by John T. Edge
That said, the Big Apple is a joint worth knowing about, a vestige of the day when Farish Street, like Auburn Avenue in Atlanta or Beale Street in Memphis, was the black business address of import. Today, Farish Street is, for the most part, a rather forlorn thoroughfare, chockablock with abandoned storefronts, but the Big Apple seems to be always pulsing with life, its Wurlitzer Americana jukebox booming forth with the sounds of Jesse Graham singing “Do Me Baby” or Bobby Blue Bland crooning “Twenty-Room House.” And though the pig’s-ear sandwiches are indeed good, I prefer their curious smoked sausage sandwiches, made from link sausage pulled loose from its casing, sizzled on the grill, and served on a cottony bun drenched in mustard, slaw, and hot sauce. Could it be the only one like it available in the South?
509 NORTH FARISH STREET/601-354-9371
BULLY’S SOUL FOOD
I can spot a plate of processed turnip greens at twenty paces. Ragged, leathery leaves reduced to a mulch worthy only of cattle fodder; pale white bulbs sliced into rectangular bits of regularity: these are the telltale signs that your greens came from, at best, a freezer bag, at worst, a can. And sadly, such as this is what you’ll find on your plate at many restaurants that purport to serve Southern cooking. Some even go so far as to tout their product as homemade, when all they’ve done is doctor up the stewpot by tossing in a smoked jowl or trotter and a couple of rooster peppers.
Not so the greens served at Bully’s Soul Food, a north Jackson joint in business since 1982. “All our greens are fresh,” proprietor Ballery Bully tells me. “If we can’t get it fresh, we won’t serve it. And we like to serve a variety. Monday through Wednesday we’ll go with just two greens on the menu, but toward the weekend, we usually have three.”
I visit Bully’s on a weekday and yet there are still three varieties to be had: mixed greens with turnips and mustards, collard greens, or cabbage. I order a bit of each along with some oxtails, and lean back in my chair to survey the surroundings. Soft-focus oil portraits hang on the walls: Jesse Jackson in a meditative pose, Malcolm X in a dark suit and skinny tie, his eyes fixed with determination. Through the barred windows I can see a freight train rumbling by. In the corner sits an elderly lady, a garbage bag of greens at her feet. She’s pulling collard leaves from the bag one by one, stripping the spine and tearing away any blemish spots.
A few minutes pass before Ballery comes barreling out of the kitchen. In his hands is a beige plastic lunch tray, piled high with greens and oxtails. The oxtails are good, if a tad greasy, but the greens are near perfect: golden-hued shards of cabbage studded with pork fat; dusky collards stewed with a few strips of sweet onion; a messy melange of peppery mustard greens and sharp turnips. It’s all good, all fresh, all suffused with the sweet scent of smoked swine. “A while back, we tried cooking our greens with smoked turkey, for those folks that are so health-conscious,” Ballery tells me. “But that started costing more than pork, and besides, nobody came back asking for those greens that didn’t have the pork in them. Some things just shouldn’t be fooled with.”
3118 LIVINGSTON ROAD/601-362-0484
CRECHALE’S
For the longest time, most of the great cooks of the South lived and worked among us, their names known only to their family and friends. Like the Pullman car porters of the railroad age and the barbecue pitmasters of plantation days, these African American cooks toiled in sweaty, greasy obscurity, tending the fryer, the broiler, the grill. Generations of Southern restaurateurs staked their reputation upon the talents of these experienced cooks, though you’ll find little record of their time behind the stove.
A case in point is Crechale’s, which has been in business since 1956. For more than a quarter of a century, a sisterhood of African American cooks—the Thomas siblings—has ruled the roost at this swank roadhouse, famous for sweet, fried onion rings sheathed in an ethereal crust, peculiar cocktail sauce spiked with pickle relish, and well-marbled steaks broiled to perfection.
Martha Thomas has worked in the kitchen since 1969, her twin sister, Red Thomas, since 1967. Another sister, Diane Marshall, has been at it since 1975. More than100 combined years behind the stove at Crechale’s frying some of the best shrimp that’ve ever crossed my palate, and yet the Thomas sisters remain, for the most part, unrecognized.
