Southern Belly

by John T. Edge

  I order a ten-ounce fillet, rare, with hash browns, salad, and Texas toast, and turn to watch Bruce pull my fillet from the little roll-top cooler and scoop a handful of cubed potatoes onto the griddle alongside. Steam blossoms high in the air above the splatter of grease from the steak, and I sip from my wineglass and say a prayer that the bright promise of progress never darkens Herman’s doorway.

  2901 COLLEGE AVENUE / 479-442-9671

  Helena

  KING BISCUIT TIME

  King Biscuit Time, first broadcast on Helena’s KFFA radio in 1941, at a time when few, if any, black voices could be heard on the radio, made bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson one of the first black media stars of the modern South. The fifteen-minute broadcast, sponsored by the Interstate Grocer Company, distributor of King Biscuit Flour, was an instant hit with the denizens of the Delta. Despite the fact that the station’s signal could not be heard much farther than seventy-five miles away, Williamson’s fame skyrocketed.

  The meal that launched a bluesman’s career.

  What’s more, sales of King Biscuit Flour soared. By 1943 Interstate was selling bags of Sonny Boy Corn Meal, emblazoned with a caricature of Williamson sitting on a gunnysack of meal, a harmonica in his hand. In time the show took on a life of its own, in the same way that the Martha White Self-Rising Flour jingle, recorded by bluegrass pioneers Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, came to be an audience favorite, even among those Southerners born and raised on biscuits made with White Lily flour. Though Sonny Boy has passed on, Sonny “Sunshine” Payne continues to air the program at 12:15 each weekday afternoon, opening each show since 1965 with a hearty, “Pass the biscuits ’cause it’s King Biscuit Time on KFFA radio!”

  A bright beacon on a blighted street.

  BULLOCK’S CAFÉ

  Helena was once a rowdy river port where roustabouts prowled the docks by day, and bluesman worked the jukes by night. These days, like many Mississippi Delta towns, it’s a good bit quieter. Indeed, it’s downright desolate.

  Don’t tell that to Cora Bullock, who runs a café down on Missouri Street. “Child, we run out of food most days,” she told me. “Ever since I started cooking down here back in 1986—same year my baby child was born—folks been wolfing this stuff down.”

  The front room of the café is decorated with beer posters, and a pool table takes up a good bit of the floor space. Christmas lights blink no matter the season. Seated at one of the three creaky bar stools—when the sun goes down, Bullock’s is transformed into a juke—you can catch a glimpse of Cora in the back room, her sweet face framed by a pair of glasses, hunkered down over a battered old electric stove, sweat beading on her brow. Talk to her, she’s got a story to tell.

  Cora admits the neighborhood is in a bit of a decline—“Coke Lies, Crack Kills” warns the poster by the bar—but she’s doing just fine, thank you. “If I wasn’t cooking, I just don’t know what I would do,” she says. “I started out cooking when I was nine, cooking for my family. It was either cook or chop cotton, and I’d rather cook any day. Now I just cook out of my head. I go to the store every day and see what looks good.”

  One taste and you’ll be glad she took to cooking. On the day you visit, you’re likely to be handed a scrap sheet of paper, maybe an old manila envelope, on which she has scrawled that day’s menu. Dense meatloaf in a sweetish tomato gravy, chicken wings or turkey necks swimming in broth, pigs’ tails, pigs’ feet, good old fried chicken, mashed potatoes thick with milk and larded with butter, fat butter beans bursting at the seams: she serves it all and seasons each dish assertively, almost violently, with salt and peppers both black and red.

  On your way out the door, pick up one of the airbrushed aprons Cora sells. The one I bought features a kaleidoscopic still life of a plate lunch in repose.

  201 MISSOURI STREET / 870-338-1183

  PASQUALE’S TAMALES

  Used to be when you walked in the front door of Pasquale’s, the first thing you noticed, mounted on a far wall, was a sepia-toned photo in a severe Victorian frame. “That’s my daddy,” Pasquale’s proprietor, Joe St. Columbia, would say, gesturing to the little boy flanked by the Victorian-garbed man and woman. “He used to tell me that his daddy—my grandfather—came over to America in 1892 from Cephalu, Sicily, and this is as far as his money took him.”

