Southern Belly

by John T. Edge

  305 SOUTH STATE STREET/662-624-9887

  THE KOOLICKLE

  I first noticed Koolickles in 2005, while traveling the Delta with a friend. We had planned to make it down to Yazoo City before noon to catch piano player Jamie Isonhood’s regular Saturday morning gig at the Sunflower Grocery. (He plays on a catwalk above the frozen-food section.) But we overslept and decided, instead, to drive about aimlessly.

  It was midafternoon when we hit Shelby. We were hungry. (In my experience, breakfasts of cold tallboys and hot tamales don’t quite cut it.) And we were thirsty. For a half hour or so, we sat at the bar in the Dew Drop Inn, drinking more beer and watching the proprietor hack a wild catfish into steaks with a knife that, in the right light, might be taken for a machete.

  No food appeared forthcoming, so we exited and ambled over to a small blues festival, staged against a backdrop of the old train depot. Judging by the listlessness of the crowd, the celebration was either just starting or had just ended. But there was food to be had, served from white pop-up tents by local church groups and civic clubs.

  I fixed on ferreting out local eats. Hot tamales, check. Fried buffalo fish, check. Spaghetti with a black pepper–shot ground-beef bolognese, served as a side in the manner of macaroni and cheese, check. All old school. But two of the tents advertised Koolickles, a delicacy that had, heretofore, never graced my maw. I ordered one strawberry-flavored Koolickle and, for good measure, one grape.

  Before I tell you of the taste, I should tell you that in the interim I have eaten another dozen or so Koolickles, all in the service of research. In conversations with convenience-store clerks, I have tried to plot their history. In an attempt to establish their bounds of distribution, I have quizzed innumerable friends. For the most part, I’ve come up empty. But I am not dissuaded. Modern folk foods like this garner little notice, little respect, until they go national. Think Buffalo wings. Think fish tacos.

  As of this writing, here’s what I know: Dill pickles steeped in Kool-Aid seem to be a Delta phenomenon. And they seem to be of fairly recent divination, certainly not predating the Carter administration and likely not coming before Clinton. Although some makers call for piercing the pickles with a fork before submerging them—and a precious few have been known to hollow pickle centers out and secret peppermint sticks within—the most common method of preparation is to simply empty a gallon pickle jar of its brine and pour in an equal measure of sweetened Kool-Aid. Wait a couple days and you have what are variously known as Southern sweet pickles, Kool-Aid pickles, and, in the most pleasant of coinages, Koolickles.

  Lately I’ve been inclined to eat my Koolickles at one of the Double Quick stores in Indianola (for no other reason than the knowledge that managers from the various stores comprise a singing group, the Double Quick Gospel Choir) or at Big Jim’s on Highway 61 in Clarksdale, which is, of course, across the road from a Double Quick.

  The setting at Big Jim’s is part of the appeal. The sides of the walk-up are plastered with various flotsams, including a bas-relief of a black Santa Claus. A sign advertises hog maws, hot tamales, and various burger riffs. And a red light mounted to a pole revolves day and night.

  As for the pickles—which remind me of the ones I first tasted in Shelby—they are textbooks of the form. Pulled from a jar of strawberry Kool-Aid, they emerge a mite shriveled, their color a marriage of green and red. The taste is confusing, at once sweet and tart and salty. Truth be told, they may be a once-in-a-lifetime eat for many. But in my book their presence on the byways of the Mississippi Delta serves notice that throughout the South undiscovered tastes hover on the horizon.

  BIG JIM’S/1700 STATE STREET/662-645-5600

  SOLLY’S HOT TAMALES

  Just up the bluff from the Mississippi River, Solly’s Hot Tamales has been serving generations of Vicksburg residents. Open since 1939, this little storefront serves a subtly incendiary bundle of corn and pork at 1921 Washington Street in Vicksburg.

  1921 WASHINGTON STREET/VICKSBURG/601-636-2020

  WHITE FRONT CAFÉ

  On a nondescript stretch of road in the sleepy nondescript Delta town of Rosedale, the White Front Café serves what may be the best tamales in Mississippi. Since the death of owner Joe Pope, his sister Barbara Pope has taken up the reins. Stop by late in the afternoon or early in the evening and you’ll have the best chance of finding someone at the stove, keeping a watchful eye on a pot of simmering tamales.

