Southern Belly

by John T. Edge

  As we talk, seated at the back of her corner restaurant, it occurs to me that, for Strange, the white proprietor of a restaurant named in honor of her family’s black housekeeper, helping tourists understand okra may be the least of her worries in a town where most everyone has come in search of an Old South where magnolias and mint juleps hold sway.

  “I never imagined I would own a restaurant,” she tells me by way of explanation. “But when Jestine fell sick at 110, I knew I had to do this, to open this little diner so that people would know about Jestine, so that she would know about the restaurant before she passed.”

  As the early lunch customers start to trickle in, Strange makes her way across to the front of the room, burping her infant son, Berlin, as she goes. For the next couple of hours she will serve as hostess: seating customers and taking drink orders, all the while exchanging reminiscences with her customers about the woman for whom the restaurant is named, the black woman this white Southern Jew knew as “my Nursey.”

  “My grandparents owned a clothing store in town, and met Jestine when she was in her fifties,” recalls Strange. “They basically said to her, ‘If you’ll help raise our child, we’ll take care of you for the rest of your life.’ I guess the joke was on my grandparents; they’ve been gone for years and Jestine lived until this past December … Jestine was my mother’s companion. And when my mother had me, she started taking care of me.”

  * * *

  “A lot of our customers aren’t from the South, and they always seem to be asking, ‘What is okra? What does it look like?’”

  * * *

  Soon the tables are packed with customers, the air heady with the scents of what the restaurant advertises as “Southern food with lots of soul.” As Strange works to seat customers and bus tables, she expounds upon her rationale for the restaurant’s existence. “People come in here and tell me that they had a Jestine,” says Strange. “Maybe not a 112-year-old Jestine, but they had someone who took care of them when they were growing up. I’ll be walking through the dining room and see a tear or two or they’ll call me over and tell me, ‘We’re so glad you did this; we had a Jestine.’”

  There are those that label Strange a paternalistic profiteer, yet she is unrepentant. “I’ve had people question my motives. I’ve had people ask if Jestine was my parents’ slave. How could they think I’d be that way? I loved her,” she argues, her voice crackling with indignation. “I could have named this place after my mother. You can’t get much more Southern than Shera Lee’s Kitchen …

  “As it is, the recipes we use are Jestine’s. We kind of whiten the food up a bit. But we don’t have chefs. Jestine is the chef,” explains Strange as she piles a table high with mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans and okra gumbo, red rice and fried chicken.

  “Now I’m looking for a Jestine for him,” she sighs, her eyes cast wistfully back to the bassinet at the rear of the room where baby Berlin sleeps.

  * * *

  “People come in here and tell me that they had a Jestine. Maybe not a 112-year-old Jestine, but they had someone who took care of them when they were growing up.”

  * * *

  251 MEETING STREET / 843-722-7224

  MARTHA LOU’S KITCHEN

  There’s a scrap yard next door, chockablock with rusting pickup trucks and busted refrigerators. Sea gulls circle overhead, in search of scurrying prey among the wreckage. Twisted metal spirals upward from the center of the lot, dull and scarred, looming over the tiny pink cinder-block building that is home to Martha Lou Gadsen’s café.

  Inside, Martha Lou stands in front of the fry basket, a pair of tongs in hand, fishing—forgive me—a golden brown whiting fillet from the roiling oil. It’s Wednesday, so there’s a pot of chitlins and hot peppers simmering on the back burner, and lima beans, soupy and rich, bubbling in a battered aluminum pan on the front burner. In the oven a tray of macaroni and cheese burbles and spits. Yesterday she served okra soup, tomorrow she’ll have giblet rice, Friday there’s red rice. Every day you can count on pork chops and fried fish.

  The phone rings. Her son picks it up and I eavesdrop on his end of the conversation. “What kind of chicken you want?” he asks. And then after a pause, “I said what kind of chicken you want? White meat, dark meat, blue meat, green meat. What you gonna have?”