  Helena was good to the St. Columbias. As the town grew, the family prospered. Joe’s father ran a taxi service and a grocery business, selling meat and meal to the sharecroppers who tended the cotton fields. When Mexican laborers began making their way up from Texas to work the cotton harvests in the early teens, they traded with the St. Columbias. After all, strangers in a strange land have to stick together. In turn, the St. Columbias learned how to make tamales, the food that has sustained the family ever since.

  “Back during the depression my father was approached by a young black couple—Maggie and Eugene Brown—who wanted to open up a little café,” recalled Joe, who’s inclined toward chef’s whites and sporting a floppy red and green hat. “Tamales were starting to catch on all around the Delta. So my daddy said, ‘Okay, we’ll open as long as you make ‘em like I tell you to.’ Well, it took off from there. That was over on Elm Street when the Browns ran it. Called it Elm Street Tamales. Today, we’re still using the same recipe. Tamales are the Delta in a nutshell, an Italian man’s recipe, learned from Mexicans, perfected by African Americans.”

  Though Joe has since closed the restaurant, his family still peddles tamales from a fleet of trucks that work the roadways of Arkansas. And the tamales that Pasquale’s turns out are just as good: bundles of cornmeal, piquant spices, and ground beef, wrapped in corn shucks and steamed to perfection. Joe may have retired, but don’t think for a moment that he has quit cooking. “In the spring we’ll make spaghetti with fennel,” he says. “And in the fall I’ll make Italian sausage with the seeds.”

  On-the-run eats, served from

  carts throughout the region.

  877-572-0500

  Hot Springs

  MCCLARD’S

  Hot Springs is a rough-and-tumble old resort town, a onetime haunt of the gamblers and gangsters who came to soak in the waters and bet on the ponies. During Prohibition, Al Capone was a regular visitor, as was his archenemy Bugs Moran.

  J. D. McClard, patriarch of the McClard family barbecue dynasty, remembers those days well. “Alvin Karpis—he was Public Enemy Number One for a good while—used to love our barbecue goat,” he recalls. “I was just a young boy then, and I’d deliver an order to his room. He’d open the door and you could see girls running all around with next to nothing on. Ol’ Alvin would give me a fifty-cent tip, and I’d be on my way. Boy, I would’ve voted for him for governor!”

  The goat and gangsters are now gone, but little else has changed at this 1928 vintage shrine to smoked meat and small-town charm. They still cook barbecue the old fashioned way. Take a peek out back, behind the whitewashed stucco dining room, and you’ll spy the pits: two pagoda-shaped, double-decker monstrosities, loaded down with pork hams on top, sirloin butts on bottom. “That way, the juices from the pork baste the beef,” confides J. D. And, no matter the time of day, there always seems to be an ancient, primer-splotched pickup pulling into the parking lot, its bed sagging with a couple of cords of green hickory wood.

  MCCLARD’s SAUCE

  McClard’s barbecue sauce is among the best in the land, a heady concoction of tomato puree, vinegar, red and black peppers, onions, sugar, and Lord knows what else. It’s a world-class sauce, a worthy complement to smoked beef or pork. And, as luck would have it, the ruddy stuff comes complete with a great story.

  “My parents had a little tourist court out on the highway, nine little cabins set around a restaurant,” J. D. McClard tells me. “Well, this fellow stayed with us a month or so, and when it came time to leave, he couldn’t come up with the ten dollars he owed us. He told my parents he’d give them his barbecue sauce recipe instead, said it was ‘the world’s greatest barbecue sauce.’
That was back during the Depression, and they figured they didn’t have much of a chance of getting any money out of him, so they said okay. Turns out, he was an honest man. The tourist court’s been gone, but that’s the same sauce we use today. Ain’t nothing better. We keep the recipe downtown in a safe deposit box, locked away, safe and sound.”

  Inside, the dining room is simplicity incarnate: twelve red swivel stools facing a low counter, eighteen booths spread out across a gleaming black and white tile floor, and white walls covered with pictures of famous folks and politicos. In the background, you can hear the throaty hiss of deep fryers at work.