3107 HIGHWAY 80 WEST/601-355-1840
MAYFLOWER CAFÉ
The cognoscenti call this Greek-owned, Depression-era diner in downtown Jackson a “poor man’s Galatoire’s.” The reference points are twofold. First, the Mayflower serves Gulf-fresh seafood of similar quality as the century-old New Orleans standard-bearer, at a significantly lower price point. Second, although both dining rooms are devoid of pretense, inspiration for the mirror-lined Galatoire’s comes from the bistros of France while the look of the neon-haloed Mayflower, with its porthole windows and leatherette booths, is Vegas-cum-Vicksburg.
Another consideration is the Mayflower bathrooms. They are reached by exiting the building, walking down the street and up a steep flight of stairs to a rabbit warren of rooms, one of which is carpeted, in the manner of a litter box, with old newspapers. But I digress.
Recently, I ate a fillet of wild redfish at the Mayflower. Swabbed in a mix of Worcestershire sauce and butter, it was accompanied by a brace of hand-cut fries and preceded by a salad of iceberg and feta and black olives. Before that I sipped an okra-muddled gumbo. Between bites of pearlescent fish, I dragged fries through a puddle of curry-spiked Cumback dressing, which Jerry Kountouris makes according to the recipe handed down by his late father, Mike Kountouris, born on the Greek island of Patmos.
That meal conjured the cookery of New Orleans, but it sang, too, of a uniquely creolized Mississippi. It taught me a lesson I should have already known. Of Africans who arrived in Mississippi knowing okra as gombo, its Bantu name. Of Vietnamese who, in the wake of the American exit from their homeland, arrived in Biloxi to pull nets of shrimp and strings of fish from the Gulf of Mexico. Of Greeks who have provided the muscle and intellect for generations of Jackson restaurants, from the Rotisserie Grill and the Black Cat Café to the Mayflower.
123 WEST CAPITOL STREET/601-355-4122
For a riff on Mike Kountouris’ Cumback Dressing recipe, see page 189.
CUMBACK DRESSING
Cumback dressing, the Jackson condiment of choice, is a pale orange local favorite that upon first blush appears as peculiar to outlanders as the mustard-based barbecue sauces of central South Carolina or the remoulade sauces so popular in New Orleans. At Crechale’s they serve a pickle-relish-spiked version, and every table in the joint is set with an old catsup bottle, stripped of its label and filled to the top. At the Mayflower a stubby bottle of Cumback dressing hits the table when you do, filled with a red-flecked orange slurry brightened by a hint of curry. At the Cherokee Inn it’s more of the same, with a punch of garlic to boot. Most every local restaurant serves it in some form or fashion. Locals pour it on their salad greens, slather it on hamburgers, and use it as dunking sauce for everything from fried chicken to French fries to fried shrimp.
In its simplest form, Cumback is nothing more than a smoothly pureed Thousand Island dressing, spiked with a bit more chili powder, perhaps an extra teaspoon or two of garlic salt, but share that observation with a native of Jackson and you’re liable to raise a ruckus. Among the culinary cognoscenti hereabouts, it is considered to be a Jackson original, as common as catsup, but with no known progenitor. “Cumback is Jackson restaurant history in a bottle,” my friend Randy Yates of Oxford’s Ajax Diner once told me. “You can trace the history of eating places in Jackson by tracing the changes in Cumback dressing as it moved from one place to the next, from one Greek-owned restaurant to the next.” My friend Malcolm White points to the now-defunct Rotisserie restaurant as the origin point, postulating that they made a Cumback dressing as early as the 1930s, and that from there it spread first to the Black Cat and later to the Mayflower. His theory gains credibility when you take note that by the early 1950s Duncan Hine
s’ Adventures in Good Eating was touting the Rotisserie as “Home of the KUMBAK salad dressing.”
McComb
DINNER BELL
Round-table dining may not be exclusive to Mississippi, but it is here that this peculiar dining custom reaches exalted heights. Over in Vicksburg there’s Walnut Hills, set in an 1880 vintage home. Down in Columbia the Round Table has been packing them in for years.
