by Paula Deen
My Best Ham Salad Sandwich
The tuna salad, egg salad, and chicken salad sandwiches seemed to fly from The Bag Lady’s basket, but one of the most popular was always the ham salad sandwich. The trick is to use the best ham you can find; my momma’s favorite, and mine, was a traditional Smithfield ham.
I adore, in particular, a Smithfield spiral-sliced ham because you don’t even have to slice it. It’s already done for you. When I get to the end of that ham, I love cutting the leftover meat off the bone—and there’s always plenty. Trimming any fat off, I make a ham salad by putting the ham in the food processor to gently chop it all up, stopping before it becomes mushy or pasty.
2 cups leftover ham, chopped in a food processor
1 cup finely diced celery
¼ cup finely minced sweet onion
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
2 hard-boiled eggs, diced
¼ cup hot pickle relish, drained
½ cup mayonnaise
Mix all the ingredients until well blended and spread on white bread—crust and all—to make a generous, fat sandwich that does justice to The Bag Lady.
Chapter 7
THE BOTTOMING OUT AND THE NEW BEGINNING
People will step on your back to get in ahead of y’all. That’s why you gotta be tough even when you feel so stinkin’ bad, you need yo’ momma’s comfort.
In the beginning, it was just Jamie and me. Bobby had a job working at Circuit City.
Before The Bag Lady was born, Jamie had gone off to school at Valdosta State. Fact is, I didn’t have any money for college. He didn’t have any money for college. His daddy didn’t have any money for college. But off he went to Valdosta anyway on a partial scholarship. At that age, like many kids, Jamie’s biggest ambition was to enjoy some serious college partying, and he figured he’d eventually get a job that would pay his way through school. Jamie, who’s the smartest, most talented guy in the world (and have you ever checked out those dimples?), is just not cut out for studying and academics. Sorry I said it, but this is his momma speaking, you’d better believe it. Oh, he might have taken one class while he was there, but mostly he wanted to be part of the whole social scene. His dream was good times and my dream was making a livin’. The truth? Even if I could have scraped up the money, I wouldn’t have given it to him for college—I’d have definitely thought that’d be pure pissin’ it away.
But Jamie’s his own man, and when he went to Valdosta he moved in with his best friend and went to work in a restaurant. Then he got himself a job digging swimming pools. The poor things lived in a house that I don’t think had any electricity or runnin’ drinking water, and I know it didn’t have any water to flush the toilet. It was a serious challenge when nature called. Lord have mercy!
“We didn’t have anything,” Jamie remembers. “Just likethere’s not a tooth fairy, there’s not a toothpaste fairy, and there’s sure not a toilet paper fairy. Our water was cut off many times before we figured out how to turn it back on. The house was either freezing cold or burning hot, and at times very dry.”
Well, my heart really about broke when one day Jamie, who is so law-abiding, had to tell me on the phone, “Momma, I stole candy bars to have something to eat.” Soon after, he called again to tell me he’d gotten a job at the Dairy Queen. I was pretty happy about that because I knew that at least he could eat at the Dairy Queen.
“Yup,” he said, “you know, Momma, this job’s gonna be good, but they wear double-knit uniforms, and those ugly little crown caps.”
I guessed right then that there was going to be big trouble. There was no way my Jamie would wear a little crown cap. For a week he was in luck because he was so big they had to special-order a uniform that would fit. When the week was up, Saturday rolled around and I called him at the Dairy Queen. “May I speak with Jamie Deen, please?” I asked. The man on the phone told me he was certainly sorry but Jamie wasn’t there because his grandfather died, and he had to go home.
I said, “His grandfather’s been dead now for almost twentyfive years.”
Jamie’s uniform had come in. He would have eaten shit before he’d wear that uniform. So, he just told them his granddaddy died and walked out.