  I order a fried pork chop, lima beans, rice, and, for good measure, a side of macaroni and cheese before taking a seat at one of the two vinyl booths that line the wall. Above me is a mural of the Charleston market, rendered in a colorful, almost Haitian manner. In short time Martha Lou returns with a plastic plate, quaking beneath the weight of my lunch. She catches me staring at the mural and points to the one alongside. “That one’s of Mosquito Beach,” she offers, “where we all used to hang out after hours, back when the beaches were segregated.” Martha Lou sets my plate down, slides into the opposite seat, and without much prompting, shares her culinary philosophy. “I believe in fresh foods,” she says. “And I believe in seasoning my food. I don’t like seeing people reach for the salt and pepper shaker.”

  One bite of the lima beans and I’m a believer. They are assertively, even aggressively seasoned, spiked with a healthy dash of salt and what tastes like a half-shaker of black pepper. The pork chop is juicy, sheathed in a thin, brittle crust. The rice is perfect, each grain separate, distinct. But the macaroni and cheese is in a class all its own. A paragon of Southern Soul cookery, it takes my breath away and sends me reaching for my tumbler of water. While most mac ‘n’ cheese is rather anemic stuff—limp elbow noodles swimming in a neon-orange soup of American cheese and condensed milk—Martha Lou’s rendition is a burnt ochre in color, shot through with black pepper, firm at the center, crunchy on the top, and stupendously salty. I look up at Martha Lou and she smiles. “See what I mean?” she says. “I told you I liked my food seasoned.”

  1068 MORRISON DRIVE / 843-577-9583

  THE RICE KITCHEN

  Charleston was once rice-obsessed. Planter whites built their antebellum fortunes on the grain they called Carolina Gold. Laboring blacks supplied, under force of violence, African-honed expertise. Pithy locals, cognizant of their hidebound ways, were fond of asking, “What do the Chinese and Charleston natives have in common?” The answer came quick: “They eat rice and worship their ancestors.”

  In 1860, when the total national rice crop was 5 million bushels, 3.5 million of those bushels were harvested along the South Carolina coast. That was the height. The decline, in the wake of the Civil War, was swift. By 1901 only 35,000 were planted. By 1920 the total rice acreage did not top 500. “Charleson had a mere handful of good restaurants then,” my friend John Martin Taylor has observed, speaking of the decades that followed the early twentieth-century decline. “Other than a couple of joints, none of them served rice in any form.”

  Today, however, South Carolina is in the midst of a rice renaissance. Charleston is chock-full of restaurants that aim to be temples of rice culture. And rice cookers, bulbous aluminum double boilers, ideal for steaming the local crop, remain fixtures in Charleston kitchens. Even the cultivation of rice is on the rise. Carolina Plantation Rice grows an aromatic variety on the Pee Dee River, while Specialty Foods South sells true Carolina Gold rice. Anson Mills, on the other hand, both grows and sells true Carolina Gold.

  ANSON MILLS / 803-467-4122

  CAROLINA PLANTATION RICE / 843-395-8058

  SPECIALTY FOODS SOUTH / 843-766-2580

  TONY THE PEANUT MAN

  Street vendors were once ever present on Southern streets. In Canton, Mississippi, Frank Owens walked the courthouse square, selling pecan, chess, and blackberry pies from a cut-down cardboard box. In Lufin, Texas, a tamale vendor known as Hombre worked high school football games. In the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, Sam De Kemel peddled four-for-a-nickel waffles while wearing a white chef’s toque and playing a bugle.

  Reform movements geared toward improvements in public health introduced onerous regulations and wipe
d out most of them. The fast-food industry finished off the rest. Or so I thought. Of late, I’ve begun to spot a few retro renegade operators. I’ve met a man who vends red velvet cakes from the trunk of his car. I’ve met a woman who sells pimento cheese sandwiches from a basket bolted to the front of her ten-speed. I’ve met a passel of hot dog vendors. (For a year I, too, owned a weenie wagon.) But no one has honed a shtick like Tony the Peanut Man, peddling sacks of peanuts since 1991 in Charleston, South Carolina.

  He wears a bow tie, fixed tight around the collar of a T-shirt. The front is blazoned with his own smiling mug. The rear boasts his slogan-cum-song, “Got some boiled / Got some toasted / Got some stewed / Got some roasted,” which, when he’s selling—and he’s always selling—wizened Tony sings with the bravado of a pubescent opera star.

