Southern Belly

by John T. Edge

  Back in 1987 Jimmy quit the carpentry business, hanging up his hammer and chisel for good. “I’d always loved to bake,” he tells me on the day I come calling. “I’d get off work at the carpentry shop and head for the kitchen. Now I get to do it all day long.”

  Jimmy takes his baking seriously. He’ll drive a good forty miles to get the jumbo eggs he prefers. He picks his own blackberries and peels his own sweet potatoes. And he knows that he does good work, but he’s always surprised, even honored, when someone comes driving up unannounced. “This is way out in the country,” says Jimmy. “I bake a good pie. I know that, but when folks drive over from Lafayette or New Iberia just to get one of my pies, well, I get so proud I almost pop.”

  3606 ROMERO ROAD-COTEAU / 337-365-7465

  Fried Chicken

  from Austin Leslie

  Serves 4 to 6

  This recipe, adapted, like the one that follows, from the Chez Helene House of Good Food Cookbook, is a keeper. The evaporated milk adds a touch of sweetness. And the chicken emerges from the oil with a proper mantle of crust. Some may consider ditching the dill pickles. Don’t do it. I believe they are ideal foils for the bird beneath.

  1 chicken (3 to 4 pounds), cut into 8 to 10 pieces

  2 tablespoons salt

  2 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper

  1 12-ounce can evaporated milk

  1 cup water

  1 large egg, beaten

  1 cup all-purpose flour

  Peanut oil, for frying

  1 garlic clove, very finely chopped, for garnish

  1 bunch parsley, finely chopped, for garnish

  10 pickle slices

  Place the chicken in a bowl and season with salt and pepper. Refrigerate uncovered for at least 1 hour and up to 24 hours. Remove from the refrigerator. In a large bowl combine the evaporated milk, water, and egg. Place the flour in a shallow bowl; set aside.

  Pour the oil into a high-sided cast-iron skillet or Dutch oven to a depth of at least 3 inches. Heat over high heat until it reaches 375° F. Dip the chicken pieces into egg wash, then dredge in the flour. Shake off excess flour, and slip the chicken into the hot oil without crowding, starting with the dark meat. Reduce the heat and cook, maintaining a temperature of between 325° and 350° F, until the juices run clear when pierced with a knife, 10 to 12 minutes. Remove to a wire rack or plate lined with paper towels to drain. Transfer to a serving platter and garnish the chopped garlic and parsley. Top with pickle slices and serve immediately.

  Shrimp Creole

  from Austin Leslie

  Serves 8 to 10

  Leslie’s reliance upon red wine reminds me of the great Buster Holmes, who once ran a café on Burgundy Street in the French Quarter Café. Holmes was famous for red beans and rice. And if my memory serves, his secret ingredient was, you guessed it, red wine.

  1⁄ 4 cup bacon drippings

  1⁄ 4 cup all-purpose flour

  11⁄ 2 cups chopped onions (about 1 large)

  1 cup chopped shallots (about 4)

  1 cup chopped celery (about 2 stalks)

  1 cup chopped bell pepper (about 2)

  4 cloves garlic, finely chopped

  1 16-ounce can crushed tomatoes

  1 8-ounce can tomato sauce

  1 6-ounce can tomato paste

  3 bay leaves

  1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

  1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

  1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves

  2 cups dry red or Burgundy wine

  1 cup water or shrimp stock

  1 tablespoon sugar

  1 teaspoon salt

  1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  Tabasco sauce

  4 pounds large shrimp, peeled and deveined

  1⁄ 2 cup freshly chopped parsley

  Cooked rice, for serving

  Heat the bacon drippings in a large saucepan over medium heat. Blend in the flour, and cook slowly, stirring until the bacon drippings and flour foam. Cook, stirring gently, but constantly until the roux is rich dark brown, 18 to 20 minutes.

  Add the onions, shallots, celery, bell pepper, and garlic. Cook until the onions are translucent, 3 to 5 minutes. Add the crushed tomatoes, tomato sauce, and tomato paste. Reduce heat to low and simmer until the flavors are well combined, about 15 minutes. Add bay leaves, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, thyme, wine, water or shrimp stock, sugar, salt, pepper, and Tabasco to taste. Simmer for an hour, stirring occasionally.

