt-kissed and mellow if boiled.

  And though you may curse the government regulations that are to blame for a decided drop in ham production by some of the old masters, there is an ancillary benefit to this unwarranted governmental intrusion: if you travel to Trigg County, you get to meet kind folks like Doug Freeman. Ask nicely, and he’ll give you a lesson in carving that lovely hunk of hog flesh, so that you can avoid flecks of what Doug calls sawdust and you might recognize as bone dust. “A butcher with one of those saws will spray the ham with dust,” says Doug. “But if you do it yourself and you’re real careful, you can slice it up nice and clean.”

  605 NEW HOPE ROAD / 270-522-8900

  N.B.: Doug Freeman is angling to retire any day now. If he can’t take care of you, Colonel Bill at Newsom’s Country Hams will.

  NEWSOM’S COUNTRY HAMS

  208 EAST MAIN STREET / PRINCETON / 270-365-2482

  Still life with cured pork haunch.

  Corbin

  BIRTHPLACE OF KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN

  Tolstoy came late to the bicycle, learning how to ride at the age of sixty-seven. Harland Sanders, of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, did not begin actively franchising his fried chicken business until the age of sixty-five. Before then Sanders had worked as a farmhand, studied law by correspondence course, sold insurance, manned a steamboat ferry, and operated filling stations, most famously at a little spot on Highway 25, one-half mile north of Corbin.

  What began as a modest service station grew quickly and Sanders added a small café and later motel rooms. “I had a little room in the corner of the service station about fifteen-foot square that was used for storage,” Sanders wrote in Life as I Have Known It Has Been Finger Lickin’ Good. “About a month after I had been there I went and got me a piece of linoleum for sixteen dollars on credit … I put that down on the floor and wheeled the family dinin’ room table into the room. We had six chairs, so that was our restaurant seating capacity.”

  Thanks to the quality of his cooking, and a flare for showmanship that would give P. T. Barnum pause, Sanders’ fame grew exponentially. Governor Ruby Laffoon made him a Kentucky colonel in 1935, and by 1939 fellow Kentuckian Duncan Hines was touting the Colonel’s fried chicken and country ham in his Adventures in Good Eating guides. But there was trouble ahead. In the 1950s a new interstate highway was planned, bypassing the now-thriving Harlan Sanders Court and Café.

  Rather than move, the Colonel—by that time sixty-five years of age—auctioned off his business and soon was on the road, selling franchise rights to restaurateurs interested in replicating his pressure-cooked fried chicken, seasoned with those famous eleven herbs and spices. For more than ten years he traveled across the country by car, cooking batches of chicken for restaurant owners and their employees. If the restaurant owner liked what he tasted, Sanders struck a handshake deal that required a nickel payment for each chicken dish sold.

  By 1964 the white-suited dandy had more than 600 franchise outlets in the U.S. and Canada. That same year, he sold his interest in the U.S. company for $2 million to a group of investors. Though the Colonel remained a public spokesman for the company, in his later years he would complain that, as interpreted by corporate America, his beloved Kentucky Fried Chicken now tasted like “nothing more than a fried doughball wrapped around some chicken.”

  Harrodsburg

  BEAUMONT INN

  At the Beaumont Inn, situated in a former finishing school for young ladies built in 1845, the columned main house is staid, the floral-wallpaper-flocked dining room almost dowdy. But the ham that emerges from this kitchen is the best that you’re likely to taste in a restaurant. The secret, according to the kitchen staff at the Beaumont, is that they purchase one-year-old hams from a local producer and then promptly hang them for one more year before serving.

  The resulting two-year beauty is a paragon of pork—salty, sweet, savory, and just a tad bit earthy. Served with matchbook-sized biscuits made with lard, an exemplary corn pudding that threatens collapse under its own caloric heft, and a bevy of other Southern vegetables, this is a swoon-inducing meal.

  After dinner, drunk on ham and hospitality (the folks at the Beaumont are exceedingly nice), I need a place to collapse, so I make my way to the front porch and snag one of the rocking chairs. As the cicadas sing and my food settles, I make inquiries as to how one might purchase a two-year-old ham like the Beaumont serves. I am rebuffed, politely but firmly. “You can’t get this kind of cooking anywhere else but at home,” says the fellow in the next rocker. “Two-year-old hams never leave the farm where they were cured. Count yourself lucky, son.”

  638 BEAUMONT INN DRIVE / 859-734-3381

  Lexington

  SPALDING’S BAKERY

  Too many storied institutions renovate or expand with an eye toward reinvention. Often, a funky roadside joint with a hard-earned patina begets a soulless aircraft hangar with aluminum siding.

  I’m not advocating poverty as style. Many Southern food institutions start in private homes, at backyard pits, on side porches. Others evolve from convenience stores or corner groceries. Those locations are not born of romantic instinct. They are necessary compromises. Once a certain degree of success is achieved, the building of a true storefront is not an exercise in hubris; it’s the realization of a dream delayed.

  But food, as a literary theorist might argue, is as much about context as text. Too much gussying wipes clean the memories cultivated over decades of operation. The vibe suffers. And so do the pleasures of eating.