  On his head is a baseball hat, woven in the Gullah-style from sweetgrass. “I do the market,” he tells me, referring to the City Market, where local women of African descent have long sold their signature baskets to tourists. “I do most anything to make a buck. Gotta move. Gotta sell.”

  Tony Wright’s salt-roasted peanuts are good. And his boiled peanuts are great; they have that telltale dank earth taste. If you can’t find him at the market, he’s probably working a high school football game. Or a college basketball game. The local Piggly Wiggly sells his canned peanuts. But Tony is worth tracking down. If you don’t meet the man you won’t hear the song, a ditty that links him to generations of African American vendors past, people like the late Ben Campbell, the Charlestonian Tony modeled his pitch after, the man all remember as the King of Peanuts.

  843-343-6362

  Clemson

  CLEMSON BLUE CHEESE

  A slice of rat cheese (called hoop cheese in more polite circles) and a couple of saltine crackers has long been a snack time Southern favorite. Look on the counter of an old country store—or a modern convenience store for that matter—and you’re likely to spy a luminescent orange round of the sharp stuff, encased in a red plastic mantle. It’s the prime ingredient in pimento cheese, that heavenly concoction known by many as the house paté of the South. But it’s not the only cheese in town.

  Since the 1940s, Clemson University’s agricultural school has been turning out a blue-veined cheese, sweet, creamy, and piquant enough to give the folks in Roquefort a run for their money. Originally aged in nearby Stumphouse Tunnel, an abandoned antebellum train tunnel, the cheese is now a marvel of high-tech ingenuity, crafted in a climate-controlled ceramic-tile kitchen and lorded over by any number of card-carrying doctors of dairy science.

  To pick up a wedge or wheel of Clemson Blue you have to wend your way through campus, past innumerable nondescript low-slung redbrick buildings until you reach equally nondescript Newman Hall, home to the Clemson Ag Sales Center, where, in addition to selling cheese, they mix up a fine milkshake.

  118 NEWMAN HALL / 864-656-3242

  Columbia

  PIMENTO CHEESEBURGERS

  If there is one dish that defines Columbia, it is the pimento cheeseburger. Sure, the Varsity over in Atlanta, Georgia, serves them, as does the Delta Sandwich shop in Augusta, Georgia, but it’s here that this Southern twist on the national dish gets the most grill play.

  Locals remember the 60s-era Dairy Bar as the place that popularized the slathering of pimento cheese on a hamburger. My friend Bobb Dixon recalls that the Dairy Bar “made their own pimento cheese and spread it over a very thin but barely griddled patty. The combination was melt-in-your-mouth meat. It was heaven. I say ‘was’ because they moved to Main Street and then retired. The current versions available around town are okay, but not the same.”

  Tim Shealy, whose grandfather opened what was Shealy Sandwiches down on Assembly Street back in 1940, also remembers those Dairy Bar pimento cheeseburgers. “Used to be that we didn’t serve a pimento cheeseburger out of respect for the people that owned the Dairy Bar,” he told me. “That was their sandwich, just like ours was the MOC, the mustard, onion, and chili burger. Hell, both of ‘em were real popular before cholesterol was discovered.”

  Until recently, Tim sold a slew of pimento cheeseburgers at his little lunchroom. “We use four different cheeses in ours,” Tim told me. “People can taste the difference; it’s rich and sharp. We just can’t make enough of the stuff.” With Tim’s spot now closed, the keeper of the Dairy Bar flame is Eddie’s, where they cook their burgers on a flattop and stir up their own pimento cheese blend. Or you might try the filet mignon–capped “French Quarter Pimento Cheese” served at the nearby Mr. Friendly’s, a trendy place that advertises itself as a “New Southern Café.”

  EDDIE’S / 1301 ASSEMBLY STREET / 803-779-6222

  CROMER’S P-NUTS

  “Guaranteed Worst in Town”—now that’s the kind of slogan you don’t want to live up to.

  Yet, if you visit the Cromer’s P-Nut store, that’s just what you’ll see, hanging high above the entrance, outlined in neon.

