South Toward Home

by Julia Reed

  The meat itself, she says, was “quite coarse and tough, but good.” I’m not convinced, but either way, that expedition sounds like a hell of a lot more fun than the exploits of the long-suffering pilgrims. But then they were not a people known for their fun-loving ways or for their way around a kitchen either, even when they had a bit more to work with. In David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, a terrific account of the folkways of four groups that came over from England, he writes: “Among both high-born and humble folk, eating was a more sensual experience in Virginia than in Massachusetts. There was nothing in the Chesapeake colonies to equal the relentless austerity of New England’s ‘canonical dish’ of cold baked beans.” No kidding. By that time (the eighteenth century), we were busy munching on far more lavish renditions of that first Thanksgiving fowl. Recipes from the era include one for a duck fricassee made with pickled oysters, a bottle of claret, copious amounts of butter and egg yolks, and a quarter pound of bacon. I might well make that this year. Or maybe some dark venison chili followed by a big plate of fried catfish and hush puppies. We should be most thankful for the bounty just outside our door, after all, and when Roosevelt made yet another visit to Mississippi, in 1911, the local folks were smart enough to know that. The luncheon in honor of the former president kicked off with mint juleps and included okra gumbo with beaten biscuits, deviled crab, and “Fried Milk Fed Chicken, Southern Style” with grilled sweet potatoes.

  Man. Mint juleps and fried chicken. That’s a Thanksgiving menu that might distract even the most devout turkey diehards.

  Recipe for Longevity

  For the last eight weeks I’ve received an email with the subject line “What’s your address? (sending you a cookbook)…” from an outfit called Paleo Reboot. Every day, I dutifully unsubscribe, report the message as spam, and delete, and every day I get another one. (I realize I could avoid many such irritating missives by getting rid of my AOL account, but old habits die hard and I’ve decided it’s cool rather than lazy to be a holdout.) I have no intention of sending these people my home address, but I finally did take a look at the website, where I discovered a young man named Dr. Ryan Lazarus (not an MD, exactly, but rather a “certified practitioner of functional medicine and Doctor of Chiropractic”), who was touting books related to the phenomenon that is the Paleo diet.

  For those of you who have been living under a rock—or who long ago abandoned AOL—the Paleo diet is a high-protein, high-fiber eating plan that purports to mimic the habits of our ancestral hunter-gatherers by eliminating dairy, refined sugar, legumes, cereal, grains, potatoes, and beef from cows that have dined on anything but grass. The premise (and promise) is that making like a caveman will enable you to get lean and all but eliminate the risk of heart disease and diabetes, along with a whole host of other ills. There has been much back-and-forth about the pros and cons of such a diet, with one of the biggest cons (yep, that’s a pun) being that no one could possibly know what the real Paleo diet actually consisted of and that different groups ate different stuff. Aboriginal Australians dined primarily on animal products, for example, while the Kitavans of Papua New Guinea ate fish and coconuts. Also, not only have our genes changed more in the last ten thousand years than Paleo proponents would have us believe, but also so have the species of fish and fruit, etc., that early man ate. Whatever. I’ll try anything for a week or two, but I have no intention of living a life devoid of—just to name a few—rice and gravy, lady peas, butter beans, biscuits, ice cream, yeast rolls, steak frites, or cheese.

  Instead, when it comes to ancestors, I prefer to draw on the eating habits of my more recent—rather more evolved—ones, including my paternal great-grandfather Sterling Price Reynolds, who died at age 106, and my three great-aunts who lived well into their nineties. My father grew up in the home of Mr. Reynolds (as he was mostly called, even by his best friend and brother-in-law, Uncle Gideon Crews), a sprawling place near the banks of the Mississippi River in Caruthersville, Missouri, that housed three generations of family. Even though Daddy recently turned eighty-eight himself, he can still recall, with vivid accuracy and enthusiasm, the three daily meals taken at his grandfather’s table. “Doctor” Lazarus, as well as Loren Cordain, the Ph.D. and professor emeritus who is the self-declared “founder of the Paleo Diet Movement,” would be appalled by every one of them.

