South Toward Home

by Julia Reed

  Versions of both could well be the case, a point articulated in one of the oral histories conducted by the SFA’s Amy Evans Streeter as part of the organization’s Hot Tamale Trail project. “Basically, the Delta was built up on a lot of people who were just travelers going from one destination to another,” Larry Lee, a former salesman at Greenville’s Hot Tamale Heaven, told Streeter. “That’s how the people melted here.… And from that, you get all kinds of cultures and ideas—you know, you share with me, I share with you. And before long, what can I tell you? Something came out of it and the tamale was one of those things.”

  Whatever its origin, a Delta tamale is smaller than its Mexican counterpart and is usually made with plain white cornmeal as opposed to the finer masa. The filling is almost always well-spiced pork or beef, and the tamales themselves are simmered in liquid rather than steamed, a process that creates a tasty “juice” that bathes them in their shucks and keeps them moist. By 1928, their popularity among both blacks and whites was such that the Reverend Moses Mason recorded a song called “Molly Man” that included the lyrics “Good times is comin’/Don’t you see the sign?/White folks standin’ round here, spending many dimes” (on the tamales that were then thirty cents a dozen). Eight years later Robert Johnson’s slightly more suggestive “They’re Red Hot” quotes the same price, which is a little less than what my father says he paid during his childhood in Caruthersville, Missouri, not far north of the Delta on the Mississippi: “You could buy them on the street, three for a dime, or you could roll the dice with the man, who always won. I grew up thinking they were a product of the Mississippi River rather than Mexico.”

  My own relationship with tamales began at an even younger age—there’s a photo of my mother, eight and a half months pregnant with me, sitting on the wooden front steps of Doe’s. Since then I’ve eaten enough of them to make me fairly confident as a judge, but still, it’s a complicated business. My fellow judges (including my dear friend and Garden & Gun colleague Roy Blount, Jr., who was kind enough to make the trip) were given badges featuring dancing tamales and a lengthy orientation session during which we received guidance on how to score categories ranging from presentation to tenderness—a quality we were told “speaks for itself.”

  There was an artisanal division and a commercial division, dessert tamales (including a weirdly delicious strawberry version made by the talented Antoinette Turner, of Drew, to whom I gave high marks), and a decidedly un-Delta tamale filled with butter beans and chicken from a bird its maker, “Papa Doc,” claimed to have recently killed himself. The top three winners in the artisanal category were makers of classic versions from Greenville, as was the Grand Champion, Mr. Gerald Jefferson, who was so overwhelmed by the crowds trying to buy his tamales that I never got to interview him about his technique.

  There was plenty of other stuff to do, though. As at all good festivals, there was a parade and music (including performances by Greenville’s own Steve Azar and my pal Raymond Longoria, whose family once owned a tamale stand), a hot tamale tale-telling “front porch” anchored by my buddy the inimitable Hank Burdine, and, of course, a Miss Hot Tamale, a stunning St. Joseph High School sophomore named Jade Mixon, whose ingenious (and startlingly attractive) dress was made entirely of corn shucks dusted with a hint of gold glitter. Naming the first queen was a no-brainer—she was Florence Signa, the late Doe Sr.’s beloved sister-in-law, who still works at the restaurant three or four nights a week and who greeted her subjects in a corn-shuck crown.

  There was also a tamale-eating contest, won by a brave soul named Detric Boldien, who consumed twenty-five in five minutes. I was impressed with his achievement—he had to unwrap them, after all—but when I relayed his score to my friend W. Hodding Carter, whom I’ve convinced to accompany me to next year’s fest, he scoffed. Like me, Hodding grew up in Greenville, where he consumed a whole lot of hots. He’s also an intrepid sort who wrote one book about replicating the Lewis and Clark expedition and another about training to qualify for the Olympics in swimming at forty-two. More than twenty years ago, he wrote a piece for Outside magazine about coming in second at an oyster-eating contest at a seafood festival in Louisiana’s Lafourche Parish. That particular festival no longer exists, but I went to it once, the year after Hodding competed. It was held, for reasons I’ll never understand, in July. The heat—and the stench—was brutal. Hodding, who was then living in New York, had trained mostly in the air-conditioned oyster bars at Grand Central Station and the Plaza Hotel and was no match for an oil-field worker named Danny Vining, who ate 151 oysters in fifteen minutes. Still, Hodding came close—his score of 136 would have been higher but for the fact that the 136th oyster stayed on his fork for a full two minutes before he could force himself to swallow it. Plus, when time was called, Danny still had his last sixteen oysters in his mouth.