  Spalding’s Bakery, a Lexington fixture since 1929, recently moved from a downtown Victorian storefront to new quarters, on a ragtag stretch of roadway, across from Jif peanut butter plant. The new place isn’t nouveau. It’s a faithful replication of the old, with a bigger and better kitchen tacked on the rear.

  Martha Edwards, granddaughter of founder B. J. Spalding, is the one who, in consultation with her uncle, James Spalding, curated the vibe. She’s also the baker most devoted to their caramel-icing-draped cinnamon buns. The exterior r
ecalls the old location. Same redbrick. Similar white-framed picture windows. Inside, stark white walls, wooden showcases polished to a sheen, and a scroll-embossed National cash register.

  Alongside the register is a feeder roll of tissue paper, a stack of white pasteboard boxes, and a ball of twine for securing those boxes once Martha and her fellow family members stack them with, among other lovelies, cinnamon buns, carrot cup-cakes, and honey-glazed donuts.

  Speaking of donuts, I can say without equivocation that Spalding’s yeast-raised and honey-glazed trademarks did not suffer in the relocation. They are among the best available in the South. Unlike machine-made antiseptic products cranked out perfectly round and unerringly glazed by the gross, Spalding’s serves craggy circles of dough that are crunchy on the outside, cottony on the inside, and slicked with a honey icing that is gobsmackingly good.

  780 WINCHESTER DRIVE / 859-252-3737

  Louisville

  BROWN HOTEL

  Thanks in part to the season of parties that culminates in the annual run for the roses at Churchill Downs, Louisville has enjoyed a long and well-deserved reputation as the citadel of high society in the Bluegrass state. And for much of the city’s history, the Brown Hotel has been the epicenter of the social whirl. Debutante parties, Christmas balls, weddings by the score: the Brown has been the address of import since the doors opened in 1923.

  Brian Logsdon and Joe Castro, deep in the bowels of the Brown Hotel kitchen.

  And it was here, just a few short years after the hotel opened, that the Hot Brown sandwich was created by chef Fred K. Schmidt. Though guests of the day dined in grand style on caviar and lobster, sweetbread croquettes, and strawberries Romanoff, by the wee small hours of the morning when the band ceased playing, most were clamoring for a late-night breakfast. Schmidt, bored with cooking platter after platter of ham and eggs, did what cooks have been doing from time immemorial; he tried something new. In an oral-history interview collected by the hotel, a former employee recalled the very night: “[Schmidt] said, ‘I have an idea for an open-faced turkey sandwich with mornay sauce over it.’ At that time turkeys were used only for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and they had just started selling them year-around. I said, ‘That sounds a little flat’; and the chef said, ‘I’m going to put it under the broiler.’ The maitre d’ said, ‘It should have a little color, too.’ So Schmidt said, ‘We’ll put two strips of bacon on it.’ I said, ‘How about some pimento,’ and that’s how the Hot Brown came to be.”

  Though the sandwich has long since been adopted by seemingly every restaurant in Kentucky, with each adding its own little fillip, from replacing the mornay with low-rent sausage gravy to substituting highfalutin smoked salmon for the turkey, the Brown Hotel still serves the city’s definitive Hot Brown. On a recent Saturday morning I took a seat in the hotel’s J. Graham’s Restaurant and sank into an over-stuffed chair to await my prize. In short order it arrived in a brown faux skillet made of crockery, trailing scents of toasted cheese and fried bacon. The mornay sauce was still burbling when my waiter presented the dish with a flourish. One forkful and I knew I was in the presence of something special, a dish unparalleled in its richness, its reckless disregard for dietary restraint. Within moments I was wiping the last bits of mornay from the skillet with a toast point. Two cups of hot coffee later I was able to clamber to my feet, sated but woozy.

  335 WEST BROADWAY STREET / 502-583-1234

  For the Brown Hotel’s legendary Hot Brown Sandwich recipe, see page 125.

  BENEDICTINE SPREAD

  Mayonnaise-rich sandwich spreads are a constant of Southern life. In Smithfield, Virginia, they grind yesterday’s country ham trimmings, mix in a bit of mustard and mayonnaise, maybe a taste of relish, and slather it on store-bought white bread. In Oxford, Mississippi, my friend Mary Hartwell Howorth concocts a devilish tub of pimento cheese about once a week, adding yard onions and sage to a mix of shredded cheese, chopped pimentos, and mayonnaise. She likes it spread on rye or rough wheat. And from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Conway, Arkansas, you can bet that when the local garden club gathers for a white-glove ladies luncheon, chicken salad–stuffed finger sandwiches, served sans crust, will be front and center.

  But only in Kentucky are you likely to taste that singular spread known as Benedictine, for it was here in the city of Louisville that Miss Jennie Benedict first stirred up a batch, and it is here—and perhaps only here—that the sight of a tub of green, cucumber-spiked spread of mostly mayonnaise and cream cheese elicits not shock but salivation.