  Order a spread, one of the restaurant’s signature dishes, and you’ll get a meal of gargantuan proportions: a clunky oval platter covered with corn chips topped with two house-made tamales strewn with barbecue beef and chili beans, spritzed with barbecue sauce, and showered with shredded cheese and chopped onion. It’s a nap-inducing, texturally complex, train wreck of a meal, one of the most glorious dishes in Dixie. But don’t stop there. The ribs will bring tears to your eyes, and the chopped pork is a smoky revelation. The fries are hand-cut, greaseless, golden brown, and damn near perfect. Forgo the catsup, and ask for a monkey bowl full of McClard’s justly famous barbecue sauce for dipping.

  505 ALBERT PIKE ROAD / 501-624-9586

  Little Rock

  SIMS’ BAR-B-QUE

  Morning, noon, and night, there’s a plume of smoke spiraling from the chimney of this brown brick bunker, home to Sims’ Barbecue since 1947. Inside, a jukebox over in the corner is playing lazy R&B. Budweiser posters celebrating the “Great Kings of Africa” plaster the walls. Slices of sweet potato pie and luminescent red velvet cake sit by the cash register.

  Step to the counter and order a rib sandwich, and you’ll get a good half-dozen bones piled willy-nilly atop a couple of slices of white bread, the whole affair drenched in a torrent of dirty-yellow sauce with a vinegary nose and an apple cider–sweet base. Though this sauce style is more common to central South Carolina and pockets of eastern Alabama, it’s been swabbed on Sims’ meats since day one, says Vinita Settlers, whose mother and father, Estella and George Sims, first began cooking whole hogs over hand-dug earthen pits back in 1937.

  “They were living out in the Hardscrabble Community on the southwestern edge of Little Rock and they got to cooking hogs for the holidays, for Labor Day and the second weekend of June,” Ms. Settlers tells me. “Hardscrabble wasn’t a very big place, maybe one hundred folks if you count chickens and dogs and everything. Long about ten years later my Uncle Allen Sims started his own business; he moved it to the city.”

  Today, in addition to the original Thirty-third Street location, Sims’ operates two branches in Little Rock. The business was controlled for a brief time by another family, but Allen Sims’ great-nephew, Ronnie Settlers, is now at the helm. “Yes, it’s a real family business,” says Ms. Settlers. “We’re right proud of our family. We’re especially proud of our barbecue.”

  716 WEST THIRTY-THIRD STREET / 501-372-6868

  LINDSEY’S

  Founded in 1956 by Church of God in Christ bishop D. L. Lindsey, this Little Rock institution has, in more recent years, taken to cooking its meat on a newfangled, commercially manufactured smoker. Accordingly the ribs and pork shoulder lack the distinctive bite of hickory that makes for a clearly superior smoke shack meal. But all is not lost. The fried peach and apple pies are still heaven sent—flaky envelopes bursting at the seams with sweet fruit.

  And though D. L. Lindsey has since passed on, his family continues to operate a business in which a bishop could take pride. A case in point: among the offerings on the menu is a bereavement platter, piled high with ribs, sausage links, pork shoulder, chicken, coleslaw, potato salad, and a loaf of bread—the perfect item for the harried Southerner who has too little time to cook, but cares too much for the family of the bereaved not to appear at their front door soon after he hears of a tragedy, bearing a platter of country cooking on high.

  After I polished off my pie, I asked the woman behind the counter whether they sold many of the platters. “Oh yes,” she replied. “But we put so much on them that I’m sure we lose money. We try to help out the families in our community in our own way. It’s the Christian thing to do.”

  203 EAST FOURTEENTH STREET / 501-374-5901

  Marvell

  SHADDEN’S GROCERY

  Country stores like Shadden’s were once the rule rather than the exception—weary wooden buildings with wide front porches and, inside, shelves stocked with cans of baked beans, tins of tuna, barrels full of pickles and crackers. Pigs’ feet and pickled eggs floating in murky jars, that sort of thing.

  Shadden’s, built in the 1890s, is a relic of that past, a dinosaur limping off alone toward an uncertain fate.