  Hodding is already pumped up for next year’s contest and has asked me to warn Mr. Boldien that he’s not holding onto his title. A little competition will be exciting, and there’ll be more stuff too, including a food writers’ symposium. We’ll have to come up with something to talk about other than how the tamale made its way to the Delta, because I’m pretty sure we’ll never know. I’m sticking with what Mr. Lee told Amy Streeter: “The best way I can sum it up is that you’re not from the Delta if you know nothing of tamales. It’s that simple. It’s the levee, it’s the blues, it’s the tamale.”

  Good to the Bone

  A few years ago I went out to dinner in New Orleans with some friends, and the talk turned, as it so often does, to food. Specifically to the singular glories of fried chicken, which we all apparently wished we were eating instead of the grilled salmon that sat, rather reproachfully, on our plates. I can talk all day about chicken and was gearing up to debate the finer points of, say, lard vs. Crisco (lard), garlic powder or not (yes), when one of the women at the table piped up that her favorite part of the chicken happened to be the bones.

  Now, I know we Southerners are famous for eating a lot of stuff most people don’t. Dirt, poke sallet, and Goo Goo Clusters are just a few things that come immediately to mind. But I had never heard of anyone not only eating but favoring the bones of a fried chicken.

  “Bones?” I asked brightly, even though what I was thinking was “Are you out of your mind? The last time my dog ate chicken bones I had to take him to the vet.” But she looked at me as if I were the one who was crazy, as if I might be the only person in the world who didn’t know the secret of their goodness. “Yes,” she said, “the bones,” adding that she sucked the marrow out of them first. For the second time in less than a minute, I was floored. I am all about beef and veal marrow—in stews, spread on toast with a little sea salt, scooped out of a hunk of osso buco with a proper silver marrow spoon. But I feel sure that if I had ever bothered to think about it, I would have assumed that the amount of marrow in a chicken’s skinny bones would be negligible. This is where I would be wrong. “You haven’t lived until you’ve sucked out the marrow,” she told me with, I swear, a faintly glazed look in her eyes. And then she added the kicker: “And then of course there is the gristle, et cetera.”

  I should point out here that this woman is not a figure out of a Walker Evans photograph. She is smart and attractive and funny and well off enough not to have to resort to bones and gristle to keep from going hungry. So when she uttered the words “gristle, et cetera,” my mouth must have dropped open, because she felt the need to reassure me that eating a chicken in its entirety, especially the “crispy wings,” is not a big deal. “It’s just like eating shrimp shells,” she said. I don’t eat those either, but in the end I had to admire the thoroughness and gusto with which this woman dispatched her bird. Plus, I came across a song lyric by an Austin-based singer/songwriter I like a lot named Bob Schneider that attests to the fact that the bones are fairly easy to eat. In “Come with Me Tonight,” there’s a line about “Larry,” who “Always gets it wrong/His heart’s as soft as chicken bone.”

  Schn
eider’s is not the only song that mentions chicken—or bones, either, for that matter. There’s a great Danny Barker song, popularized by Johnny Mercer, called “Save the Bones for Henry Jones,” in which “Henry don’t eat no meat.” My friend Jimmy Phillips has a song called “Gnawing Bone,” in which a guy gets a clue that his woman has left him when he comes home to an open door and an empty house: “The whole place smells like pork chops/But ain’t no pig meat on the stove/Just some cold grease in the skillet/And one low-down gnawing bone.” Jimmy also wrote “Fried Chicken,” which has to be the best song ever written on the subject. It mentions neither marrow nor gristle, but it comes close with a line about “All that knuckle-sucking goodness just looking back at me” and goes on to explain that “Full awareness is heightened/When the grease goes to your brain.” Eden Brent covers “Fried Chicken” on her Mississippi Number One CD, and whenever she plays it live, people go just as crazy for it as they do for the real thing.

