A Fork In The Road: Tales of Food, Pleasure and Discovery On The Road (Lonely Planet Travel Literature)
Page 11
Anthony Bourdain put down a rack of Fat Matt’s ribs on his show The Layover. I go by @BBQsnob on Twitter so it seemed like a personal message when he opened his meal there with the line, ‘Okay, barbecue snobs and food nerds, I know it’s not real barbecue.’ What he means is that they pre-cook their ribs and grill them over direct heat. They do not smoke meat, nor do they pretend to. Brisket is not on the menu nor will you find tempura-battered anything. When you ask for sauce on the side they assume you just want more sauce, not unadulterated meat. How would it smell like the burnt sugar of a backyard cookout any other way? We got a little of everything, which included a chopped pork sandwich more akin to a sloppy joe, Brunswick stew that had simmered beyond the point where any single ingredient could be recognized, and a rack of ribs whose meat was literally dropping off the bones from being so tender. The charred flavor from the fire was secondary only to the vinegar-heavy tomato sauce. Juicy breast meat beneath crispy chicken skin didn’t have even a whiff of smoke, but it was grilled with such a deft hand that I had to peek back inside on my way out just to make sure Jerry wasn’t back there with a beer manning the grill.
August: I travelled alone on this trip. The weather held up and Bill Addison was able to meet me at Community Q, where I drove immediately after securing my rental car. Dave Roberts opened this place in 2009 after working with two Atlanta-area barbecue legends—Dave Poe and Sam Huff. We’ll get to them in a few months. The menu here was the widest I’d found in Georgia. Not only did they have pork, ribs, brisket and chicken, but they also had beef short ribs, which are fatty bricks of roast-like beef perched atop what could be mistaken for a human femur. They are big and they are very hard to cook well. Although Bill had me prepared to love the brisket and pork ribs, we agreed that the smoky beef rib, with its pull-apart tenderness and aggressive black pepper seasoning, won the day.
I would be remiss not to mention the ‘Mac N Cheese’. It’s not often in Georgia that a specific side item gets as much attention as Brunswick stew does, but in Atlanta it’s all about rigatoni with plenty of cheddar, Monterey Jack and parmesan, all mixed in with a hefty amount of cream. The recipe’s provenance is debated, no matter the recipe’s origination you can find it at Community Q, Dave Poe’s BBQ, Sam’s BBQ1 and Grand Champion BBQ.
Being unhindered by time and wanting to prolong my temporary escape from real work, we left Community Q bound for the brand new Bone Lick BBQ. Mike LaSage had been doing a weekly barbecue menu within P’cheen restaurant and he called it Bone Lick BBQ. Atlanta magazine offered high praise to this tiny joint within a restaurant in their BBQ 2010 article, so Bill was anxious to try it now that it had its own space and a daily menu of smoked meat. I hate to carp too heavily on a place that just opened, but it’s also hard to quiet my inner critic. Based on one visit they were experiencing some considerable growing pains.
September: A crisis on the jobsite brought me straight to Warner Robins, where I arrived just in time for lunch at Martin’s BBQ. I ate more great brisket and opted this time for some well-smoked turkey breast. Fresh-cut French fries and hand-battered okra rounded out what was once again a great meal. Then I did it again the next day, and the sausage isn’t bad either.
October: Those hot Georgia summers were giving way to beautiful fall skies, and the architecture was starting to get in the way of the barbecue hunts. I had just returned from a weekend with the Southern Foodways Alliance that had altered my perspective on my place in the food writing world. It was the SFA symposium of food thinkers, writers, purveyors and cooks. My fellow attendees cared about the barbecue book I had nearly completed and encouraged me to take the leap. At the beginning of the symposium I introduced myself as an architect. By the second day it felt more natural to say I was an author. I was among peers.
Back at the jobsite a morning meeting mercifully ended early. I left the group who went to Martin’s again and I drove north to Jackson, the home of Fresh Air Bar-B-Q since 1929. It felt good to be on the back roads with nothing but time and an appetite. I was seeking a therapeutic mental refuge in barbecue as much I was seeking smoked meat.
