Southern Belly

by John T. Edge

  On Friday and Saturday nights, a seat on one of the White Spot’s eleven orange vinyl-capped stools is a hard-won prize for besotted college students in search of the holy grail of grease. Like the late, lamented Blanche’s in Athens, Georgia, where, if you asked nicely, the wizened proprietress would whip up a gamy goat-meat omelet, the White Spot is an integral part of the college experience, cherished by those lucky few able to spend a good five years or so squandering their daddy’s money while earning their undergraduate degree.

  1407 UNIVERSITY AVENUE / 434-295-9899

  Harrisonburg

  KLINE’S DAIRY BAR

  Though the counter help can be sweet as sugar, and the custard tastes like the next best thing to homemade, the real stars of the show at this pink-and-blue-tile confection of a building are the two cast-aluminum Electro Freeze machines that sit behind the counter—dull, silvery cylinders with a vaguely Deco look—churning the custard to a soft, luxurious thickness.

  “They say Miz Bess Kline bought those machines used back in 1943,” says the fresh-faced college coed as she flips open an adjacent freezer lid to reveal a shallow trough filled with whorls of creamy blueberry custard studded with shards of bright blue fruit. “Regular ice cream is full of air, but not the kind we make. It’s real high in butterfat, too; something like 10 percent or more.” I snag a double-dip cone, and trailing drops of sweet cream retreat to the asphalt parking lot where, between licks, I drip a pattern worthy of Pollock on the pavement.

  58 EAST WOLFE STREET / 540-434-6980

  Lawrenceville

  BRUNSWICK STEWMASTERS

  There’s an ongoing debate between Georgians and Virginians as to where Brunswick stew originated. The city of Brunswick along the Atlantic coast, say Georgians. The county of Brunswick, in the heart of the Southside, say Virginians. In support of their claim Georgians trot out a cast-iron cauldron in which the first batch of the fabled game stew was cooked, while Virginians tell the story of Creed Haskins, who in concert with his cook, Jimmy Matthews, concocted the first such stew back in 1828. Truth be told, both stories are apocryphal, for at its essence, Brunswick stew is a huntsman’s dish, thick with squirrels and other sharpshooter prizes. Simply put, such a dish probably wasn’t invented by any one person or persons but owes its origins to the ages.

  I’m a Georgian by birth, reared on Brunswick stew. And at the risk of being banned from my native state, I’ll have to admit that if Virginia didn’t invent the stuff, they have most assuredly perfected it. When done well, Virginia Brunswick stew is a pale umber in color, studded with pegs of corn and pillows of butter beans, rich with strands of tender, dark chicken, suffused with tomatoes and potato, spiked with a bit of pepper, gilded with a healthy dollop of butter. Stirred to a froth with a special paddle, the stew has a light, almost airy consistency. “That stuff they make in Georgia isn’t Brunswick stew,” says stewmaster John Clary. “That’s chili. Or maybe it’s soup, but it’s definitely not Brunswick stew. At least in Kentucky they’ve got enough sense to call the stuff they make burgoo.”

  On the day I meet up with John in Chase City, Virginia, he has been working with his crew since 3:30 in the morning, peeling potatoes and onions, boiling boneless chicken thighs, and stirring the pot, always and forever stirring. Stewmasters like John are known by name throughout Southside Virginia. Like a DJ at a hip dance club, or a chef at a white-tablecloth restaurant, they are celebrities of a sort. And people seek them out, buying quarts of stew by the dozen. “We’ve already got close to seventy-five gallons presold,” John tells me. Most weekends during the fall, winter, and early spring, John cooks stew with his friends, raising funds for the local fire department or church, kindergarten or high school marching band. “We cook for causes,” says John. “It’s our sort of public service.”

  After what seems like an interminable wait, I put down my notepad and pen and pick up a spoon. John instructs one of the rookies to “dip me up a bowl.” The stew is perfection, a creamy blend of chicken and vegetables with a top note of pepper and pork, so light it’s almost soufflé-like. Forgive me, Georgia.

  To find out where and when John is cooking next, call him at 434-848-2222. “We usually don’t stray too far from home,” says the Lawrenceville, Virginia, resident.