  Add shrimp and cook just until the shrimp is pink but still tender, 3 to 5 minutes. Add parsley and stir to combine. Taste and adjust for seasoning with salt and pepper. Serve immediately on cooked rice.

  MISsiSsIPPi

  vein of spicy pork, wrapped in a cornhusk and tied in a bundle of six. Pork cracklins rendered in woks by Chinese folks from Clarksdale, their accents as thick and sweet as molasses. Plate lunches from Peggy’s of Philadelphia, served on a makeshift buffet tacked up in the hallway. Welcome to Mississippi, my adopted home. If you like, meet me for dinner on Sunday night out at Taylor Grocery in rural Lafayette County, where fresh catfish is rolled in spiced meal and fried in roiling oil, and hushpuppies with the sweet scent of corn arrive steaming at the table.

  Amory

  BILL’S HAMBURGERS

  There may not be a business in the South with a more tangled family tree than Bill’s, an Amory institution since 1929. Bob Hill was the first man to fire up the grill down in the Vinegar Bend neighborhood, infamous hereabouts for illicit whiskey making. He called his burger stand Bob’s.

  In the 1930s Bill Tubb joined the enterprise, and the two worked hand in hand, cooking freshly ground burgers on a flattop grill, smearing on a bit of mustard and adding a slice of onion before stuffing the whole affair in a homemade bun from Toney’s Bakery down the street. In 1955 Bill and Bob had a tiff, and Bob’s Hamburgers moved down the street and soon failed in its new location. Meanwhile, Bill plastered his name on the brick façade formerly occupied by Bob’s and never looked back.

  Through the years, the good citizens of Monroe County have come to dote on the burgers served from the little grill at 310 North Main Street, no matter the proprietor, no matter the name. Sure, there have been some changes through the years. French fries made their debut in 1984, cheeseburgers in 1994. But among the cognoscenti, it’s consistency and community that have mattered all along. “We still grind our meat fresh every day,” onetime owner Greg Maples told me. “And we still don’t offer lettuce or pickles or any of that other mess.”

  Old-timers remember the days when the gin was still running across the way, and farmers, flush with cash from selling a bale of cotton, would pick up a pasteboard box of twelve wax-paper-wrapped sandwiches for the family. Others recall the time when most everybody asked for extra gravy on their burgers, and the cook obliged, dipping the bun into the grease that pooled on the side of the grill. “That was back before they discovered cholesterol,” offers a man dressed in overalls, seated at one of the fifteen-odd stools that are the little café’s only seats.

  And most everyone recalls the reign of Junior Manasco, who, until his death in 1994, served as a sort of unofficial ambassador for Bill’s, working the counter, grabbing drinks for customers, handing out Tootsie Rolls to children. “People would come in just to see Junior,” said Greg. “He was what you might call slow, but, you know, he never really missed a beat. He was the heart and soul of this place. Just to see him smiling behind the counter made you happy, made that burger taste all that much better. And you can bet that you’d never get that sort of thing at a McDonald’s.”

  310 NORTH MAIN STREET / 662-256-2085

  GULF COAST POOR BOYS

  All poor boys are not created equal. In New Orleans, origin point of the fabled sand-wich, they prefer their fried shrimp cradled in a crusty taper of fresh-from-the-oven French bread that shatters with the first bite. But along the Gulf Coast, westward through Biloxi, Gulfport, and Long Beach, the emphasis is oftentimes less on the qual
ity of the bread and more upon the texture that the bread achieves when toasted.

  It’s common hereabouts for cooks to slit a loaf open, maintaining the hinge between bottom and top, and toast the interior crumb on a flattop griddle. I’ve seen that done at BP convenience stores in Gulfport and at roadside stands in Biloxi, too. The effect is comparable to a Cuban sandwich, pressed on a plancha.

  Post–Hurricane Katrina, however, the best Gulf Coast poor boys I’ve eaten showcase an uncanny reverence for the original form. At New Orleans Style Seafood Poboys, set in a former fast-food outlet, just north of Biloxi in D’Iberville, Linda Dao and Tom Nguyen offer two menus to patrons. The yellow one features chagio (spring rolls) and com ga nuong xa (chicken with lemongrass), while the orange one boasts fried shrimp, oyster, or soft-shell crab poor boys, along with potato salad and onion rings.