  Right off the bat, breakfast, which was always served at 7:00 A.M. sharp, was full of Paleo no-nos. There was fruit (acceptable), but it was invariably topped off with the cream left over from the daily churning of butter, as was the oatmeal (unacceptable). To add to these sins, there were eggs (acceptable), but they were fried in the aforementioned butter and accompanied by cured ham (there was a smokehouse) and bacon or both (Cordain recommends uncured pork chops instead). The noon lunch was even worse: chicken and dumplings, fried catfish, or a roast of red meat carved at table, except on Sundays, when there was usually fried chicken; spoon bread or fried hot-water cornbread (slathered with butter); greens and/or field peas cooked with cured ham hocks, plus all the vegetables in season from the garden. Dinner, at six, was a slightly more formal affair. There would be beefsteak or quail, all manner of potatoes, plus yeast rolls and biscuits and sometimes popovers too. Paleo-friendly additions included oysters off the overnight train from New Orleans, fresh spinach or asparagus from the bed, watermelon every night in summer, and ambrosia for dessert—but even the ambrosia got doused with cream.

  The beverages would also have been highly alien to Homo habilis. Hot coffee was served during breakfast, iced tea (albeit unsweetened) during lunch and dinner, with more hot coffee served afterward. Before dinner the grown-ups enjoyed a highball (or two or three) of bourbon. This often took the form of an old-fashioned, which I’m pretty sure was made with regular old refined sugar as opposed to the coconut syrup used in the version posted on paleococktails.com. While the good professor Cordain is opposed to caffeine and frowns on distilled spirits and wine with sulfites (which is pretty much all of them), he graciously allows his non-obese followers to cheat 15 percent of the time.

  Mr. Reynolds didn’t smoke, but his daughter, my grandmother, was a lifelong smoker, as was her husband and his sisters, the long-lived great-aunts. (We’ll never know how long my grandparents would have hung around—they were in their eighties and as healthy as horses when they were killed in a car crash.) I was especially close to my aunt Margaret, who celebrated her ninetieth birthday at a big bash, where she was photographed with her “little” sisters Helen and Jessie (both in their late eighties) sitting side by side on a sofa. Each woman is holding a highball and a cigarette, with their cigarette “purses,” those old-fashioned snap-top things with side pockets for lighters, positioned prominently in their laps. I never saw Aunt Margaret without hers, and as a child I was forever entertained by that popping sound her lips made against the filter as she wrenched the last possible drag out of her Benson & Hedges 100.

  Now, let me hasten to add that I’m not for one minute advocating smoking—I know way too many people not nearly as lucky as the aunts. I’m just saying (and hoping like hell) that a lot of this is luck of the gene-pool draw. (And in Aunt Margaret’s case, the bourbon and tobacco might very well have been offset by the fact that she never married or had children—she was an extraordinarily cheerful human.) But I do think we Homo sapiens could be okay with a slightly longer view than that taken by Professor Cordain. His list of non-Paleo foods that adversely affect the health of humanity includes but is not remotely limited to potato chips, tacos, hamburgers, french fries, doughnuts, chips and salsa, sandwiches, sausage, pancakes, and pizza—in short, “just about any other product man/woman has their hand in producing.” At this rate, we’ll be picking blueberries off bushes with our teeth.

  Cordain clearly has a tiny tendency toward the pompous, so I’ll just respond by noting that I am profoundly grateful to the “man/woman” who figured out pretty early on that the noble pig would taste mighty damn delicious if you took your hands and salted an
d cured various cuts of him, notably his belly and his haunch. Bacon and country ham are, as noted, on Cordain’s list of stuff that is adverse to our health, but in this he is not alone. A year ago, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a World Health Organization group, announced its findings that the consumption of processed meat (anything “transformed through salting, curing, fermentation, smoking, or other processes to enhance flavour or improve preservation”) causes cancer, and the consumption of red meat “probably” does.