I had been making some noise about starting some sort of business, but Jamie would have done about anything to avoid workin’ with me, so he got a job at Yellowstone Park, and, wouldn’t you know it, he’d call collect every week and tell me how homesick he was. I’d say, “Oh, son, I’m so sorry,” but I wasn’t sorry. Well, finally he got over his homesickness, started enjoying the park and making some friends, but very little money. He was twenty-two and I worried so about his future.
This was in 1989, and I’d been batting around the idea for The Bag Lady for a while. I knew Jamie was just marking time till he found a way to seriously support himself; it was my personal opinion he just shouldn’t play around anymore. I wanted him home. I needed him home. It was time to tell him about my plan.
“Son, I’m really starting a business,” I said on the phone one day. “I’ve got this idea, and I think we can do it, but I can’t do it without you. I need you so badly to help me with this, and I need you right now.”
My Jamie didn’t have an option, to tell the truth. Neither did his brother. I needed them.
Looking back, I think that maybe one reason my sons and I have such a great relationship today is that we went through some pretty rough times together. Jamie and Bobby didn’t have the same opportunities as kids whose parents have the money for educating them. Those rich kids leave home at eighteen for college and then fall into the lawyering, the banking—the cushy office jobs. My sons had only one choice—if you call it a choice. The choice’s name was Momma.
So, grudgingly, Jamie said okay, but he wanted to make a little detour before coming home. His girlfriend at the time lived in Atlanta, and he wanted to go see her for a week before he came back to Savannah.
“Okay, son,” I remember telling him, “but you’ve got to be home by Friday at the latest because we’re gonna start The Bag Lady Monday, and I desperately need you to help me think all this stuff out and make serious plans.”
You may be thinkin’ I sound pretty mean, and maybe I was, but it’s not like I was just dying inside because I had to deny my academically driven son a college education. A love for books was not driving that child. Jamie was doing himself no good at Yellowstone at all, he’d be the first to tell you that. It was a temporary position, it could never last, and he knew it. Jamie was ready to get his feet on the ground, and it wasn’t going to be in no advanced philosophy or tree-hugging course.
Well, he went to Atlanta to see his girl, and he got home Sunday afternoon. I was so devastated that he didn’t come home Friday like he said he would that when he ambled in the door, I walked past him like he wasn’t there and didn’t bother speaking to him.
Thinking of it, it about kills me that I acted that way. I think he holds that against me, even today, and I still feel guilty about it. Truth is, I had missed him so bad and now I needed him so desperately. I felt I was literally fighting for our lives and he disappointed me, but I know now that I should not have reacted the way I did. No one ever said I was no angel. But my biggest fear in the whole world was that I was going to die and leave my children with no security, in the very same financial boat I’d been left in. No way. I was going to do whatever it took to make them safe. Cooking was my first, last, and only hope. I had nowhere to turn, nobody to turn to. It was all up to my sons and me: family was all we had.
To be fair, Jamie had a different take on it.
“I never really believed it was going to be a real business, I thought it was just a crazy idea of Mom’s,” he says today. “So, how early did I have to get there to fix ham sandwiches, put ’em in a cooler, and knock on a few doors?
“Why didn’t I just walk away from her crazy scheme? Well, it’s only in hindsight that now I know we were all going to have grand, beautiful homes on the water and a business
we’d all love. It’s only in hindsight that I know the tougher the vine, the sweeter the grape. It’s only in hindsight that I know that Bobby and I would have our own television show, our own cookbook, and even be able to buy a wonderful house for our dad, who is the hardest-working man I know. The truth is that our momma was the headlight on the locomotive that Bobby and I didn’t believe in at first. But my brother and I were blessed from the start to have a relationship so close with our momma that today we three, Bobby, Mom, and I, are blooming together. Sure, a lot of times I wanted my mom and not Paula Deen, my boss. She can be very, very tough, even mean; she can turn on a dime, and can use enough angry guilt to make anyone do anything for her—and not happily! But today, we’re blessed. And we did it together.”
