Southern Belly

by John T. Edge

  The rooms were nice enough—little connected cabins of the motor court variety, set in a row flanking the restaurant—but it was the food that proved to be the real draw. Old-timers still talk of how Lon would scour the Tennessee countryside in search of the best ham producers, of how he would massage a ham before he sliced it to “work up the juices.” Annie Loveless’ biscuits were of no less renown, light as clouds with a crusty brown mantle, the perfect foil for a hunk of butter or a dollop of homemade wild blackberry preserves.

  In succeeding years, the Loveless has passed on to new owners, first Stella and Cordell Maynard, then Donna and Charlie McCabe, now Tom Morales, and the old restaurant with its plywood-paneled walls and beaded-board ceiling has been scrubbed clean of its pleasant patina of age.

  Today the “No Vacancy” sign flashes day and night—the little motel rooms have been shuttered since 1986—and a new generation of proprietors tend the stoves, but the ham and biscuits remain exemplary. On one visit I asked owner Donna McCabe to let me in on the secret to baking those ethereal biscuits. “Our recipe is the secret, same one that Annie Loveless started out with way back,” she said with a smile. “And I’m not telling.”

  N.B.: On weekends, the Loveless can be overwhelmed by ham and biscuits pilgrims. The effects are twofold. Sometimes the biscuits suffer. Other times, it’s just a matter of escaping the crowds. Relief waits twenty or so minutes down the road at the Beacon Light Tea Room. Annie Loveless was once the proprietor here, too. And although the dim interior has gone Cracker Barrel Christian, the lard-enriched biscuits and center-cut ham steaks remain fitting tributes to her kitchen prowess.

  LOVELESS CAFÉ / 8400 HIGHWAY 100 / 615-646-9700

  BEACON LIGHT TEA ROOM / 6276 HIGHWAY 100 / 931-670-3800

  MAYO’S-MAHALIA JACKSON FRIED PIES AND CHICKEN

  You could order a Soul Bowl of stewed chicken giblets over rice at this walk-up, ringed by a gravel parking lot. Or a tripe sandwich. Or a platter with half chicken gizzards, half chicken livers. You could, taking note of the name, get a three-piece box of fried chicken, spiced and cooked in a manner dictated by the founders of the long-kaput Mahalia Jackson Fried Chicken chain. But such choices are inadvisable. Here, fried pies are, by far, the best food to emerge from the kitchen.

  If E. W. Mayo has his way, signs like this will line the South’s roadways.

  In the 1970s E. W. Mayo bought the last link in a chain of restaurants that in the 1960s aspired to offer an alternative to the franchise of the moment, Minnie Pearl’s Fried Chicken. The brand had been built around singer Mahalia Jackson, the woman who sold white audiences on black gospel music. But Mayo didn’t do it Mahalia’s way. A native of Cottage Grove in northwestern Tennessee, he decided to leverage the recipes of his mother, Eula Mayo, born in 1890, just one generation removed from the yoke of slavery. And as a marker of his ownership and of his mother’s reputation for excellence in pastry, Mayo appended the family name to the business.

  Mayo is proud of his mother, prouder still of her pie recipe. “My mother invented the sweet potato pie,” Mayo, born in 1917, tells me, his voice trembling with brag-gadocio. “I’m just carrying on what she started.”

  One bite of a fried sweet potato pie—a flaky crescent of dough bursting at its fork-crimped seams with a cinnamony custard—and you’ll know her legacy was entrusted to the right man.

  Although Mayo now spends part of his time in a wheelchair, he has grand plans for the future. Visit his home base, near Tennessee State University, and if you lean in close to hear through the Plexiglas partition that separates the kitchen and the two benches where anxious customers disassemble cellophane-wrapped pies, he’ll tell you about his plans for more fried pie outlets; maybe he’ll even show you the balsawood model of the one that’s already in service on Jefferson Street.

  2618 BUCHANAN STREET / 615-742-1899

  PRINCE’S HOT CHICKEN SHACK

  Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack will never be accused of false advertising. Housed in a run-down strip shopping center on the northern edge of Nashville, this simple storefront operation serves exactly what it claims: hot chicken. Make that very hot chicken.