Until recently, the Mendenhall Hotel, a circa 1915 railroad hostelry in the county seat town of Mendenhall, was the grandfather of them all. But the Mendenhall, once a favorite of M. F. K. Fisher, is now shuttered, leaving the Dinner Bell in McComb as the standard-bearer of a tradition that calls for serving all-you-can-eat midday meals from lazy Susan–style tables, which were likely solutions to the “boardinghouse reach”—long the bane of mannered Southerners who looked with disdain upon itinerant drummers who reached across a crowded table to snag a bowl of black-eyed peas, a casserole dish of creamed spinach, or a platter of country ham.
In Mississippi boardinghouses, long-armed extensions have long been unnecessary, for while the bottom tiers of the lazy Susan tables remain stationary the buffets spin by on the top tiers like carousels of calories. And at the redbrick Dinner Bell, in business since the early 1950s, that carousel includes fat butter beans in potlikker, sweet potato casserole dotted with marshmallows, and sage-laced chicken and dumplings that owing to the richness of the poaching stock shade more toward yellow-green than pasty white. And let’s not forget the house specialty, fried cornmeal-coated disks of eggplant, raspy on the outside and creamy at their core, quite frankly, the best you’ll ever taste.
Twenty people can take seats at the Dinner Bell’s back table. And on a recent Sunday, each chair was full. Over the course of an early lunch, I learned from an aging regular how to expertly spin the lazy Susan, how to use English to get the casseroles and bowls I desired. He worked the thing like it was a roulette wheel and a C-note was riding on the proper placement of the eggplant. As for me, I was happy to accept what fate spun my way, although I will admit that the best of my spins landed a bowl of stewed okra and tomatoes that I quietly removed from the rotation.
229 FIFTH AVENUE/601-684-4883
Philadelphia
PEGGY’S
Ask Peggy Webb why she’s never hung up a sign to advertise her restaurant, and she’s likely to tell you much the same thing she told me. I ducked my head back in the kitchen and found her standing at the stove in a flour-dusted blue apron, dipping battered pork chops into a cast-iron pot burbling with hot oil: “Honey, people show up here often enough when we’re not open, looking for me to fix them some food. You know it would only get worse if I put up a sign. We live here; I’ve raised three children in this house. You’re standing in my kitchen. No, we don’t need a sign.”
Since 1961 Peggy and her husband, Don, have been welcoming local folks to lunch in their modest, stuccoed home, just off the town square. Seating is communal style, at one of six tables scattered about the floors of the family’s former living and dining rooms. A hostess brings your iced tea, a basket of cornbread, and a roll of silverware. You step into the hallway where a board Don tacked up across the walls serves as a makeshift buffet.
Arrayed on a collection of electric hot plates are big, metal pans of sweet, rosy ham on Monday; crusty fried chicken on Tuesday and Friday; soupy beef tips on Wednesday; and salty, fried pork chops on Thursday. Sweet creamed corn and butter beans in a pale green potlikker are among the vegetable offerings. Caramel layer cake is the dessert of choice.
If it’s your first visit to Peggy’s, a call for the check will bring a chortle or two from your tablemates, for, when it comes to settling up, you’re on your own. Just toss your six dollars in the basket near the entrance, making change if need be. Short on cash? If Citizen’s Bank of Philadelphia is your financial institution of choice, then you can just scratch out payment on one of the counter checks stacked alongside the basket.
512 BAY STREET/601-656-3478
Taylor
TAYLOR GROCERY
Back in the dark days, when Taylor Grocery closed in the spring of 1997, a heavy sigh could be heard to drift across the hill country of northern Mississippi. Famed for serving crisp-fried, sandy-brown catfish in a woebegone, tin-roofed old country store, the avant-funk restaurant had won an army of admirers throughout the years. When those screen doors slapped shut, and the big metal sign—the one that pleaded with passersby, “Eat or We Both Starve”—was hauled inside, a large chunk of Lafayette County history was missing from the landscape.
It was a tradition, a rite, a pilgrimage of import. Rain or shine, win or lose, generations of Ole Miss football fans had made their way down the two-lane blacktop that snaked from Oxford nine miles south to the little hamlet of Taylor, toddies in hand, fried catfish and hushpuppies on their mind.
Miss Catfish 2000, Jessica Perkins, just can’t get enough of that good fried fish.
