Southern Belly

by John T. Edge

  TeNNESsEE

  ome of the plate lunch, the meat ’n’ three, and the blue plate special, Nashville is the place to be come noontime. At Arnold’s Country Kitchen, you can count on garden-fresh vegetables served from a steam table and hoecakes hot from the griddle. South of Nashville in the hamlet of Lynchburg, fine whiskey and fried chicken are to be had, the latter at Miss Mary Bobo’s Boarding House just off the square. Should you find yourself in western Tennessee, be sure to stop off in the town of Mason for a platter of Gus’s fried chicken or Memphis for a bowl of Frank Vernon’s barbecue spaghetti.

  Chattanooga

  KRYSTAL

  Long before the golden arches spanned the Southland, there was Krystal, a home-grown chain of burger stands patterned after the mother of them all, White Castle Hamburgers of Witchita, Kansas. Founded by Chattanooga businessmen R. B. Davenport and J. Glenn Sherrill, Krystal came of age during the Depression, selling small, square hamburgers on small, square buns for five cents apiece. The first location, a streamlined affair made of porcelain enamel and stainless steel, opened in October 1932 at the corner of Seventh and Cherry Streets.

  The business model was almost identical to that of White Castle founded eleven years earlier. Cheap cost, consistent quality, and clean, well-lit surroundings were the hallmarks then and now. Employees ascribed to the Krystal Kreed of operations:

  Hamburger Moderne, courtesy of Chattanooga’s Krystal Company.

  To Operate a Spotlessly Clean Establishment

  To Serve the Best Foods Obtainable, Properly Cooked

  To Render Quick, Efficient and Courteous Service

  To Offer All These at the Lowest Prices Possible

  Truth be told, there wasn’t anything particularly Southern about the Krystal concept. But in the same way that sliced, white loaf bread and tinned tuna fish came to be appreciated, first for their novelty and later for their economy, Southerners were soon clamoring for Krystals. And as the Depression ebbed and hundreds of hungry veterans returned from World War II, Krystal hamburgers—steamed on a flattop griddle, sprinkled with onions and pickle chips, and smeared with mustard before being stuffed in a fluffy bun not much bigger than a ladies compact—came to be a lunchtime staple, a gut bomb now fondly recalled by generations of Southerners.

  Fayetteville

  SLAWBURGER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

  Just when I was beginning to think that the McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King cabal had finally run roughshod over the Southland, banishing regional variants on the all-American burger to the dustbin of history, I had the good fortune to spend an afternoon eating my way through the south-central Tennessee town of Fayetteville, where slawburgers are the undisputed local dish of choice.

  Sure there are other spots on the Southern map where quirky local burgers are still savored—the pimento cheeseburgers of Columbia, South Carolina, and fried-egg-topped burgers of Roanoke and Charlottesville, Virginia, come to mind—and, yes, folks up around Greensburg, Kentucky, and Gastonia, North Carolina, do serve a similar slaw-capped comestible, but only in Fayetteville does the cult of the slawburger reach such exalted heights.

  On the courthouse square, two pool halls sit side by side: Bill’s Café & Billiards and Honey’s Restaurant & Billiards. Both serve a burger nestled in a bun slathered with a sweet, mustardy coleslaw that resembles chowchow. Walk in the door of either and you’ll see a long counter facing a flattop grill. The atmosphere at Bill’s is a bit ruder, the air a bit smokier, but the formula is much the same. Both restaurants boast pool tables, though at Bill’s the game of choice is dominoes, played with a surprising ferocity.

  Honey’s, opened in 1923 by Weston Stubblefield, is the older of the two, and the current owners boast that their restaurant is “home of the original pool room slaw.” Among locals the subject is a matter worthy of debate, with most folks in one of two camps: those who believe that Mr. Stubblefield first concocted the slaw, and a lesser contingent who claim that Stubblefield’s longtime grill cook, Bob Kelso—who once ran a burger joint known as Big Hearted Bob’s—was the first man to swab a burger with a fine-chopped mix of mustard, vinegar, sugar, and cabbage.