  There are very few people who don’t go crazy over fried chicken, a point not lost on the editors of Bon Appétit, who surely boosted the magazine’s February 2012 newsstand sales by putting a gorgeous golden drumstick on the cover, along with a line touting the “41 Soulful Recipes from America’s New Food Capital” inside. While I’m all for promoting chicken and Southern food in general, and I subscribe to Bon Appétit, I do have a couple of tiny quibbles. One, in its recipe, the chicken is batter fried, which is okay—maybe—if you want to eat it cold the next day for a picnic. Otherwise it should be tossed in a paper bag with flour and seasonings, period. No egg ever need enter the process.

  Two, I sort of disagree with that word new. When were we not the nation’s food capital, really? Let us all remember that while the Puritans were munching on what the historian David Hackett Fischer calls their “canonical dish” of cold baked beans, we were down here supping on chicken fricassee made with “a pint of red claret, a pint of oysters and a dozen egg yolks.” At no point in history would I rather have eaten anywhere else, but to be fair, Bon Appétit is referring to our current crop of hot chefs and the fact that the rest of the country has finally caught up to our obsessions with ham and pimento cheese and small-batch bourbons and things like “house-made” pickles, which is pretty much what we’ve been eating all along.

  With the exception of the fried chicken, there are some excellent recipes in the issue, including the brilliant Charleston chef Mike Lata’s swanky chicken and dumplings and my friend Martha Foose’s luscious-looking coconut cake, which is enlivened by a healthy dose of Southern Comfort. (The editors of the magazine clearly understood the importance of whiskey to our cuisine—there is also a braised brisket with a bourbon peach glaze and a banana cream pie with salty bourbon caramel.) Martha’s cake is one that I would actually make. A cake I would not make is the coconut cake with saffron cream garnish from Food & Wine’s Southern food issue a couple of years earlier.

  In that issue, “50 Best Recipes from the New South,” the editors decided to “update” some “classics” by attempting to make them healthy, a sobering exercise that resulted in a recipe for “smoky shrimp and grits” that substituted canola oil for butter, as well as a pairing of sausage gravy with whole-wheat biscuits, which is just weird. Some classics are better left un-updated, so I have been reaching way back instead. The recent Dining with the Washingtons: Historic Recipes, Entertaining, and Hospitality from Mount Vernon includes a fine chicken fricassee recipe, and at Charleston’s now sadly shuttered Heirloom Books, which was my favorite culinary bookstore, I found another treasure, Pearl’s Kitchen: An Extraordinary Cookbook, by Pearl Bailey. Bailey was one of my childhood idols—I loved to hear her sing and talk about her husband, the Italian-American jazz drummer Louis Bellson, on The Tonight Show. She had a ton of soul, and I should have known she’d be an excellent cook and storyteller.

  A recipe for pork chops and green apples, for example, starts off with the line: “I had a dinner a few nights ago that was more exciting, actually sexier, than a best-selling novel. What, you may ask, does sex have to do with food? Darlin’, I am not going into that right now. Just let me tell you that what got me so excited was pork chops, buttered rice, and Mama’s cabbage.” She reports that she served more cabbage and rice with Baked Sole Spontaneous “and the whole family had a real ball.” She rails against too-thin aluminum nonstick pans and prefers butter or lard to margarine, which she loathes.

  Pearl grew up in Philadelphia, but she was born in Newport News, Virginia, and her mother, a constant figure in the book, clearly knew her way around a kitchen. Not only did Ella Mae Bailey cook “the best fried chicken in the world” every Sunday morning, she also went to the chicken man to “blow the feathers back” and choose her own live bird. Like my friend, Pearl was most fond of the wings, but she “liked the necks too and sometimes the gizzard” because “there was an old wives’ tale that said if you ate the chicken gizzard you would become pretty.”

  Pearl was as passionate about chicken as my gristle-loving, marrow-sucking friend, but then Pearl was passionate about everything. At one point she wrote, “I don’t like to say that my kitchen is actually a religious place, but I would say that if I were a voodoo priestess, I would conduct my rituals there.” Let’s not forget that a lot of them involve the bones of a chicken.