  Although I like their pho (beef noodle soup), I’m crazy for their poor boys, especially the shrimp version, overstuffed with corn flour–fried crustaceans, the whole affair nestled in a crackly loaf from the ovens of the local Vietnamese-owned Le Bakery. (The shrimp, by the way, are caught by Linda’s father; during shrimping season, you can spy him in the parking lot, selling head-on twelve-counters from the tailgate of his pickup.) If you ask nicely when you order your poor boy, Linda will, at no additional charge, give you a mountainous platter of the bean sprouts and basil and other herbs that are traditionally served with pho. Though she will look askance when you do it, I like to tuck a thatch of those herbs inside my sandwich.

  NEW ORLEANS STYLE SEAFOOD POBOYS

  10271 D’IBERVILLE BOULEVARD/D’IBERVILLE/228-392-8683

  Clarksdale and the Mississippi Delta

  CHAMOUN’S REST HAVEN

  If you accept novelist Richard Ford’s contention that the Mississippi Delta is the “South’s South,” that this flat patch of fecund farmland stretching along the Mississippi River from Vicksburg northward to Memphis, Tennessee, is the most Southern place on earth, then you must be willing to embrace a South that is more than the sum of its African and Anglo-Saxon ancestors, for here, Lebanese and Chinese, Jew and Syrian, Italian and Mexican peoples have lived for generation upon generation.

  Most came to the South in search of work at a time when labor was needed to bring in the cotton harvests. The first Chinese came as indentured servants, the first Italians were lured to work as laborers on a plantation located in Sunnyside, Arkansas, just across the river. Lebanese began arriving in the late 1800s, and many soon took to peddling dry goods from door to door. Chafik and Louise Chamoun arrived in the United States in 1954, where Chafik’s grandparents had long run a dry goods store in the town of Clarksdale. “I started out selling door to door to people out in the country, selling a line of flavorings and such made by the Rawleigh company,” Chafik says. “But before long I had my own grocery store.”

  Chafik was a good merchant, a sound businessman, but in short order his wife’s talent in the kitchen overshadowed any specials he might run on cornmeal or canned tomatoes. Locals recall taking notice of the kibbe sandwiches that Louise prepared for the family luncheon, watching Chafik eat them at the counter and asking if they might try one, too. Before long Chafik was moving aside the shelves full of tinned sardines and sacks of sweet potatoes to set up tables on which to serve a burgeoning lunch trade.

  In 1990 the Chamoun family gave up the grocery business for good when they moved their operation down the road to the Rest Haven, a local institution opened in 1947 by another Lebanese family, the Josephs. It’s a vaguely modern place, outfitted with leatherette booths and tile flooring that would look at home in any small-town Southern café—that is until you take a look at the menu and realize that this may well be the only restaurant in the land where you can get an order of skillet-fried chicken with a couple of dolmathas on the side and a little bowl of hummus to begin your meal. Dessert is, of course, coconut cream pie, topped with a towering meringue.

  419 NORTH STREET/662-624-8601

  KIM’S PORK RINDS

  Kim Wong, a sixty-something-year-old native of Guandong Province in China, followed his father to America in 1949. His father, Duck Lee Wong, had made his way to the Mississippi Delta in the early years of the twentieth century. “My father moved here to find work, to become a part of the American dream,” Kim tells me. “By the time I came over, he was running a store called the Joe Bing Company in Friar’s Point, Mississippi. After I finished school, I joined him and helped run the store.”

  By the 1960s Kim had moved the family enterprise to the town of Clarksdale, where he operated a restaurant and grocery store, and supplemented his income by teaching karate lessons to local kids at night. The restaurant did fine, serving both Southern fried chicken and Guandong-style wok-fried sweet-and-sour pork, but it wasn’t until 1985, when the Wong family hit upon selling pork cracklins by the bag, that the family fortunes soared.

  For years, Kim’s wife, Jean, whom he met in Hong Kong, rendered lard from pork to use in the Southern-style biscuits that the restaurant served for breakfast, but tossed away the cracklins that settled to the bottom of the wok. “Back then, the fresh cracklins were only available when somebody killed a hog, so we just started putting ours in Ziploc bags, and selling them by the register,” Kim recalls. “People loved ours because they were available year-round and they cooked up crisper, too. Woks make the difference. They cook the cracklins more evenly in less oil. Two years later we closed the restaurant because we needed more warehouse for the cracklin business. The old buffet line still sits over in the corner where we left it.”