  Not surprisingly, the North American Meat Institute posted a host of studies that found differently. There was even a series of YouTube videos featuring the senior vice president for public affairs calmly telling viewers that “it is IARC’s job to find cancer hazards,” and that so far the outfit has found “sunlight, breathing air … working in a barbershop” all to be causes of the disease. Both camps have a point. If you bake yourself in the sun, you might get skin cancer and die. But my great-grandfather had a daily serving of cured and red meats (and alcohol), and he led the parade, on foot, that marked his one hundredth birthday.

  Though there was a lot of hoopla when the study came out, it seems unlikely that my fellow bacon lovers are going to give it up anytime soon. Americans eat an average of eighteen pounds of bacon a year, each. If you remove the vegetarians, vegans, and some Paleo dieters from the list, that means many of us are eating a highly disproportionate share of the roughly 5,760,000,000 pounds of pork strips consumed across the country each year. And that’s not even counting the Canadians. In a recent poll, 43 percent of our brothers and sisters to the north said they preferred bacon to sex.

  Also, it turns out that bacon has some health benefits of a sort. A study at the International Centre for Life at Newcastle University in England examined why the classic English bacon sandwich (a “bacon butty”) was a near perfect treat to cure a hangover. The researcher Elin Roberts told the Telegraph, “Bread doesn’t soak up alcohol but is high in carbohydrates that boost blood-sugar levels and speed up the metabolism, helping to get rid of alcohol quickly. Bingeing on alcohol depletes brain neuro-transmitters but bacon, which is rich in protein, contains amino acids that top these up, giving you a clearer head.”

  Gwyneth Paltrow would most likely say it’s all about finding your balance, but I’d bet big money that the whole time she lived in London with Chris Martin, she never ate a bacon butty. Me, I’m gonna take my chances. One of the world’s great pleasures is a dry martini, up, before moving along to a perfectly cooked steak and a bottle of a fairly big red. And then there is the trifecta of Paleo contraband, the pimento cheese dog at Atlanta’s Varsity. Bread/cheese/dog equals a Paleo nightmare, but for many of us, it’s heaven in a bite. Sadly, our more distant ancestors, who lived, at most, to the ripe old age of forty, never had the pleasure.

  Make Mine a Scotch

  In 1975, Walker Percy wrote a now famous essay for Esquire called, simply, “Bourbon.” This was long before the stuff became a cult and a bottle of twenty-three-year-old Pappy could set you back more than two thousand dollars. In the piece, Percy confesses up front that he’s no connoisseur (his preferred brand was Early Times, and he was no stranger to the rather rougher satisfactions of long-ago labels like Two Natural); his subject lay in “the aesthetic of bourbon drinking” and the “pleasure of knocking [it] back.” I will have to take his word for it. I don’t like bourbon.

  Let me say up front that I do like Walker Percy. You will not find a bigger fan than me. I reread The Last Gentleman every year and Lancelot and Love in the Ruins almost as much. I reread the bourbon essay too, quite a bit, because like so much of what Percy wrote, it makes me sit up and say, “Yes, yes, I know that!” It also makes me laugh out loud. To (very loosely) paraphrase Percy, there are few better defenses against the anomie of the twenty-first century than the shock of recognition and a good chuckle.

  But for me Scotch whiskey is the far superior front line. In Love in the Ruins, set in “a time near the end of the world,” the protagonist holes up in an abandoned Howard Johnson’s with fifteen cases of Early Times and a whole lot of Vienna sausage. By contrast, I could face down pretty much anything with some Dewar’s and Campbell’s chicken noodle. I do not for one minute begrudge Percy his bourbon. And while it doesn’t have the same effect on me, I totally get his description of “the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime” whenever he throws back a shot. That is great stuff on the page. But then—and here is where I have one tiny, tiny quibble with my hero—he gets a tad judgmental about my own whiskey of choice (which, by the way, is the world’s most popular spirit). He says he finds drinking Scotch to be “like looking at a picture of Noel Coward.” That’s a great line too, and very funny, but I happen to adore Noel Coward. There’s also this: “The [Scotch] whiskey assaults the nasopharynx with all the excitement of paregoric.” Unlike Percy, I am not a doctor and I don’t know much about my nasopharynx, but I do know that when I drink Scotch, there’s a warmth surging through my veins that makes me feel immediately better about what Percy aptly described as “the sadness of the old dying Western world” and enables me to be far more compassionate toward my fellow man. The feeling I get sounds not all that unlike the description junkies give of that first lovely hit, which is one of the many reasons I’ve never tried heroin.