  Bizarre Foods

  In 2014, the intrepid food writer, journalist, novelist, poet, memoirist, and (whew) much-lauded humorist Calvin Trillin journeyed to my hometown of Greenville, Mississippi, to do a piece for the New Yorker on the second annual Delta Hot Tamale Festival. I’d implored him and he’d relented, but before he left town, he tapped his notebook and said that if he managed to get a story out of what was inside, he’d nominate his own self for a MacArthur genius grant. He got one, of course (a piece, not the award, but he’s already won the Thurber Prize for American Humor), and it was terrific and funny and full of good stuff on tamales and Delta culture, both of which he’d long known a little bit about. During his five-day stay, he’d gamely sampled fried tamales, vegetarian tamales, a tamale pie, and the rather more highbrow offerings of the competing celebrity chefs, including New Orleans’s Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski, and Michael Hudman and Andy Ticer, who own five restaurants in Memphis. Then, on the day of the fest itself, a vendor offered him a more recent example of Delta food culture: a Kool-Aid pickle, also known as a Koolickle, a Day-Glo-colored delicacy made by draining the brine from a gallon jar of dill pickles and replacing it with double-strength Kool-Aid and a whole lot of sugar.

  Trillin may well be the funniest human being I’ve ever met; he is also an exceptionally polite man. So after a couple of bites, when pressed for an opinion of the rather alarming cherry-red item in his hand, he “took refuge,” he wrote, “in the initialism I.C.P., Interesting Culinary Phenomenon.”

  Clearly, Trillin was not mad for the Koolickle. And while I’m famously big on promoting Delta culture in all its glorious forms, I’m not entirely sold on it myself. But we are in the minority. As early as 2007, John T. Edge, the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, wrote in the New York Times that the popularity of the Koolickle had spread beyond the Delta—where it was mostly sold out of people’s kitchens (much like hot tamales), at neighborhood stores, and at blues-festival food stands—to cities as far away as Dallas and St. Louis. He also reported that the Indianola, Mississippi–based convenience-store chain DoubleQuick had applied for a trademark on the term Koolickle, coined by the stores’ director of food service. Since then, the application seems to have lapsed, and some DoubleQuicks now tout the same product under the name Pickoolas. Either way, to quote Edge, “Depending on your palate and perspective, they are either the worst thing to happen to pickles since plastic brining barrels or a brave new taste sensation to be celebrated.”

  The latter is a happy fate that has greeted more than one I.C.P. I’ll have to ask Trillin, but I feel like when an I.C.P. becomes so entrenched that chefs start riffing on it with “gourmet” versions, it no long
er qualifies for the initials. At any rate, it was bound to happen. Hayden Hall, an artist and chef in Clarksdale, Mississippi, made an upscale version of the Koolickle for some members of the Association of Food Journalists a couple of years ago that by all reports was a big hit. Hall has chops—he worked at Wolfgang Puck’s the Source in Washington, D.C., and Susan Spicer’s Bayona in New Orleans before returning home to the Delta—and he emphasizes the Koolickle’s sweet-and-sour flavor combo rather than its scary color, which he avoids by not actually using Kool-Aid. Instead, he heats up homemade lemonade and adds his own homemade dills along with a handful of rosemary or mint or basil from his garden, and lets everything steep before chilling. The formula, he says, keeps the pickle “in the ‘ade’ world” without being too outré. Next he’s thinking of adding vodka to the mix, an excellent idea that will take the pickles firmly out of the I.C.P. camp and turn them into convenient alcohol delivery systems along the lines of the now classic vodka-spiked watermelon.

  When I was a kid, dill pickles were just dill pickles and sat among the more bizarre or just plain gross items lined up in gallon jars on the wooden counters of gas stations and grocery stores—things like pickled eggs and pickled pigs’ feet and lips and hocks, as well as the occasional pickled sausages called Red Hots that are dyed the same scary red shade as the Koolickles of today. But just as Hall has fancified the Kool-Aid pickle, the whole nose-to-tail movement—the wildly popular trend in which chefs allow no part of an animal to go to waste—has moved the pig parts out of the gas-station jar and onto the upscale plate.