  Today, a dozen or more monster woks line the kitchen of the Clarksdale facility and the Wong family turns out a wide variety of products. “I’m really proud of my chicken cracklins,” Kim says. “When everybody started talking about how they couldn’t eat pork, we started frying chicken skins. They’ve been doing real well.”

  417 THIRD STREET/662-627-2389

  HOT TAMALES IN THE LAND OF THE BLUES

  A map of Mexico points the way at Jack’s in the community of Flowood.

  So what is this food—tamales—so often associated with Mexico, doing in the Mississippi Delta? you might ask. Isn’t this just an aberration? Like finding curried conch in Collierville, Tennessee, or foie gras in Fort Smith, Arkansas?

  No, it’s just not that simple. Tamales have been a menu mainstay in the Mississippi Delta for much of the twentieth century. Indeed, along with catfish, they may just be the archetypal Delta food. Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson sang about them in the song “She’s Red Hot,” recorded in 1936. Hodding Carter, always a moderating force in Mississippi race relations, began his book So the Hefners Left McComb with an ode to the symbolic importance of tamales. He tells us that the Hefners left McComb, Mississippi, after breaking the 1960s de facto laws against eating with interlopers. The Hefners’ great crime? They shared hot tamales, from Doe’s restaurant in Greenville, with civil rights workers.

  White and black Mississippians recall that tamale vendors traveled the streets of their youth. Author Shelby Foote, a native of Greenville, Mississippi, remembers two African American tamale vendors, “Stanfield and one they called 666,” selling tamales during the 1920s: “They sold them out of lard buckets,” Foote recalls. “They wrapped them in newspapers and sold them for fifteen cents a dozen. Hell, we were eating them before we ever saw a Mexican.”

  And why not? Tamale ingredients are few and readily available in the South: cornmeal, pork or beef, and a few spices. All one need do is steam the mixture in a corn husk, a sleeve of butcher’s paper, or, heaven forbid, a coffee filter (I’ve seen it done), and you have a Delta tamale.

  As best as I can determine, tamales came to be a Delta favorite sometime in the early years of the twentieth century when Hispanic laborers began making their way up from Texas by way of Arkansas to work the cotton harvest. Imagine the scenario: It’s an unseasonably cold November day. Two laborers sit side by side in a cotton field, unpacking their lunch pails. One, an
African American, has a sweet potato, a slice of cornbread, and a hunk of side meat. Though they were hot when he packed them at sunup, by lunchtime they’re cold.

  The Hispanic laborer unpacks a similar pail—probably a lard bucket lined with crumpled newspapers—but his lunch emerges from the bucket still warm, because tamales, packed tightly, have wonderful heat-retention qualities. In essence, the cornmeal-mush jackets serve as insulation. The African American laborer casts an envious eye over at his co-worker’s hot lunch, begs a taste and then a recipe. Soon both men are heading to the field, their pails packed with tamales. When the cotton harvest is over, the Hispanic laborer hops a train bound for Texas, and the African American, in need of income between seasons, starts selling tamales at rent parties and from a cart he pushes down the main drag on Saturday nights.

  All supposition aside, rather than fret about the origins of Delta tamales, most Mississippians would rather eat them. Visit any of these purveyors of culture and cuisine, and you’ll be inclined to do the same.

  Delta Hot Tamales

  OSCAR’S TAMALES

  Oscar Orsby once boasted that he sold “hot dogs as long as Fourth Street and pork steaks you don’t need no teeth for,” but he didn’t have to brag about his hot tamales. All of Clarksdale, Mississippi, knew they were some of the best in town.

  Until recently Orsby backed his converted pickup into a parking space at the corner of Fourth and Yazoo Streets, flipped the circuit breaker on his personal electric meter, plugged his little two burner stove into a socket on the utility pole, and sold hot tamales to anyone with a few quarters jangling in his pocket. Since Orsby retired, Hick’s Tamales seems to own the franchise in Clarksdale.