  Mr. Shadden usually sits just inside the front door, smoking cigarettes and swapping gossip. “U Kill It, We Grill It,” says the sign behind the counter. The shelves are filled with yesterday’s stock overruns: butterfly-shaped hair barrettes, cans of potted meat, and pouches of Days Work chewing tobacco. By the register is a Plexiglas display case piled high with eight-track tapes. “Groovin’ with Stan Getz” was hot the last time stock was replenished. The floor, a crazy quilt patchwork of splintered wood and faded yellow linoleum, creaks with each step. And yes, jars of pickled eggs and pigs’ feet sit atop the bar, rising and falling like ectoplasm in some sort of low-rent lava lamp.

  Barbecue sandwiches are cheap as dirt, hot as hell, and may well be one of the best bargains in the whole of the Southland. Cold beers are yours for the taking; just reach into the rolltop cooler next to the counter.

  Moments after you place your order, you’ll hear a steady thwack, thwack, thwack coming from the kitchen, and soon your sandwich arrives: irregular chunks of tender, smoky pork—cooked for at least twelve hours, says Shadden—heavy on the outside meat, napped with a fiery red sauce, and crowned with sweet coleslaw, all tucked within a toasted bun.

  I ordered a second sandwich for the road, and left pondering whether I should install an eight-track player.

  19771 HIGHWAY 49, FOUR MILES WEST OF MARVELL / 870-829-2255

  Tontitown Italian Eats

  Settlers of Tontitown—many hailing from the Veneto and Marche regions of Italy—came to the hills of Arkansas in roundabout fashion. Recruited by cotton lords to work the alluvial soil on the western bank of the Mississippi River, the Italians proved ill matched to both task and place. They were subsistence farmers, averse to the dictates of monoculture; they were highland and seaside dwellers, and were smothered in the miasmic heat of the delta lowlands; they were foreigners in a land that did not brook intrusion. (Their 1895 arrival warranted a front page headline in the Springdale News, “Dagoes Coming.”)

  Two years passed. Malaria took its toll. Austin Corbin, sponsor of the colony, died, and the colony foundered. Then, in January of 1898, Father Pietro Bandini of Rome, arrived to lead his kith, Moses-like, to a 700-acre plot of forlorn Ozark timberland. The Italians worked quickly to transform their new home. They tended apple seedlings and grapevine cuttings. They kept sheep and made cheese, according to an early visitor, “in the approved Lombard and Tuscan manner, sunned on green fern leaves.” They preserved fruit in “the Southern Italian style, cut open, filled with almonds and wild fennel … and flattened out to dry in the sun on wicker trays.”

  Loosed from their homeland, community feeds proved important for the settlers of Tontitown. Tradition holds that Virginia Morsani, along with Mary Bastianelli, cooked a fifty-egg batch of spaghetti in 1898 for the Tontitown harvest festival. En route from her home to the church, Morsani balanced a dishpan full of sauce on her head. Soon the cooks added roast chicken. And in a nod to the palates of their neighbors (and potential customers) fried chicken debuted by 1910. The typical Tontitown meal has remained the same ever since: homemade spaghetti, swamped in a ragù of chicken livers and beef; drumsticks and breasts and thighs, salted and peppered, battered and fried�
�the two cultures conjoined: Italian and Southern.

  One hundred years hence, Arkansas Smokehouse, up the road in Farmington, now crafts Tontitown salamis, cured not with salt in the prevailing Italian tradition but smoked the Arkansan way, and War Eagle Mill in Rogers has been known to ratchet their stones down on occasion, switching from a coarse grits grind to a Tontitown-fine polenta one. And in Tontitown proper, one, maybe two, restaurants cleave to the old ways.

  MARY MAESTRI’S

  Irishwoman Mary Quinn married Italian Aldo Maestri in 1906. Mary learned Italian cookery from Aldo’s mother. It took a while. Of early efforts, her mother-in-law once said, “When Mary gets through rolling the spaghetti, it looks like a possum hide—a leg here and a tail there.” By the early 1920s, Mary got the hang of it, and she and Aldo opened a restaurant in the family home. Today, her grandson, Danny Maestri, is at the helm, and though the restaurant is in its dotage, the spaghetti sauce still packs the punch of gizzards pulled from local birds.

  956 HIGHWAY 412 EAST / 479-361-2536

  See a riff on Mary Maestri’s recipe for Tontitown Salad on page 48.