  902 MAIN STREET/662-759-3842

  The late Joe Pope, awaiting his public.

  Cleveland

  DELTA STATE FIGHTING OKRA

  A few years back, on a drive through the town of Cleveland, Mississippi, a roadside apparition appeared. Plastered on the side of a hulking, late-model station wagon, were the words “Delta State University Fighting Okra—We’re No Ordinary Vegetable.” I made a hard right turn into the parking lot and started asking questions.

  Here’s the story I was told: It seems that a few years back, the football team couldn’t get an ample supply of their traditional kelly-green jerseys. But their supplier had a great deal on an earthier brownish green. Strapped for cash like many colleges, Delta State opted for the okra-green jerseys. Soon after, from high in the grandstand, a local pundit was heard to observe, “Well, I’ll be damned. Don’t they look like a mess of okra wrigglin’ around down there?”

  More recently, a friend sketched a somewhat similar story. But he ditched the uniform angle and moved the action from a football field to a baseball diamond with an okra patch in the outfield. Same kind of okra epiphany. Same results, the coolest (and slimiest) name in sports.

  You, too, can share the vision. Show the world that you’re okra and you’re proud with a fine, all cotton T-shirt. The Delta State University bookstore (662-846-4640) always seems to have a good stock.

  Corinth

  WHITE TROLLEY

  Over in Lexington, North Carolina, people know them as bread burgers. I’ve heard folks all over the South call them wish burgers, as in, I wish there were more meat. But nowhere else have I seen these little beauties consumed with such zeal as they are in the northeastern Mississippi towns of Corinth and Booneville. In Booneville they’re known as dough burgers and they resemble ground-beef pancakes. Around Corinth, they’re called slug burgers, and, unfortunate name aside, folks swear by these faux hamburgers fashioned from ground beef and various fillers, including soy. (Corinth also holds an annual slug-burger festival where they crown a slug-burger queen. My wife, Blair Hobbs, was honored to teach creative writing to Mia Knighton, the first queen so crowned.)

  General consensus is that the best slug burgers in Corinth come from the White Trolley, a blond-brick rectangle out on the highway at the edge of town. Seating is at one of the fifteen-odd stools that face the counter, which, by the way, is lined with a dazzling display of snack cakes and honey buns, Moon Pies and Break cakes. I consider ordering a baloney burger (fried baloney on a bun) or a double dog (two hot dogs, split along their length and fried until they curl up, again served on a cottony white bun) but succumb to the pull of curiosity and order a slug burger and a side of Tater Tots.

  While I’m waiting, I ask the elderly woman next to me how slug burgers came to be so popular around here. “You can’t remember that far back, but back during the Depression meat was awful expensive,” she says. “And after that World War II came along and they got to rationing out our meat. Folks around here were poor. I guess we got used to doing without and never thought better of it.”

  As she talks I can hear oil cracking and soon my burger emerges from the kitchen, topped with a healthy dollop of mustard and a scattering of hacked-up onions. It looks and tastes a bit like a pig’s-ear sandwich, floppy, meaty, and vaguely cartilaginous. I chase each bite with a Tater Tot and the whole affair goes down just fine.

  1215 Highway 72 East / 662-287-4593

  Greenville

  A joint, pure and simple.

  DOE’S EAT PLACE

  Like Lusco’s over i
n Greenwood and Taylor Grocery just south of Oxford—not to mention Shadden’s Barbecue in Marvel, Arkansas; Joe’s Dreyfus Store in Livonia, Louisiana; and hundreds of other spots on the Southern culinary map—Doe’s Eat Place began life as a grocery sometime between the world wars. Back then Carmel Signa stocked the shelves of his home with tinned sardines, hoop cheese, and a few staples of the Italian tradition like cans of Roma tomatoes and sleeves of dried spaghetti. Neighborhood folks—fellow immigrants for the most part—were his first customers. The Signa family bunked in back.

  By the late 1940s Carmel’s son, Dominick, had taken over, and, as was the fashion in the Delta—both then and now—began rolling hot tamales and selling them by the bundle to passersby. Soon neighbors were showing up at the kitchen door, tin pots and pans in hand, to collect a dozen or two for a dinner. While waiting for Dominick to fish their reward from the pot, customers caught wind of the stuffed eggplant swimming in tomato sauce that Dominick’s wife, Mamie, had left simmering on the back burner, and soon they were inquiring if she might be willing to make up a few more of those for tomorrow night’s dinner. She was.