  New Market

  SOUTHERN KITCHEN

  The peanut soup served at this trim little diner—replete with boomerang-print linoleum tabletops and a beige Permastone exterior—may well be the best I’ve ever tasted: pale blond, delicate, flecked with sweet onion, topped with crushed nuts, at once creamy and just a tad grainy. After sampling sorry, goopy versions that taste like condensed Campbell’s cream of chicken soup mixed with a dab of Jiff, it’s a revelation.

  That such a soup would show up on a Virginia menu should come as no surprise. Virginians are a peanut-mad people. But what’s this stellar bisque doing in the Shenandoah Valley? Aren’t all the peanuts grown down in Southside Virginia? “Well, yes, that’s true,” says Eddie Newland, whose mother and father opened the Southern Kitchen back around 1957. “But Mama just had a great peanut soup recipe, so she started serving it.”

  Judging by the contented smiles of the locals who pack the green vinyl booths morning, noon, and night, Mrs. Newland had some great recipes for more than just soup: fried chicken, crusty and savory, served on a heavy white platter ringed with magnolia blossoms; redbrick country ham with a salty bite; startlingly sweet stewed tomatoes served atop a base of saltine crackers; matchbox-sized biscuits, light and airy and buttery; electric-yellow coconut cream pie, crowned with high-flying meringue.

  “What’s the secret to your success?” I ask Eddie. His answer echoes an old Southern refrain: “We’ve had good help in the kitchen all along.”

  9576 SOUTH CONGRESS STREET / 540-740-3514

  Norfolk

  Working the waffle irons at Doumar’s in Ocean View Park.

  DOUMAR’S

  If you’re lucky enough to make it to Al Doumar’s drive-in between the hours of, say, 2:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon, you’ll spot the old man at work, a quiver of straws in his shirt pocket, a bright bow tie fixed around his neck. Stationed at the front window, a captain at the prow of the family ship, he works a series of four cast-iron, gas-fired waffle irons that resemble a combination of medieval forge and pinball machine. He’s making ice-cream cones—toasting buckwheat-colored batter to a golden hue, peeling the pliable square from the waffle iron, shaping it into a cone on a wooden mandrel, and setting the sweet treat into a rack to await the next scoop of vanilla, chocolate, or black walnut. Al’s movements are blessed with economy, touched with grace. He makes cones just the way his uncle before him did, and if you’ve got a spare ten minutes, he’ll tell you how it all came to be. His story of ethnicity and entrepreneurship is part and parcel of the Southern experience.

  “Abe Doumar, my uncle, immigrated here from Damascus, Syria,” says Al. “One day while working at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, he bought a waffle and thought to roll it into a cone, adding a scoop of ice cream on top. The ice-cream cone! In a short time, he was in business for himself. By 1905 he had set up a stand on Coney Island. He started traveling to all the state fairs and expositions. He’d team up with an ice-cream maker, erect a stand out of two-by-fours, and set to work selling ice-cream cones. He worked fairs from New York down to Florida before finally settling here in Norfolk at Ocean View Park back when it was the greatest resort south of Atlantic City.”

  Today’s version of Doumar’s seems far removed from its Victorian birth. Seated at one of the orange leatherette-capped stools, gazing out at the 1950s-era circus bigtop sign, you will not be surprised to learn that carhops still work the parking lot. Did I mention that the cheeseburgers are great, too? Smashed flat, slathered with sweet relish, mustard, and onions, before being wrapped in thin wax paper, they rival the vanilla-perfumed waffle cones in appeal. Oh, and don’t forget a limeade to wash it all down.

  1919 MONTICELLO AVENUE / 757-627-4163


  Petersburg

  DIXIE RESTAURANT

  From outside, the Dixie, with its weary gray façade and hand-lettered sign, looks like a thousand other small-town greasy spoons. Inside the narrow dining room, five stools with cracked green leatherette seats face the counter and fifteen-odd booths covered in the same institutional fabric hug the walls. A pressed-tin ceiling painted a dull beige looms overhead.

  Aged locals dote on their Tuesday lunch special, chicken and dumplings, or Thursday’s chicken livers on toast. Teens clamor for Dixie dogs, the aesthetes among them ordering their dogs upside down, with the mustard, onions, and chili cradled in the bun beneath the wiener.