  After finishing my burger at Honey’s—a juicy, hand-patted disk stuffed into a toasted bun slathered with their cardamom-yellow coleslaw—I take the advice of proprietor Lee McAllister and make my way down to the local grocery store, intent upon picking up a pint of Honey’s Pool Room Slaw to take home. Any doubt I may have had about the primacy of slawburger culinary culture in Fayetteville vanishes when I take a gander at the refrigerator case, where, next to shrink-wrapped packages of hamburger meat, three varieties of hometown slaw are arrayed: Daniel’s Pool Room Slaw, Honey’s Pool Room Slaw, and Bill’s Spicy Slaw, the latter a pinkish version of the yellow norm. I buy one of each.

  HONEY’S RESTAURANT & BILLIARDS

  109 EAST MARKET STREET / 931-433-1181

  Greeneville

  BEAN BARN

  Beans and cornbread might as well be the state dish of Tennessee: white beans swimming in a beefy stew, as dished up at church picnics in Columbia; butter beans from a cast-iron kettle, served at a fire-department fund-raising dinner down in Sewanee; pinto beans, larded with smoked pork jowl, dipped from a tin pot simmering on the back of the stove in Lexington. With a coarse hoecake or moist slice of cracklin bread for sopping, it’s as simple, frugal, and good as supper gets.

  Problem is, few spots serve truly great beans every day. Truth be told, in Tennessee you can’t even depend upon getting great beans one day a week like you can in Louisiana, where Monday is the traditional wash day, the day you could count on finding that cracked ham bone from Sunday dinner bobbing in a pot of red beans meant for Monday supper.

  At least that’s what I thought until my friend Fred Sauceman told me about the Bean Barn, in business under one name or another since 1949. Here beans and corn-bread are an everyday staple, the house specialty.

  “You’ve got your choice,” Jerry Hartselle, the owner since the late 1970s, tells me. “Beans with onions, beans plain, beans with stew, beans all the way.” I ask for a bowl all the way and lean close against the counter to watch as my waitress spoons a bit of broth and a single chunk of potato from a pot of beef stew into a plastic bowl. A ladle full of deep maroon pinto beans goes on top of that, and as the darker beef broth floats to the top like an oil spill, she tosses in a handful of chopped onions and plops the whole affair down in front of me. A crusty hunk of cornbread wrapped in a paper towel, and my feast is complete. The beans are perfect, soupy and soft, but with a bit of tooth; the cornbread salty and coarse and not the least bit sweet.

  I am so drawn to my bowl of beans that I almost forget to ask Jerry about all the advertising paraphernalia displayed on the walls, transforming the dining room into a tasteful version of a Cracker Barrel restaurant. On a brief tour I had spied old cola bottles by the score, tobacco tins by the gross, and a collection of lard cans that would make a sow blush: Clover Leaf lard from Knoxville, Tennessee; Valleydale lard from Bristol, Virginia; Selecto lard from Knoxville, Tennessee; Azalea lard from Orangeburg, South Carolina. “My bread man got me started collecting that stuff a while back,” Jerry says by way of explanation. “He’s been collecting the stuff since he was a kid and he got me hooked on it, too. His real name is Jim Hensley, but we call him the Bunny man because he delivers the Bunny brand bread we use.”

  515 EAST CHURCH STREET / 423-638-8329

  Johnson City

  Dr. Enuf’s fleet of delivery trucks, ever at the ready.

  Dr. ENUF

  During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, patent medicine products, such as Sagwa from the Kickapoo Indian Company, promised Southerners relief from all manner of ills including catarrh and pulmonary consumption, premenstrual cramps and fatigue. Medicine shows traveled the land, hawking various and sundry cures that were really nothing more than alcohol infused with herbs and roots, boosted perhaps by a bit of cocaine or opium.

  But by the
middle years of the twentieth century, the popularity of patent medicine was on the wane, as the Food and Drug Administration worked to ensure that manufacturers clearly label their products and refrain from making fraudulent claims of their effectiveness. Today, few inheritors of the patent medicine tradition endure. No more Carter’s liver pills, no more Kickapoo salves, ointments, and tonics.