  “It began as a joke back around 1937,” the late J. D. Cromer Jr. told me a few years back. “When Dad—he was J. D. Sr.—started selling peanuts down here at the curb market, well he did all right, and before you know it, there’s another fellow setting up across the street. Well, this fellow was a loud cuss, and whenever a customer would come by our stand, he’d yell, ‘Don’t buy those. Mine are best! Mine are best!’ Dad got irritated with the guy and grabbed a piece of cardboard and scribbled ‘Worst in Town’ on it and set it down. Well, the slogan stuck and business picked up.”

  A beacon of good taste and good humor for peanut lovers.

  At some point along the way, Cromer’s expanded upon this early marketing strategy, posting signs that pleaded, “If you find a good p-nut in your pack, please return our mistake.”

  Today, there’s a little less hucksterism and hustle evident, and the once dowdy building where the peanuts were roasted has been exchanged for a new brick box, but if you take a look around back you’ll soon learn that a few relics remain from those early days, including one of the old retrofitted coffee roasters in which J. D.’s father cooked his peanuts. It’s still in use today, a bulking black metal and chrome affair that has a passing—if unappetizing—resemblance to an iron lung. Rest assured that the peanuts that emerge from a tumble inside are as good as ever, sweet, salty treats that belie Cromer’s jestful promise.

  1055 BEREA ROAD / 803-779-2290

  MAURICE BESSINGER’S PIGGIE PARK

  Like the late J. D. Cromer Sr., Maurice Bessinger is a showman of the old school, a regular P. T. Barnum of the barbecue world who has been tending the pits in West Columbia since 1955. Give him a minute and he’ll take an hour to tell you just how good his “gourmet” pork barbecue and “secret heirloom” mustard sauce are. Low in cholesterol and fat, too, God’s own health food. And while we’re at it, did you know that God was the original pitmaster? That’s a fact, says Bessinger: “All the Old Testament sacrifices were cooked with wood, and that was ordained by God.”

  The restaurant is a sprawling behemoth built, like many drive-ins of an earlier era, in a hub and spoke pattern, with the dining room and pits at the center and little corrugated-tin-topped awnings radiating outward. Carhops still work the parking lot, but you have to hike inside, past cord after cord of hickory wood, to get the full effect.

  Just inside the door sits a pile of pamphlets and newspaper clippings, some at -testing to Maurice’s barbecue acumen, some pleading that you had best heed the word of God or spend the rest of your days in Hell, and others arguing for the sanctity of Confederate heritage. If you’re lucky, you’ll spot the big man himself—Maurice—behind the counter, his white hair shining bright beneath the heat lamps. The day I was there, he beamed a smile that would make a TV weatherman proud and pronounced, “I’m going to make barbecue the hamburger of the twenty-first century. With God’s help, I will.”

  Home of right-wing politics and right good ’cue.

  All proselytizing aside, you have to admire Bessinger’s way with a
ham. Cooked up to twenty-four hours over hickory coals, the meat comes out tender and smoke-suffused, with a bark that is dark and sweet, almost caramelized from the heat of the pit. And the sauce—a heady concoction of mustard, soy sauce, brown sugar, and vinegar—is a joyous taste revelation for those barbecue hounds of the vinegar or tomato camps. Side dishes of slaw and hash are good as well but, comparatively, don’t rate even a hosanna.

  4411 DEVINE STREET / 803-782-9547

  **Maurice Bessinger** An Ill-Fated Flirt with Politics

  Like Lester Maddox over in Georgia, Maurice turned his attention away from the food business for a few years, trading in his pit and tongs for a stump and a megaphone. At one point in the 1960s, he even took to riding a white horse and touting the virtues of a group called the National Association for the Preservation of White People. His racially charged antics fanned the flames of intolerance in South Carolina, and won him a good measure of scorn and ridicule. In 1974 he ran for governor and lost.

  It was all a mess really, a sad mistake as Maurice tells it. By the late 1970s he had undergone a religious conversion, erecting a mission in the midst of Piggie Park, right beside the pits, where on Wednesdays he still leads a Bible study class from 11:30 to 1:00. “When you have a truly religious conversion, you don’t see black and white, you don’t see rich and poor,” he told a reporter a few years back. But these days Maurice is backsliding, writing “God and Country” editorials in the local newspaper and flying his Confederate flag high for all to see.