I had to laugh, as I walked to the door through the gravel parking lot, that the only thing tainting the crisp blue sky was a plume from the smokestack of a nearby power plant. I guess it was all fresh air out here in 1929, but no longer. I enjoyed the brevity of the menu: you could get a plate of gently sauced pork with slaw and Brunswick stew, or you could get a larger plate. I thought this must be the Georgia Style that Robert F. Moss discussed in his book Barbecue: The History of an American Institution, where he describes a dry-ish chopped pork lightly doused with a thin, red vinegar sauce along with a side of Brunswick stew. Smoking only hams made for a drier meat but the finely chopped pork hadn’t verged into sawdust territory. A hearty Brunswick stew contained a bit of what looked like ground beef along with potatoes and corn. The bright green slaw was finely chopped with just enough mayonnaise dressing to hold it together. This was pork meant for piling onto bread and topping with that slaw, and that’s just how I polished it off.
Just up the road was The Blind Pig, where I was soon seated with a tray of ribs, beans, stew and an exemplary pulled pork sandwich. Pork shoulders are smoked daily here and pulled (not chopped) to order, which retains freshness and moisture and offers large bites of smoky crust. The saucy ribs and sweet beans were fine, but after one bite of the Brunswick stew my attention was solidly diverted. Maybe it was the stasis between soup and stew, or the kick of black pepper that this Texan is addicted to. It may have also been the solid smokiness of the meat within that stew, but the answer isn’t as important as the discovery of my favorite Brunswick stew in Georgia.
The back roads I used to get to Dean’s Barbeque (since 1947) proved inefficient and the clock was ticking quickly toward my departure time. Inside a Styrofoam container there was slaw and stew nearly equal in appearance and quality to what I found at Fresh Air, but the uniformly pale chunks of pork had been strangled beneath a pool of a sweet vinegar sauce. Every awful bite came with a vinegar chaser. Maybe the sandwich was better, but I had to hit a gas station before dropping the rental. Two out of three ain’t bad.
November: Bill Addison convinced me to come a bit earlier so we could venture out to some of his favorites in Marietta just northwest of the city and outside the loop. We had grand plans of multiple stops that evening, but the Atlanta gridlock was too much to overcome. It gave us time to talk about the real possibility of becoming a writer. Bill listened eagerly as I explained my early negotiations with Texas Monthly. They had hinted at the possibility of taking me on as a writer—a barbecue writer. A hint was all I needed at that point.
We just beat the closing sign at Dave Poe’s. It took only one bite of the pulled pork to know that it was some of the best in the state. Bill noted my audible moan after the first bite of the moist, smoky meat. Chicken wings flecked with a ruddy spice coating were crisp with a hint of sweetness. Ribs and brisket were forgettable while familiar cheesy pasta was less greasy than other versions, but the Brunswick stew had an oil slick on top. We were already late for the next stop.
DAVID KAMP is a writer and humorist whose work appears most frequently in Vanity Fair. He is the author of, among other books, The United States of Arugula, a chronicle of American food trends.
STOLEN APPLES, YANKEE POT ROAST, AND A CABIN BY THE LAKE
David Kamp
I still have the little printed card from the place:
MAPLE COTTAGE
FOR TOURISTS
‘A Good Place to Spend the Night’
Cabins and Good Meals at Reasonable Rates
R.M. FLETCHER
Maple Cottage was a clapboard farmhouse on the outskirts of Center Harbor, New Hampshire, about ten miles east of Squam Lake, where Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda scenically confronted their mortality in the 1981 film On Golden Pond. It had been built, like most nineteenth-century farmhouses, close to the road, just a few feet back from New Hampshire Route 25.
R.M. Fletcher was Robert Fletcher, ‘Rob’ to his old friends—who, like him, were literally old—and ‘Mr. Fletcher’ to my family. He was a lifelong bachelor, congenitally shy, born and raised on the Maple Cottage property, back when it had been a working farm. He had thick white hair barbered in a tight 1920s style and the plain features of a Dorothea Lange sharecropper. He was usually wearing an apron over his short-sleeve dress shirt and belted trousers, because he was usually in some stage of meal preparation.