  Before too long folks started plopping down right in the middle of Mamie’s kitchen to eat her eggplant, and Dominick began broiling gargantuan beefsteaks, first for the local folks and later for the masses. As improbable as it may sound, in the intervening years, what was once the Signa family home and grocery has been transformed into a temple of gastronomy, recognized as one of America’s great steak houses. And a seat in the kitchen, at a rickety oilcloth-draped four-seater by the stove, is as hard won as a chef’s table at a four-star restaurant in New Orleans or New York.

  Though branch locations have opened in recent years—in Little Rock, Arkansas, Oxford, Mississippi, and elsewhere—the original Doe’s remains, as ever, a clapboard and cinder-block heap at the corner of Nelson and Hinds Streets—butt-sprung and busted—but nonetheless famous throughout the South for massive hillocks of prime beef broiled to perfection, and hand-rolled hot tamales, bursting with grease and spice.

  502 NELSON STREET/662-334-3315

  Greenwood

  LUSCO’S

  Butter pats no longer cover the pressed-tin ceiling. The menu, once recited by a waitstaff that was old, dignified, and black, is now handed out by waitresses that are young, perky, and white. Over the past few years, this Delta dowager has undergone many a change. Yet Lusco’s remains one of the most popular and peculiar restaurants in Mississippi.

  According to third-generation owner Karen Pinkston, who has operated the restaurant with her husband, Andy Pinkston, since 1976, the secret to the restaurant’s success can be attributed to sage words of advice offered by a longtime customer. “When we took over, he said to me, ‘Change, but change gently.’”

  To the denizens of the Delta, any change is suspect. Take those butter pats. “For years, people would use their knives to catapult the little pats up onto the ceiling,” explains Karen. “It wasn’t so bad during summer. But during the winter, when we turned the heater on, those little pats would come unglued and go splat! Right on somebody’s nice dress … Tradition or not, we just had to put a stop to it.”

  Long the haunt of wealthy Deltans who made their way to the wrong side of the tracks for a little dining, drinking, and slumming, Lusco’s still looks as though it has never escaped the Depression during which it was born. “Andy’s grandparents opened on the same day in 1933 that President Roosevelt was inaugurated,” says Karen. Once at the center of Greenwood life, Lusco’s now shares the block with a collection of boarded-up and soon-to-be-boarded-up brick-fronted businesses, including L.C.M.C. Mortuary Products.

  Though the restaurant was started by first-generation Italian immigrants, it was illegal hooch, not tasty Italian food, that lured the Delta gentry to Lusco’s. “During Prohibition folks came to drink Poppa Lusco’s home brew in the back booths. But Lusco’s didn’t serve any riffraff,” Karen says. “Back then it was mainly a grocery store. The food was kind of secondary; people showed up to dance, drink, and hide out.”

  The No Tell Motel of restaurant spaces.

  Thanks to ten-foot-high wooden partitioned “booths” with curtained fronts—the preferred seating—and a waitstaff that tells no tales, hiding out was (and is) easy at Lusco’s. But food is no longer an afterthought. Andy Pinkston is a stickler for the perfect steak: “We use certified Angus from Buckhead Beef in Atlanta. And I don’t sear my steaks; I broil them. Steaks should be tender, not crusty.”

  Served with Lusco’s Special Salad (a pungent oily mix of greens, capers, ripe olives, and anchovies) and a heaping helping of hand-cut fries, the T-bones, rib-eyes, and sirloins are superb. Yet the steaks pale in comparison to the house specialty: luscious, dove-white, broiled pompano. Served whole and slathered with Lusco’s lemony fish sauce, the broiled fish often overlaps the magnolia-laced platter on which it is presented. Of special note is the broiled shrimp. The shrimp are plump and juicy, if just a tad overcooked, but the raison d’être of this delectable dish is the sauce itself. Available in mild, hot, or “hoteeee” versions, it tastes of vinegar, cayenne, and an ineffable mixture of spices, all swimming in the thinnest and butteriest of emulsions.