  But up around Johnson City, locals are still swilling a citrusy soda known as Dr. Enuf—and claiming it’s good for whatever ails you. Introduced to the area in 1949 by a Chicago chemist, the soft drink was initially marketed as a dietary supplement, chock-full of vitamins, packed with energy. Even today bottles read, “Ask your doctor about Dr. Enuf.” Rich with 260 percent of the daily requirement of thiamin, 120 percent of the needed potassium iodide, and 90 percent of the required niacin, the fizzy drink attracts today’s health-conscious consumers and hedonists alike, with the latter group claiming that, next to a slug of hair-of-the-dog, it’s the best cure for a hangover to be found in the hills.

  Lexington

  B. E. SCOTT’S Barbecue

  Ricky Parker hasn’t had a good night’s sleep since 1989. Like his mentor, B. E. Scott, who opened this roadside smoke shack back in the early 1970s, Ricky is resigned to his fate, content to catch a catnap or three over the course of a long night spent stoking an open-pit with shovel after shovel of smoldering hickory embers.

  Ricky was reared here, by the pits. He began his tutelage in whole-hog barbecue cookery back in 1976 at the age of fourteen when Mr. Scott hired him to do a few odd jobs: cutting and hauling wood, chopping cabbage for slaw, that sort of thing. “He used to pick me up from school in the afternoon and then take me home at night,” Ricky tells me. “Mr. Scott was like a daddy to me.”

  Back in 1989 Ricky took over the daily operations of the restaurant, and Mr. Scott retired to his home next door. “He’ll still help me out once in a while,” Ricky recalls. “If I get so exhausted that I really can’t take it, he’ll come over and check on the pits while I get a little more sleep. I’ve inherited a hard life. I know that, but it’s the only way. I’ve spent almost my whole life at this. You know, I got a call from this barbecue place up in New York called Virgil’s. They wanted me to come up there for three months to teach them how to do whole-hog barbecue—wanted to pay me $10,000. Three months! They must be crazy. You can’t learn how to do this in three months!”

  Ricky, like Mr. Scott before him, works two pits: concrete-block rectangles rigged with metal rods on which the splayed hogs rest for twenty-two to twenty-four hours of slow, slow smoking. And like his mentor, Ricky still caps the primary pit with old pasteboard boxes, stacked layer upon layer to seal in the heat. A second pit, kept at an even lower temperature, is used as a serving line of sorts, where the cooked hogs lie in repose until a customer orders a sandwich or plate. “Barbecue should be served straight from the hog,” says Ricky. “If you put it on a steam table it’ll dry out. We pull our meat from the pit by hand. And since it’s whole hog, we can do special requests. We can serve folks most any part of the hog they want. Some people like the white meat from the tenderloin or middlin’, we can do that. Ribs, we can do that, too. Some people want a special mix of outside and inside meat. That’s all right by us.”

  I order just such a mixed sandwich, topped with a bit of coleslaw and doused with Scott’s fiery vinegar-based sauce. The meat is tender, subtle, sweet, and smoke-suffused—as close to porcine perfection as I have ever tasted. I look up at Ricky. His eyes are at half-mast, a slight grin creases his face. “If they made me start cooking with gas, I’d just quit,” he says by way of accepting the compliment that was forming in my mind.

  10880 HIGHWAY 412 WEST / 731-968-0420

  Lynchburg

  MISS MARY BOBO’S BOARDING HOUSE

  For three years—from 1908 when Mary Bobo and her husband took over the Salmon House Hotel just off the town square, until 1911 when Tennessee whiskey distiller Jack Daniel passed away at the age of sixty-one—Lynchburg’s two most famous citizens walked the same streets, shopped in the same stores, even broke bread at the same table.

  Tales of Mr. Jack crossing the footbridge over Mulberry Creek—a duster coat wrapped tight against the winter chill, a tall hat perched on his head—to eat a midday meal with Miss Mary are legion in this bucolic little burg. And on a cold winter day in the year 2000, with the gas heater in the parlor at full blast and the dinner bell clanging loud enough to wake the dead, you, too, might swear that you caught a glimpse of Mr. Jack out there on that bridge, hotfooting it across the creek for a noonday repast of fried chicken, scalloped tomatoes, and rich, dank black-eyed peas; pot roast, turnip greens, and garlicky cheese grits.