  But take a gander at the breakfast menu, and you’ll know there’s something special afoot. The menu promises that eggs are scrambled, not with a slice of processed cheese goo, but with sharp cheddar. City ham, country ham, bacon, sausage, or brains, yes brains, are available for the asking. And then there are the fish offerings: herring roe, salt mackerel, salt herring, or trout—vestiges of the time when the Dixie-fed warehouse workers were involved in the coastal fish trade.

  Taking a cue from my waitress, I order mackerel fried “hard” with a side of apple-sauce and a few slices of tomato. It’s a trencherman’s breakfast, rudely salted and oddly satisfying, tasting of brawn and brine and life on the docks circa 1890. Picking my way through the bones for the sweet meat, I crunch into the tail, shattering it like a piscine pork rind. A spoonful of applesauce, a crescent of tomato, and a few swigs of coffee follow, and soon I’m on my way.

  250 NORTH SYCAMORE STREET / 804-732-5761

  Rawlings

  NOTTOWAY RESTAURANT

  The construction of the interstate highway system in the 1960s and 1970s sounded a death knell for many small Southern cafés and rib huts, chicken shacks and dairy bars. Highway 61 and Route 66, the Lincoln Highway and the Dixie Highway—if not gone, they were all but forgotten. Westbound tourists no longer threaded their way through downtown Memphis traffic along Highway 70, stopping off at Leonard’s for a brown pig sandwich. Southbound Atlanta travelers no longer wound past the Big Chicken on Highway 41, pulling over for dinner before swooping down into the city.

  Many cafés closed their doors, selling off their businesses lock, stockpot, and beer barrel. A precious few stayed on to fight. Nottoway Restaurant was one of those few.

  Nottoway flourished back when Highway 1 was the primary southbound artery for snowbirds, intent on wintering in Florida. At first, in the 1930s, it was just a little filling station. By the 1940s the Harrison family added a lunchroom. By the 1950s a twelve-room motel was built—all facing on Highway 1, all dependent upon the daily flow of traffic and dollars. Tourists and locals alike flocked to the Nottoway for salt-cured country ham and skillet-fried chicken, flaky scratch biscuits and billowy yeast rolls.

  But when I-85 came through, that all changed. “It looked bad at first,” says Sandra Harrison, daughter-in-law of Nottoway founders Mr. and Mrs. L. C. Harrison. “We were afraid the interstate would just pass us by. But we were lucky. Governor Albertis Harrison was our cousin, and he lobbied to get us an interchange. He’s dead now so I guess it’s okay to tell the tale,” she says to me with a laugh. “So we turned everything around so that we drew traffic from the exit rather than just old Highway 1. It came out all right. My children kind of grew up with that interstate; my son Chip learned to ride his tricycle on a stretch of that pavement before it opened back in ‘67.”

  Today, the Nottoway has expanded into a compound of sorts with a comfortable but dowdy restaurant, a fifty-five-room motel, a convenience store, and a gas station. And the food? One taste of a ham roll—a coarse slice of salty ham enveloped by a light, slightly sour yeast roll—and you’ll be singing the praises of the late governor.

  20316 BOYDTON PLANK ROAD / I-85, EXIT 39 / 804-478-7875

  Richmond

  Like the song says, he danced.

  **Mr. Bojangles**

  The Soft-Shoe Serve

  Thanks to the eponymous song by Jerry Jeff Walker, we all know that Mr. Bojangles danced. A native of Richmond born in 1878, Bill Robinson became the first black solo act in white vaudeville, earning as much as $6,500 a week. By the 1930s, he was starring alongside Shirley Temple in a series of four films including The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel. Upon his death in 1949, 500,000 people lined the streets of New York to pay homage as his funeral procession passed. In 1973 a statue of Robinson was erected in Jackson Ward, Richmond’s storied black neighborhood.

  So how did this toast of stage and screen get his big break? Ask around Richmond and you’re likely to hear this story: In his youth Robinson supplemented his dancing income by signing on for a variety of odd jobs, including an occasional stint as a waiter, oftentimes at the famed Jefferson Hotel. One evening, as the story goes, he was serving a distinguished gentleman resplendent in a white suit.