  Crisp-fried in monstrous cast-iron skillets burbling with lard, before being doused in a fiery torrent of out-of-this-world orange-hued sauce, piled atop a nest of white bread, and crowned with a few pickle slices, the half-bird portions are as generous as the sauce is incendiary. For first-timers, unaccustomed to the uncommon heat of their birds, the good folks at Prince’s once had a sign tacked to the wall, serving notice to one and all. It read, “Don’t touch the chicken and then touch your eyes.”

  Today, the cautionary cardboard placard is gone, but the fiery fowl remains a Nashville favorite, a link to the 1940s when founder James Thornton Prince first opened a little take-out joint at Twenty-eighth and Jefferson Streets. His great-grandniece Andre Prince Jeffries runs the place these days, and by all accounts she’s got more business that she can handle. On my last visit, the gentleman taking orders was a customer who told me that he “stopped in to pick up a couple of breasts and was trying to help out.” When I left, my lips a-tingle from a taste of that great chicken, he was still at the order window, pen in hand.

  123 EWING DRIVE / 615-226-9442

  SWETT’S DINETTE

  Swett’s is a pillar of the local African American community, a restaurant that owes it success to the entrepreneurial zeal and pluck of one determined family.

  “When my grandfather and grandmother started out back in 1954, they were running what you might call a tavern,” present-day proprietor David Swett Jr. recalls.

  “They had ten children and when it came time to eat, well, my grandmother would feed the children right there in the barroom. After a while—I guess her cooking must have smelled so good to them that they couldn’t resist—customers started asking for the same food my father and the other children were eating. Before long food started outselling beer.”

  Today, iced tea is the beverage of choice and Swett’s is housed in a modern, brick building that bears an unfortunate resemblance to a Shoney’s. Inside, mauve laminate tabletops are scattered about a tile-floored dining room and an acoustical tile ceiling looms overhead. But the tradition of good food endures.

  Toward the back of the room sits a gleaming stainless-steel buffet line, stocked with a veritable cornucopia of country cooking: pork chops in a rich brown gravy, smothered beef ribs, and juicy chicken thighs sheathed in a soft crust; puffy squash soufflé, pole beans in an oily potlikker, thick mashed potatoes, and ropy batons of stewed okra. A creamy, corny hoecake and a dab of pepper relish from the little tubs set out by the register, and your feast is complete.

  “Yea, we’ve changed a few things since my grandparents’ day, but I think they’d be proud of what we’ve done,” David tells me as I plow into my lunch. “My grandfather was a good businessman. People respected him. But he never forgot how it was when he started out. He used to tell me, ‘I was a nigger when a nigger was a nigger.’ And I think my grandmother would recognize our food as hers. We may not cook with as much pork as she did; we try to be a little healthier. But the feeling is the same; it’s all about family.”

  2725 CLIFTON AVENUE / 615-329-4418

  BISCUITS:

  A SHORT HISTORY OF A QUICK BREAD

  Baking-powder-leavened biscuits are a relatively recent arrival on the Southern dining room table. Not too long past, wheat flour was a comparative luxury. Cornbread was the staff of life, the staple upon which armies marched and families with more mouths than money doted. For poor Southerners, a basket of buttered biscuits signaled good times, prosperity.

  The boys in the band sing the praises of Martha White.

  But by the early years of the twentieth century, the soft, red winter wheat so prized by Southern bakers for lightness and tenderness was widely available from companies like White Lily of Knoxville, Tennessee.

  In the intervening years, despite the fact that biscuits were a true “quick” bread,
capable of being rolled out and baked in fifteen minutes or so, enterprising Southerners conspired to shorten the time required, reduce the necessary steps.

  The most important innovation was the introduction of self-rising flour, complete with a premeasured quantity of baking powder, soda, and salt. Though many companies marketed a similar product, Martha White of Nashville rose above the fray, in large part by way of sponsoring Grand Ole Opry broadcasts by a then fledgling bluegrass group known as Flatt and Scruggs. “Now you bake right with Martha White,” they sang. “Goodness gracious, good and light, Martha White.”