There’s a lot of things none of us knew would happen then, but all I knew was that the next morning was Monday and we had to start. I was to make the sandwiches and Jamie was to sell them. I had to run the route with him the first day. His job was to go into the Medical Arts Building with his basket of lunches, and say, “Hey, I’m Jamie Deen with The Bag Lady, just stopping in.” Now, this was the kid who would give up a steady job rather than wear a little crown hat, so you just know that carrying that big old lunch basket wasn’t easy for him. So here we’re going around with all these smushed tuna fish sandwiches. Jamie was so embarrassed he liketa died and he was feeling hopeful about at least dropping into a black hole to disappear.
We probably knocked on sixty doors. Only two turned us down, and that’s because they’d closed their offices for the lunch hour. Even I was a bit mortified at the knocking and pleading we had to do, but we sold those damn sandwiches. Jamie says people bought the sandwiches out of pity. So what? I’d take pity at that moment in our lives. It was a great beginning, and I was so encouraged.
It didn’t take me but a minute to realize that my packaging sucked; why were all those sandwiches smushed? When I started trying to sell them in banks and offices and places where I didn’t know anyone, we would surely fail. Nothing for it but that I had to go out and find a sturdy container. I went down to the paper-supply houses, and they had these beautiful transparent plastic containers so people could check out the food, and it was clear that nobody would ever have touched that food except me. And nothing would smush. I sprung what little money I didn’t have for the containers.
Well, I fixed the most beautiful meals in these little boxes. I’d wake up at five every morning and make about 250 lunches—everything from sandwiches to beautiful fruit salads with French custard and a French crème. I made grilled chicken and lasagna, custards and banana pudding. And on Thursday nights, I would put a Boston pork butt on the grill and let it barbecue slowly all night, get up on Friday morning, chop it into bite-sized pieces, and put it on a hamburger roll and serve it with a small container of barbecue sauce. Banana pudding was dessert.
How’d I get the money to buy all the stuff? Once we got going, Jamie would bring back each day’s revenues for me. Then I’d go to Polk’s fresh produce market and buy some big old bananas or whatever I could find that was half-price (not half-price because it was bad, but because it was day-old. Don’t worry; even then I knew the difference between bad and just a little bit dated!). Bargain never did mean bad to me. What looks pretty isn’t necessarily good and what looks wrinkled may be the juiciest, most delicious peach in the universe. I bought the soft day-old fruit everyone else thought was rotten but I knew was actually sweeter than the fruit that just arrived at the market. I’d take a portion of money for the grocery and container stores, and buy whatever we needed there for the next day; we operated out of the house like that for about a year and a half. It had to work. I was liketa become a true bag lady if it didn’t. I was real motivated.
Jamie remembers feeling so frustrated as soon as he had to leave the Medical Arts Building, where I had some friends, and go into the banks and offices, where we knew no one.
“It was all so rag-tied and homemade looking,” he recalls. “Even me; with no uniform, no experience, nothing—I was just a guy with food. I’d go into an office wheeling my cart and say, ‘I’m from The Bag Lady, would you like some lunch?’ and I’d get mostly polite nos. When I told Momma, she said I was to pay that no mind and continue going to the same places at the same time every day, until they counted on me to be there. Then the sandwiches would start to sell.”
I was right. Gradually we began to see a real profit. I knew I was onto something. I called Bubba one day and yelled into the phone, ecstatic, “Bubba, this week I made a thousand dollars! I’ve never made so much in my entire life!”
Pretty soon, Bobby had quit his job at Circuit City, which he’d taken when he graduated from high school, and joined his momma and brother in the business. Was life wonderful because a momma and her sons were working together? Nooooo, darling. We fought something terrible.
• • •
I remember that first Halloween, Jamie dressed up like a Bag Lady, in a dress and makeup, and went out to sell the sandwiches. It was funny, but I knew he was hiding behind the costume so no one would recognize him.
I think the kids believed they were in this only temporarily, but I finally told them, “I need permanent help. Y’all are gonna have to stay here. But maybe we can hire someone to run these Bag Lady routes and find something else for you.”