  Not too long ago, Miss Mary herself would have been your hostess, but when she passed away in 1983, one month shy of her 102nd birthday, Jack Daniel’s great-grandniece Lynne Tolley stepped in. Though roomers had been banished long ago, the tradition of gathering at communal tables for the midday meal was still going strong. Lynne was the perfect choice to take over the reins. She is a native of Lynchburg. Her mother and Miss Mary’s daughter were best friends. And what she has helped preserve is the closest thing to a museum of country cooking that we Southerners have.

  Each day, perfect strangers gather at one of the wood tables on the ground floor of Miss Mary’s clapboard ante-bellum home, bow their heads in prayer for the briefest of moments, and begin passing bowl after bowl of savory Southern cooking around the table for all to share. For those lucky enough to be seated at Lynne’s table, conversation is punctuated by morsels of food history. On a recent trip, seated with a group from the Hermitage, Tennessee, Church of the Nazarene, Lynne shared her theory on why boiled eggs are used in giblet gravy: “Back when you raised your own chickens, if you killed a hen for Sunday dinner, well you would take the eggs from the egg sack and boil them to add to the gravy,” Lynne told us all. And when I cracked a weak joke saying that such a dish constituted the “ultimate mother and child reunion,” Lynne was kind enough to smile.

  Nestled in the bucolic burg of Lynchburg, Miss Mary Bobo’s is a site to see—and taste.

  295 MAIN STREET / 931-759-7394

  Madisonville

  BENTON’S SMOKY MOUNTAIN HAMS

  Allan Benton is a pork man who works with salt and smoke, transforming haunches and bellies into ham and bacon that many consider to be among America’s best. A visit to his roadside smokehouse, blazoned with the slogan “We Cure Em,” offers an audience with a humble master of his chosen craft.

  Bend his ear while purchasing a side of bacon or a shrink-wrapped sheath of thin-cut prosciutto-style ham. It’s time well spent. Tell Allan you love his hickory-smoked ham and he’ll say, “You just made my day.” Tell him you think his unsmoked salt and pepper–cured bacon is better than much of the pancetta served at America’s new guard salumerias, and he’ll answer, “You just turned my grin into a smile.” And Allan will mean it. Every word will ring true.

  Allan delivers his message with an earnest intent that rocks you back on your heels. Ask him for a brochure, and instead of giving you a catalog, he’ll write you a letter, sketching the life of Albert Hicks, the man who founded the company in 1947, the man Allan bought out in 1973. Ask Allan about technique and he’ll talk of the maple salt box he and his father crafted, about the dehumidifier he jerry-rigged to draw additional moisture from his hams, about the old cast-iron stoves he uses to burn his perfume wood, about the rub of salt and red pepper and black pepper he applies.

  Press Allan for a trick of the trade and he’ll tell you, “The secret is there’s no secret. Just long hours and patience.” Tell him you admire his handiwork, and Allan and his wife, Sharon, invite you to visit Madisonville, where, in a humble block building perched on the cusp of the Great Smoky Mountains, pork makes its leap toward immortality. Hesitate, and in an endearing display of aggressive Southern hospitality, he’ll suggest that you take a look at your calendar.

  2603 HIGHWAY 411 / 423-442-5003
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  For Allan and Sharon Benton’s Ham with Redeye Gravy and Buttermilk Biscuits recipes, see pages 268–69.

  Mason

  Does this roadside joint fry the best chicken in the land?

  GUS’S WORLD FAMOUS FRIED CHICKEN

  Hard by the side of Highway 70, sits a hoary shotgun shack ringed by dirt, gravel, and crabgrass. Though old-timers still call it Maggie’s in deference to founder Mary Magdalene Vanderbilt, these days her stepson, Gus Bonner, rules the roost.

  Despite the best efforts of four air conditioners and as many ceiling fans, the air is thick with grease on a recent summer night. Hot and sweet, it hangs heavy in the air, floating like a bank of clouds, enveloping everyone, everything. Save the one table closest to the kitchen, every seat is taken. Above the rattle and boom of the jukebox, glasses clink, voices strain to be heard. In the far corner, a teenage boy in cutoff shorts and a T-shirt leans against the particleboard wainscoting, working a piece of crust from his teeth with a frill-topped toothpick. Across the way, a group of three businessmen roll up their sleeves, tuck their neckties into their shirts, and peer back toward the galley-like kitchen, hoping to catch a glimpse of a platter of fried chicken headed their way.