I probably exchanged no more than two sentences ever with Mr. Fletcher, but I was always overjoyed at the first sight of him—that moment each year when our car pulled up at Maple Cottage after the seven-hour drive from New Jersey. My father would get out and enter the house through the side door, where the kitchen was. A minute or so later, he and the old man would emerge, engaged in jovial small talk. We would all say our hellos to Mr. Fletcher and catch wafts of whatever was cooking inside. Sometimes it might be a baked good like apple pie or cranberry bread, but usually the air carried a gravy aroma. An inviting one, like the kind you wake up to on Thanksgiving.
‘Cabins and Good Meals at Reasonable Rates’: truth in advertising. We were a Mom, a Dad, a girl, and two boys, and, for a two-figure sum per night, we got two squares a day, breakfast and dinner, and a beach more or less to ourselves, since none of Mr. Fletcher’s other patrons seemed to love Lake Kanasatka as much as we did. We took our meals in the Maple Cottage dining room with our fellow guests, boardinghouse-style. Breakfast was at 8am and dinner, 6pm. At mealtimes, Mr. Fletcher would summon us cabin-dwellers by standing on his porch and waving one of those town crier–type bells in the direction of the lake, Ya-DING, Ya-DING! Sometimes, if my brother and I charged up the dirt road fast enough, we would catch sight of the old man shuffling back into the house, his aproned back to us, his walk rickety and arthritic, the bell silent by his hip. He looked exactly like a codger in a George Booth cartoon in the New Yorker.
This was in the 1970s and early ’80s. My father was a car salesman who got precisely two weeks of vacation time a year, and he always took the same two weeks off—the last two in August, leading up to Labor Day. I was aware that other kids my age were getting on airplanes and going to Disney World or family-owned condos in Florida, but not for a second did it ever occur to me that our vacations were modest or old-fashioned. As I learned later, though, our family’s way was pretty much how working-class families had holidayed a century earlier. Norman Rockwell, in his memoir, Norman Rockwell: My Adventures as an Illustrator, describes childhood getaways from his native New York City (yes, he was a city kid, despite his totemic depictions of small-town life) that, though they took place when William McKinley was president, sound strikingly familiar:
My family spent every summer until I was nine or ten years old in the country at various farms which took in boarders. Those country boardinghouses weren’t like the resorts of today … Those boardinghouses were just farms. The grownups played croquet or sat in the high slat-backed rockers which lined the long front porch. We kids were left to do just about anything we wanted.
Mr. Fletcher’s land was no longer being actively farmed, but the area remained farm country and the cuisine was still farmhouse—not so much in the ‘farm to table’ way of today’s neo-retro agritourism, in which your married-couple 29-year-old innkeepers might present you with a fresh-plucked heritage pullet roasted with fingerlings and garlic scapes from the very acre upon which the dear bird foraged, but in the hearty, stick-to-your-ribs way that sustained farmers who had corn to thresh and hay to bale and cows to milk, and therefore required lots and lots of calories to burn.
Breakfast was two courses. Oatmeal first, served in a generous, undainty portion, with cream and brown sugar. The oatmeal was necessary, because late Augusts in New Hampshire carried with them a heavy intimation of fall, meaning not only that there were a few red maples along the road already beginning to turn, but also that the air temperature reliably plunged into the low forties at night. We’d wake up to vapor coming off the lake and out of our mouths. Though it would be swimming and canoeing weather by 11.15, it was sweatshirt and oatmeal weather at eight. After the oatmeal came the ‘proper’ breakfast, which, if syrup pitchers were set out on the table (my preferred scenario), was pancakes or French toast. Absent the syrup pitchers, it was piles of eggs with piles of toast and rashers of bacon.
But it was Mr. Fletcher’s dinners that captivated me and have kept Maple Cottage forever in my mind. Unambitious and cost-conscious as my family might have been in terms of travel, we lived very much in thrall to the aspirational food manias of the times, whether that meant visiting the wondrous new places that Craig Claiborne and Mimi Sheraton told us about in the New York Times (Dean & DeLuca! The Fondue Pot!), or, at home, essaying Julia Child’s soupe au pistou or Mollie Katzen’s carrot-cashew curry. Perversely, Mr. Fletcher’s stolid Yankee cooking, with its clean, uncomplicated flavors, struck me as radical.