Well, we did hire, but it didn’t work. I’d get someone who’d come back after a couple of hours and say, “Didn’t have any luck. Couldn’t sell any sandwiches.”
As soon as I hired people off the street, sales just never were the same. For all I knew, they were goin’ out to sit in the park with the lunches, then come back and say, “No luck again.”
I needed family. From my point of view, there was just nothing sweeter than these big old boys walking up to potential customers and saying, “My momma’s cooked meat loaf today. Would you like some for lunch?” But that was my point of view, not theirs. Still, they had to do it.
Other family pitched in as well. When things were real tight, my Aunt Peggy would regularly come over for a week or so to help us out. She’d stand with me, and sometimes cry with me, and cook with me, and always cheer me on in her unique Aunt Peggy way. I’ll never forget the first time she came after I started The Bag Lady. In the morning, I was stirring away in my kitchen, and down comes Aunt Peggy with a pair of white cotton underpants on her head. “I’m so afraid,” she said, “that I’m goin’ to get hair in your precious food and since we don’t have no hairnets, I’m usin’ my underwear.”
I laughed so long and so hard and told her I sure hoped they were clean and could she rustle up another pair for me? And, I want to tell you, we didn’t waste no money on hairnets for a long time after that. We continued to use those underpants because my motto is Make do with what yo’ got, the whole thing was pretty ingenious, and, anyway, we kinda liked the look.
My sons and I lived in our two-bedroom, one-bathroom house, and the boys then both had new girlfriends who also wanted to live with us. I’d said, “Y’all, come on in.” That there started an endless round of fighting between all of us about who slept where. I insisted the girls sleep together in a small morning room where I’d bought a pull-out trundle bed for them. The boys had twin beds that they pushed together in one of the bedrooms. I’m sorry to say the sleeping arrangements didn’t always end up as I planned, and that’s all I’m gonna say about that. I learned you gotta choose your battles. I’d have done anything to keep my family happy and with me. So I had these four children in my house, and all four of them now were running Bag Lady routes.
It was very, very hard and I realize now that was so because I was annoyingly gung ho and interested in nothing else. My boys, on the other hand, were interested in everything else but The Bag Lady. Jamie didn’t hesitate to tell me on a regular basis, “Momma, this is your dream, not mine.”
“Well, you don’t know how freakin’ hard it is to make a living!” I’d hurl back. “That’s real and no dream. You go ahea
d and be a writer and see how poor you are. Now, get your ass out there and sell those sandwiches.” Every morning, I felt like I was pullin’ this wagon by this big old thick rope, and I’d pick that rope up and put it on my shoulder and say, “Okay, boys, climb on the wagon. I’ll tell you how we’ll manage to live, if y’all would just get on.”
In the end, they climbed aboard.
Good boys. You ask Jamie why they climbed aboard and he’d tell you, “I’m a Southern boy and Southern boys can’t turn their back on their mommas. We take care of our mommas; there’s no negotiation there.”
The only bright spot was my little eight-year-old Shih Tzu, Magnolia. I just adored her tiny, solid white body with just a perky spot of tan on her back. She was such company but scared to death of loud noises. One Fourth of July, I had friends over, and Magnolia was so terrified by the fireworks, she up and ran away. I looked for her for four days but she was gone and I was devastated. Eventually, the dog pound people found my baby, none the worse for wear, and we were reunited.
Besides The Bag Lady lunches, I’d been doing more and more private catering; small parties mostly, but my darlin’ high school friend Jeannie Sims opened me up to the world of serious catering. She’s a tough woman, Jeannie, and you’d better believe she wanted her parties just right. It was summer and it turned out she was planning two dinner parties, for a total of three hundred people, and she threw those parties my way because she knew how bad I needed the business. They were my first big catering jobs. I figured out they would bring in a profit of ten thousand dollars. Three hundred eaters! Maybe ten thousand dollars! I really wanted that business.