  Nervous, excited, or just plain careless, Robinson spilled oyster soup down the man’s shirtfront. “Think nothing of it,” said the man. “It could happen to anybody.” Gratified that the man didn’t throw a hissy fit, Robinson danced a soft-shoe routine in appreciation. Turns out the white-suited man was a promoter, Marty Forkins, who knew talent when he saw it. In short time, Forkins sponsored Robinson’s initial debut in New York, and the rest is history.

  * * *

  In his youth Robinson supplemented his dancing income by signing on for a variety of odd jobs, including an occasional stint as a waiter, oftentimes at the famed Jefferson Hotel.

  * * *

  An apocryphal story? Maybe, but it fits the pattern of how many white Southerners have often addressed black waiters, as equal parts servant, savant, and entertainer. Dance, smile, sing, and shuffle, and you might just get your break. At Lusco’s Restaurant in Greenwood, Mississippi, old line patrons still talk of waiter Booker Wright, who would recite the menu in a singsong fashion to the delight of all, and take a twelve-person order without benefit of pad or paper. In Smyrna, Georgia, folks reminisce about how the kerchiefed mammies at Aunt Fanny’s Cabin would belt out a gospel number between courses, filling tea glasses as they went. And today, the House of Blues in New Orleans packs ‘em in as fresh-faced black kids praise Jesus and pass the collards.

  SALLY BELL’S KITCHEN

  In all my born days, I had never eaten a sandwich that tasted as good as the white-bread-encased chicken salad and pimento cheese treats my aunt Ruth Barrett made. Trimmed of their crust, lavished with a thick smear of Duke’s mayonnaise and then double wrapped—first in wax paper bound with masking tape, and then in a thick blanket of aluminum foil—for me, they were the ultimate evocation of care and comfort, a bland yet beatific blessing bestowed by my mother’s only sister, my surrogate grandmother.

  I’ve still never eaten a better sandwich, but on a recent visit to Sally Bell’s Kitchen, a Richmond institution since 1924, I tasted treats that were made with the same care. A case in point: deviled eggs. The ladies at Sally Bell’s do it by the book, boiling the egg whites to a springy turn; mashing the yolks with a bit of mustard, a smidgen of relish, and a dusting of paprika. For over sixty years Estelle Curtis made more than 300 of the little jewels each day, wrapping each in its own pouch of wax paper. Nowadays that task falls to her daughter, Dazaire Thompson, but little else has changed at this vibrant bakery and sandwich shop.

  Step up to the counter and order a boxed lunch: chicken salad, cream cheese and nut, egg salad, pimento cheese, corned beef spread, or a number of other offerings, served on thin, sliced white bread, swaddled in a white pasteboard box alongside a dainty paper cup of creamy potato salad studded with flecks of celery. You also get a deviled egg half, a sharp cheese wafer crowned with a pecan, and a cupcake in … gasp … your choice of flavors, including caramel, strawberry, orange, lemon, and, my favorite, pineapple, the latter tinted an inexplicably bright shade of lime green. After you make your choices, the nice ladies will wrap the box in twine and fix it with a bow. I can’t imagine even MeMa asse
mbling a lunch with more care.

  708 WEST GRACE STREET / 804-644-2838

  LIMEADE

  Richmond claims limeade as its semiofficial beverage, much like Auburn, Alabama, claims lemonade as its civic drink.

  In Auburn, the undisputed vendor of choice is Toomer’s Corner, site of an old pharmacy that in its heyday served fresh-squeezed lemonade from a marbletop soda fountain. Although Toomer’s still sells lemonade, it’s now better known for being the corner where Tiger football fans celebrate football victories by draping the neighborhood trees in toilet paper bunting. (Among those fans inclined toward Lynchburg lemonades, many find the pale yellow liquid peddled by Toomer’s an ideal mixer.)

  In Richmond a love of limeade does not come draped in bunting. But perhaps it should. Sherbet green and ice white would be the color scheme of choice. In Richmond limeade knows no bounds. Over at Phil’s Continental Lounge on Grove Avenue, they even sling a grown-up’s version, spiked with vodka.

  Traditionalists can get their fix at the Mechanicsville Drug Store. Or the Westbury Pharmacy. And that makes good sense, because the style of limeade served in Richmond—fresh-squeezed lime juice, sugar, and fizzy water—probably owes its popularity to the legions of kids with soda guns who once worked the counters in long-shuttered Richmond drugstores.