No one seems to remember when the first string of Taylor catfish was bathed in milk and eggs, rolled in meal, and tossed in a skillet burbling with oil. Maybe it was sometime in the early 1970s; that seems to be the era most often cited. This much is clear: by the early 1980s tiny Taylor was the catfish capital of a state that was plumb catfish crazy. Politicos and starlets, musicians and writers, adventuresome gourmands and just plain folks; they came by the carload, by the busload even, intent on tasting something authentic, something real, something that smacked of Mississippi. No matter the occasion, Taylor catfish was the destination restaurant of choice. Weddings and divorces, births and deaths; at the rickety tables set with dull flatware and paper napkins, good times were celebrated, bad times salved.
But it was on football game weekends that the place really came alive. Fraternity boys, tight on Jim Beam, sorority girls, pink bows fixed in teased, henna-colored hair—they came, they ate, they scribbled doggerel on the white plaster walls: “John Loves Jessica,” “Tammy Digs Tommy,” “Mississippi State Sucks,” “Archie Manning for Governor,” “William Faulkner Can Kick William Shakespeare’s Ass!”
Soon “that catfish place” was as prized for the graffiti that covered the walls as for the sweet white fish that emerged piping hot from the skillets of owner Mary Kathryn Hudson. Some folks will tell you that it all began on the eve of the Ole Miss–Georgia game back in 1979, when Willie Morris and Senator Thad Cochran took pens in hand. No matter, in the ensuing twenty years, barrel after barrel of ink was spent, to the point where Willie and Thad’s doodles were long ago eclipsed by Tammy and Tommy’s. Taylor Grocery was a democratic institution, in the truest sense of the word.
And then it was gone: doors locked, cast-iron skillets stowed away. Mary Kathryn retired. Soon locals were carping that though you could get a decent plate of sushi up the road in Oxford, a heaping platter of bone-in, honest-to-goodness fried cat-fish was getting about as scarce as chicken teeth. And they were right.
Enter Lynn Hewlett. Turns out, he bought the place soon after it closed in ’97, and has since been working to reopen it, albeit with a few changes. He grew up in the community, three doors down from Taylor Grocery, to be exact. His grandfather owned the little general store next door. This is his place. These are his people.
“I did my best to remodel the place—to fix it up so that it would satisfy the Health Department—in the least obtrusive way possible,” Lynn says, his arms sweeping wide to take in the restaurant. From the looks of things, he has succeeded. The walls have been patched in places, but with an eye for saving as much of the old graffiti as possible. The open kitchen has been enclosed. The old bathrooms have been reworked. But the heart and soul of the place remains intact. “We want to pay homage to the history of this place, to Mary Kathryn who cooked here for so long,” says Lynn. “She’ll get free catfish any time she wants it. I hope we can fix it to suit her.”
HIGHWAY 338/662-236-1716
Cumback Dressing
an homage to Mayflower Café
Makes a
bout 4 cups
At the Mayflower, the café that inspired this recipe, they bring a bottle of their housemade concoction out when you they serve your salad. I recall that it’s always cold from the refrigerator. And it’s always a welcome accompaniment to my salad. But I like it better as a dipping sauce for my French fries.
2 large garlic cloves, peeled
1 large or 2 medium onions, grated
1 cup mayonnaise
½ cup chili sauce
½ cup catsup
½ cup mustard
½ cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon finely ground black pepper
Dash of paprika
2 tablespoons water
Place the garlic and onion in a blender and puree until mixed. Add the mayonnaise, chili sauce, catsup, mustard, vegetable oil, Worcestershire sauce, pepper, paprika, and water. Blend until well combined.
NORTH CaRoLiNa
ure, there’s barbecue to be had in North Carolina. Scads of it. Whole-hog eastern-style barbecue from Wilber’s in Goldsboro, western-style sandwiches of minced pork shoulder napped in a tomato-vinegar slurry from Wayne Monk’s Lexington Barbecue. But the Tar Heel state is also home to a bit of food history worth pondering, for it was at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in the town of Greensboro that the sit-in movement took flame, when in 1961 four African American students asked to be served a cup of coffee alongside their fellow white citizens. Think about that. Chew on that. And then join me at Charlotte’s Coffee Cup for a slice of pie.