  And yet as tasty as the food may be, it is the unique atmosphere, at once shabby and genteel, libidinous and chaste, that remains the primary draw. On a typical Saturday night the restaurant is filled to capacity. In the cavernous front waiting room, beneath a covey of stuffed ducks, society swells take occasional nips from hip flasks, while dirty, brogan-wearing farmers of indeterminate age and wealth pace the cracked linoleum floor, stopping by the cash register to chide the hostess about seating another party in their favorite booth. In the corner a clutch of tourists lounge on rickety sofas.

  As you walk the dimly lit hall toward your booth, snippets of conversation float upward. Booth curtains ruffle briefly, revealing glimpses of courting couples locked in embrace. Toward the front a family of six holds hands, heads bowed in prayer. In the far booth a group of college students drink heavily and whoop loudly. At moments like these you realize that, though Lusco’s has endured slight changes, it remains as hidebound as ever. That is, until you notice the sign: “Butter pat flipping is considered malicious mischief. Violators will be prosecuted.”

  722 CARROLLTON STREET/662-453-5365

  Hattiesburg

  LEATHA’S

  For reasons still somewhat unclear to me, Mississippi lags behind other states of the Black Belt South in both quantity and quality of barbecue restaurants. Spooney’s over in Greenwood smokes some good pig as does Westside Bar-B-Que in New Albany. And there are a good half-dozen other joints scattered about the state that do a decent job with ribs and shoulders. But the state lacks critical barbecue mass.

  Now if you ascribe to the notion that, at least in the Deep South, the best pitmasters have often been African American, then this dearth of great barbecue in the state with the highest percentage of black population just doesn’t compute. Chalk it up to a legacy of poverty and prejudice if you like, but, for me, neither wholly explains the situation.

  Leatha Jackson stands proud at the door to her smokehouse.

  One notable exception is Leatha’s, an African American–owned smokehouse of the highest order, set among the piney woods of southern Mississippi. Pork or—heaven forbid—beef ribs are the draw and they’re a paragon of the pitmaster’s art. Charred just slightly after a five- to six-hour turn on the huge upright smoker that for the longest time set in a tin-roofed shack across the way, they fall from the bone with the slightest tug. And the sauce, served on the side in a coffee cup, is sweet and catsupy, but balanced with a bit of heat. Fresh-cut fries, regrettable brown-and-serve rolls, and a fat bowl of coleslaw complete the feast.

  Leatha Jackson has been the proprietor here since 1974, and an audience with her is not to be missed. After I finish my ribs, Mrs. Jackson, pulls up a red metal folding chair and starts to talk. “I picked cotton when I was a child, until I got just about
fed up with it and left that mess behind,” she tells me. “I got a ride on a log truck and I was gone. That was back around 1948; I guess I was twenty-five or so. Now I got my own place and I got my children with me. God has most definitely blessed me. My daughters live right alongside me. That’s my son, Larry, over there. When we get crowded, he’ll go from table to table singing for folks. Some people come just to hear him sing.”

  Sensing an opening, Larry sidles over. “I can sing Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, Elvis, most anybody,” he says. “I’ve won twenty-nine trophies for my singing. Want to hear me sing, mister?” I tell him that I would love to hear him sing. At that Mrs. Jackson just beams, and Larry breaks into a rousing rendition of Boy George’s “Karma Chameleon.”

  6374 HIGHWAY 98 WEST/601-271-6003

  Jackson

  BIG APPLE INN

  Each morning this Farish Street institution, open since 1939, buys about 300 pig ears from a local butcher, slices them in half, and tosses them in huge pressure cookers where they stew until soft. Locals munch them morning, noon and night.

  On my last visit, Gene Lee Jr., great-grandson of founder, Big Juan Mora, was still aflutter after a recent stopover by a film crew from the Ripley’s Believe It or Not television show. It seems they had never heard tell of a pig’s-ear sandwich before and spent a day filming at the restaurant. By the time you read this, all the world will surely know of this peculiar porcine delicacy thanks to this unprecedented gastronomic scoop scored by the dogged investigative Ripley’s team. Trouble is—as most Southerners know—there’s nothing so special about a pig’s-ear sandwich. We Southerners have long consumed every part of the hog but the squeal. Trotters and maws, lips and lights, we eat it all, and though, these days, such delicacies show up less and less often on restaurant menus, the Big Apple is not the only pig’s-ear sand-wich purveyor south of the Mason and Dixon.