  Though Flatt and Scruggs have since passed on, come Saturday night, when the Grand Ole Opry curtain rises, you can still count on hearing the Martha White jingle ringing through the hall:

  For the finest biscuits ever wuz

  Get Martha White Self-Rising Flour

  The one all-purpose flour

  Martha White Self-Rising Flour with Hot Rise

  Ham with Redeye Gravy

  from Benton’s Smoky Mountain Hams Serves 2 to 4

  Although I offer a recipe for ham and gravy and biscuits here, please do not think this choice to be a dismissal of the Benton way with bacon and biscuits. A slice of pork belly cured by Allan, fried in a cast-iron skillet until crisp, tucked in a downy buttermilk biscuit from Sharon, is among the most platonic of eats. But such as that pales in comparison to Allan’s way with ham steaks and redeye gravy. One whiff of the scents trailing from that skillet and you’ll trample a vegan to get a taste.

  2 slices country ham

  ½ cup coffee

  1 tablespoon brown sugar, firmly packed

  Heat a cast-iron skillet to medium. Trim the fat from the ham slices. Place the fat in the bottom of the skillet and cook for 1 minute. (If the fat is already trimmed or there isn’t much, use a teaspoon of vegetable oil.) Pour ½ cup of the coffee into the skillet. (Be careful as this will sputter.) Add brown sugar and stir until melted. Place ham slices on top of fat and cover with lid. Cook over medium heat. When steam comes out of the lid, remove lid and brown slices lightly. Remove ham to a warm plate and keep warm. Discard any remaining fat. Add the remaining ½ cup of coffee. Increase the heat to medium-high and cook, stirring constantly. When liquid cooks down slightly, pour gravy into a bowl and serve with ham slices.

  Buttermilk Biscuits

  from Benton’s Smoky Mountain Hams Makes 12 biscuits

  2 cups self-rising flour, preferably White Lily

  ¼ cups buttermilk

  12 pats of unsalted butter (about 6 tablespoons)

  Heat the oven to 375° F.

  Place the flour in a large bowl. Pour 1 cup of the buttermilk into the flour and stir to combine, making sure all the flour is moist. Continue pouring small amounts of buttermilk into the mixture until the dough follows the spoon around the bowl. (It will take most of the remaining ½ cup of buttermilk and the dough will be moister than your usual biscuit recipe.)

  Transfer the dough to a well-floured work surface. Knead gently two to four times, working a small amount of flour into the dough so it will not be sticky to the touch. Pat the dough with fingers until dough is about a half inch thick. Using a lightly floured 2¼-inch biscuit cutter, cut the dough without twisting it. Place the biscuit rounds on a baking sheet and top them with a small pat of butter. Bake until golden brown, 25 to 30 minutes. Remove to a rack to cool slightly. Serve with Ham and Redeye Gravy.

  East Texas

  here’s not much room in my Texas for vegetarians. A tub of coleslaw here. Maybe a side of side-meat-less collards there. Sugar cookies. Slices of buttermilk pie. Those sorts of things. Instead, I promise you chicken-fried steaks and double-decker burgers and hot gut sausages. Should you require confirmation of my meat tack, I suggest an audience with John Parks of Crosstown Barbecue in Elgin. His pit didn’t make the cut, but his quip did. When, after a long day of eating, I ordered a quarter pound of brisket and one beef rib, he stared me down. “One rib,” he stammered. “You want one rib? One rib wouldn’t do nothing but make me mad.”

  N.B.: Readers inclined toward maps should know that this book covers all lands to the east of I-35. Left of that line, the West looms.

  Austin

  CHICKEN-FRIED STEAK

  Chicken-fried steak is pounded beef (oftentimes round), salted and peppered and battered and fried in a manner commonly ascribed to chicken. It’s almost always topped with or served alongside a puddle of creamy gravy. The etymology is queer, sure, but the resulting dish, when entrusted to a skilled cook, is a paragon of Texas cookery appropriate for breakfast (with grits), lunch (with fries), and dinner (with mashed potatoes).

  I’ve eaten my share. I’ve gone haute at Ouisie’s Table in Houston’s River Oaks neighborhood, where, in addition to a battered and fried and creamed sirloin, they serve a chicken-fried steak salad with Roquefort dressing. And I’ve gone vulgaire at any number of roadside diners that promised hand-breaded meat and scratch-cooked gravy but delivered a freezer-burned shingle slicked with condensed milk. On the fringes, I once enjoyed a fine combo plate of chicken-fried quail and chicken-fried mac and cheese. And I’ve heard tell of chicken-fried tuna, but as of this writing I’ve yet to have the pleasure.