  Percy’s barbs aside, being a Scotch drinker from the Deep South has been something of a cross to bear my whole life. One of the many stereotypes we Southerners have long had to put up with is that all of us are unreconstructed devotees of corn liquor. People are forever offering me glasses of bourbon—and in far too many instances, handing me a highball before I can put them off. Single-malt Scotch may be as hip these days as small-batch bourbon among the sort of people who keep up with such things, but there are lots of places down here where even a simple bottle of J&B is not easy to come by. Take, for example, the Grey Goose, a now (extremely sadly) defunct bar in Delcambre, Louisiana. My first visit there was on one of life’s seriously perfect nights. My then beloved and I had driven west from New Orleans to eat crawfish at Black’s in Abbeville and generally get up to no good.

  When we passed the Goose, an old roadhouse on the two-lane highway between Abbeville and New Iberia, we could hear Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” streaming out the open windows, so, naturally, we pulled into the oyster-shell lot. The crowd mostly consisted of drunk shrimpers, just off the boat and still in their white rubber boots, and the proprietor, a woman with an almost incomprehensible Cajun accent and a slight beard, managed to make me understand that she had not washed her face since the former governor Edwin Edwards had kissed her during his last reelection campaign, which at that point would have been eight years earlier. There was a large photo of Edwards on the wall and some aquatic taxidermy, I think, and when I asked the bartender for a Scotch and water, he just looked at me, utterly uncomprehending. Looking back, I’m sure it was the first time the poor man had heard the word Scotch, much less received an order for it, and I cannot imagine why I placed it, but he got down on the floor and rifled through the lower cabinet, arising triumphantly with a dusty bottle of VO, which I declined in favor of a cold Bud—delicious but not the same. Now I make like my mother, who never travels without a giant plastic flask of Dewar’s or Johnny Walker Black. Twenty-first-century anomie is no small thing to reckon with, and one doesn’t want to be caught off guard.

  The brand of Scotch I grew up drinking was called John Handy (presumably named after the Scot who graced the bottle in tartans and a tam). I developed a pretty healthy taste for it at a relatively young age by enthusiastically clearing up the glasses during my parents’ frequent and lively cocktail parties, and I kept at it until they stopped making it in the early 2000s. Though Mississippi was dry in my youth (it was the last state to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment, in 1966), booze flowed freely—it just meant that we were dependent on the brands the bootlegger stocked. I know our own per
sonal bootlegger carried Old Crow bourbon because my mother left a bottle in the mailbox at Christmas as a present for the postman. My father recalls that Ballantine’s and Grand Old Parr were among the Scotch offerings. The latter, featuring an etching of a bearded man on a fake parchment label and cobwebs etched into the glass, was a big favorite, especially with his lady friends (before my mother’s time), who liked using the empty bottle as a candleholder. When, on Daddy’s first trip to Westminster Abbey, he encountered Thomas Parr’s grave, the guide told him Parr was famous only for being very old. The label did not lie.

  Daddy and his friends switched to John Handy after it was served at a party given by the local bon vivant Larry Pryor, who was a world traveler and renowned foxhunt host (I learned to ride on a horse named Squire Pryor), a bachelor who generally served the best of everything so everybody figured that was the way to go. It turned out to be imported to New Orleans, where it was mixed with the local tap water and bottled before being distributed by the Schwegmann’s grocery store chain. It wasn’t until I went off to boarding school that I learned that John Handy wasn’t exactly the toast of the nation. In an attempt to seem older than my sixteen years, I asked for it by name in the D.C. liquor store where my friends and I occasionally scored. The man at the counter happened to be from Louisiana, and he not only refused to sell us anything, he also advised me not to embarrass myself further by asking for a bottle that no one in our nation’s capital would likely have ever seen.