  Born at Harrods Creek, Kentucky, in 1830, Miss Jennie founded her Louisville catering company in 1893, working from a small kitchen behind her house. To announce the opening of her business she printed 500 fliers offering “to take orders, from a cup of chocolate to a large reception, sandwiches on short order, cakes large or small, trays and dainty dishes for the invalid.”

  Though Benedictine spread was not among her original offerings, Miss Jennie began serving it while operating a tearoom in later years. After catering a St. Louis wedding reception just before World War I, Benedictine spread won her such acclaim that the Missouri city is reputed to have offered Miss Jennie a guaranty of $1 million in business should she choose to relocate. Louisvillians raised such a hue and cry at the thought of losing dear Miss Jennie that she resolved to stay put, observing, “So great was the pressure brought to bear, that I promptly abandoned the thought of even considering such a move.”

  Miss Jennie died in 1928. In the ensuing years it seems that all of Louisville has attempted to replicate her recipe. None have quite succeeded, but I favor the restaurants and caterers who amp up the brightness of the mix by adding a healthy slug of green food coloring.

  FLABBY’S SCHNITZELBURG

  Settled in the 1850s by German Catholics in search of religious refuge, Germantown has, over the decades, expanded to include Paris Town, a French Huguenot enclave, and Schnitzelburg, a triangle-shaped German neighborhood within a neighborhood. In redbrick Louisville, it’s a place apart, where clapboard shotguns and camel-backs are the primary housing stock.

  Corner taverns, working-class dens of equity, serve as de facto living rooms for the neighborhood. Huelsman’s 19th Hole, Steve and Judy’s, Check’s Café, the Old Hickory Inn—all serve beer. Most serve food, which prompts local wags to refer to the assemblage of a dozen or so bars as the Germantown Food Court.

  The menus reveal. Fried fish platters and sandwiches are holdovers from the days when Catholics didn’t eat meat on Fridays. The prevalence of bean soup speaks to the prominence of Appalachian expatriates. Fried chicken is, depending upon your prejudices, a totem of Louisville’s Midwestern or Deep Southern populations.

  Flabby’s, which began as a grocery store in the 1890s and morphed into a tavern in the 1950s under the ownership of Jim “Flabby” Devine, serves the traditional Germantown bill of fare. But they tend a little more retro than most. Bratwurst and kraut, limburger on rye with hot beer mustard, and senfschnitzel (pounded and breaded pork with egg and dill sauce) are all a part of the daily rotation.

  A workingman’s palace.

  No matter, I go simple when I grab a stool at this warhorse of a restaurant and bar, ordering a pork schnitzel sandwich on a seeded white bun. The name may be German but the taste is Southern. Fried hard and dressed with gobs of mayonnaise, it’s the perfect ballast for beer drinking, which is, after all, the customary activity of tavern-goers.

  On my way out the door, I notice that the catercorner Old Hickory Inn has installed one of those scrolling, electronic banner signs to advertise its adherence to working-class values. Hereabouts, that translates into disdain for nonsmoking ordinances, love of weekend karaoke, and support for American troops stationed overseas.

  1101 LYDIA STREET / 502-637-9136

  MAZZONI’S

  In 1884, at a time when oysters were so plentiful that barkeeps tossed in a couple with each drink sold, two brothers—Angelo and Phillippe—immigrated to Louisville from Pie
tranera, Italy, and opened a downtown saloon. Beer by the keg, whiskey by the barrel, and oysters by the croaker sack: the brothers Mazzoni worked to slake the thirst and sate the hunger of the working-class men of Louisville.

  During those early years Phillippe journeyed back to Italy each summer, almost invariably returning with a nephew in tow, putting him to work in the family saloon. After numerous transatlantic crossings, he decided to remain in his homeland, and by 1909 Angelo was the Mazzoni in charge. Today, his great-grand-nephew Greg Haner is keeper of the family history, protector of the Mazzoni legacy, trustee of the fabled rolled oyster, a dish that my friend Ronni Lundy once described as “steamy and sexy, ocean-tanged, barroom sullied, low-rent, and high art.”

  Rolled oysters are nothing more than fist-shaped croquettes of three to five mollusks, dusted with cracker meal, dipped in a murky flour and water mixture called pastigna, rolled in seasoned cracker crumbs, and fried hard. Served in a small monkey bowl filled with oyster crackers, it’s as localized a specialty as you are likely to ever come across, unless you take into account the dishes called oyster knuckles once popular in some Nashville saloons.

  Though the original downtown location closed some years back, Greg has managed to preserve the feel of an old saloon at this suburban outpost. Above, a pressed tin ceiling looms. Behind the bar a wide mirror captures the manic pace of the countermen as they work to open beers and sling bowls of oyster rolls, platters of tamales, and sandwiches of fried codfish on rye to waiting customers.

  Greg moves the fastest, keeping up a friendly banter with waiting customers who have stopped in for a roll, a beer, and a bit of barroom gossip. It’s a role that he was born to play, indeed was reared to play. In a day when veteran restaurateurs can claim two decades in the restaurant business, Greg’s family has served Louisville in three different centuries.