  While I’m pretty sure that the idea (if not the name) behind chicken-fried steak is as old as that German veal riff, wiener schnitzel, anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that if Texans didn’t invent the dish, they sure as hell perfected it. And then they embraced it as their own, pounding what was, in the day, grass-fed and pasture-raised and sinewy beef into tender steaks that took well to the batter and fry treatment.

  I’m not alone in believing that chicken-fried steak matters more here. “As splendid and noble as barbecue and Tex-Mex are, both pale before that Great God Beef dish, chicken-fried steak,” Jerry Flemmons, columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram once wrote. “No single food better defines the Texas character; it has, in fact, become a kind of nutritive metaphor for the romanticized, prairie-hardened personality of Texans.”

  I learned to appreciate the nuances of CFS (as the cool kids call the object of our affection) some years back in Austin, seated at table in Threadgill’s. Janis Joplin got her start singing at Threadgill’s when it wasn’t much more than a beer parlor. Over the course of the past couple or three decades, raconteur Eddie Wilson has guided the restaurant to fame.

  The place and the steak both come with proud pedigrees, although some locals grouse that the food has slipped a notch. As far as I’m concerned, their circa 2006 CFS is all that I remember, which means that it is a little shy of fork tender and boasts a craggy crust, the fissures of which pool with a pepper-shot gravy. And, as has ever been the custom under Wilson’s ownership, refills on vegetables like broccoli casserole are free.

  My meal compels a beer-soaked reverie, which I indulge at Threadgill’s bar before hauling clear across town to the Broken Spoke, a dance hall where CFS still takes a backseat to beer drinking and music making. Between pulls on long-necks, I fork a CFS that may well be better than the one at Threadgill’s. But I’m not quite sure.

  What I do know is that as the western swing music rises through the wood-floored room, I begin corraling folks and reading aloud from Flemmons’ treatise. Emboldened by hitting the six-pack mark, I work the crowd with gusto. I wouldn’t say that I am especially well received, but no one asks me to leave. And two people ask for a recipe.

  BROKEN SPOKE / 3201 SOUTH LAMAR BOULEVARD / 512-442-6189 THREADGILL’S / 6416 NORTH LAMAR BOULEVARD / 512-451-5440

  See pages 293–94 for Threadgill’s Country Fried Steak recipe.

  FRISCO SHOP

  Set on the north side of Austin, this diner recalls a ranch-style house with hacienda overtones. Beige stucco walls, a red-tile roof, louvered blinds drawn to block the sun. Inside, flagstone accents, not to mention lots of Naugahyde and linoleum. All the tropes of postwar Americana are there. And so are the foods: eggs and grits for breakfast; burgers for lunch; for dinner, those cottage cheese�
�stuffed pears that passed for salads when Eisenhower was in office, steaks, and custard pie.

  An early Night Hawk crew,

  ready for a long night ahead.

  Frisco Shop is the last restaurant in the Night Hawk chain, a fabled Austin institution. On Christmas Eve in 1932, Harry Akin opened the first Night Hawk downtown. He staked his claim to a clientele by promising free coffee from midnight until 6 A.M. And he built a reputation for quality based on raising his own cattle and butchering his own beef. Akin’s equanimity earned him low employee turnover. His lead role in the integration of Austin restaurants won the respect of the African American community and, eventually, one term in office as mayor.

  At the time of his death in 1976, Akins ran seven restaurants under the Night Hawk banner. And he operated a frozen foods division, too. Frisco Shop, which opened in 1952 and is now owned by Akin’s nephew and namesake, pays homage to that past by way of a menu that brooks no calorie parsers and a staff that has adopted intransigence as a quasi-religion.

  In other words, a Frisco burger still comes slathered with Russian dressing and saccharine pickle relish, then wrapped in a tight envelope of tissue paper; and a call for decorated eggs still gets you two over-easy swamped in chili with beans. As for the ladies who tread the floor and the men who work the grill, more than seven Frisco Shop employees boast forty-plus years of Night Hawk service, including the cook Junior Arnold, who began his career at the old South Congress Avenue location in 1952.