Sundays only, he did a ‘supper’ at 1pm instead of six. It was basically the full Thanksgiving, expertly realized: the turkey, the stuffing, the cranberry sauce, and what have you. A day or two later, the leftover turkey would reappear in a pot pie with peas, root vegetables, and late-summer corn. It sounds ridiculous, but, prior to Maple Cottage, I had never heard of pot pie and was unaware in general of the concept of flaky crust–encased savories.
Mr. Fletcher’s turkey pot pie blew my mind, as did his Yankee pot roast, as did his ritual Saturday-night New England boiled dinner: braised vegetables, brisket that he’d corned himself, baked beans, and, most exotically of all, circular slices of molasses-steeped New England brown bread, home-baked in a coffee can. Inasmuch as one can eat a Norman Rockwell painting, that’s what I did, nightly and voraciously.
Dessert was a cake or fruit pie, Fletcher-made, never store-bought. One night, one of the old-timers with whom we shared a table, Aggie, asked me if I’d liked the apples in the apple pie. Aggie was a central-casting little old lady with pluck: gray hair up in a bun, floral-print summer dress. Years before we met her, she had lost her husband, ‘my Joe’, and she kept his memory alive by faithfully listening to his Red Sox on the radio. I told Aggie that yes, I’d liked the apples in the pie. ‘What if I told you,’ she asked, pausing for dramatic effect, ‘that they’d been stolen?’
Aggie was herself the thief. On her daily constitutional, she had happened upon a tree on a neighbor’s property that was already bearing ripe fruit, and she’d helped herself. Mr. Fletcher sheepishly acknowledged to us that he had accepted the goods even though they were hot.
Oftentimes after dinner, we would all—my family, Aggie, the other elderfolk roosting in the rooms upstairs, the hippie-hiker couples passing through in their Volkswagens—retire to the house’s front parlor, where an upright piano stood. There, another of Mr. Fletcher’s solo regulars, an Episcopal minister from Rhode Island named John Evans, who was somehow able to spend his entire summers at Maple Cottage, entertained us with song—not religious music but Tin Pan Alley stuff that he played off the top of his head or from the stacks of old sheet music that sat atop the piano. Reverend Evans was a multi-instrumentalist and a gabby, endearingly affable eccentric, a bit like The Music Man’s Professor Harold Hill but with actual musical ability. I still have his printed cards, too, five of ’em: one that desc
ribes him as a reverend, two that describe him as a harpist, one that describes him as ‘Singer, Author’, and another that describes him as ‘Entertainer’, his specialties being ‘Country, Dixieland, Oldies’. He and my father, a gifted amateur crooner, got along like a house on fire and duetted by the piano until it got late, which, at Maple Cottage, was around 9.03pm. At that point, it was sweatshirts on, flashlights out, and back down the hill to the cabin by the lake.
To recap: I spent summer evenings in a country boarding house eating meals with strangers and listening contentedly as people merrily sang along to sheet music in the parlor. What century did I grow up in again?
I suspect that even then, as a child, a part of me recognized that what I was witnessing and participating in was a time warp, a way of life that already belonged to the past. I further suspect that this was part of the allure. Maple Cottage may not have been as glam a destination as the high-rise Florida condos or Colorado ski resorts to which my more affluent friends traveled, but it was every bit as transportive. Probably more so.
I’ve since gotten to take airplane trips and swim in tropical waters and bargain in souks and sleep in hotel suites whose nightly rack rates have run to four figures. Still, Maple Cottage remains the beau idéal of vacations in my mind, and I retain the provincial bias that there is nowhere in the world as pretty as New England in late summer. And while my palate has since been treated to hundreds of experiences putatively more exciting and broadening than the simple country meals prepared by that old man in his farmhouse in New Hampshire, my abiding culinary love is for the kind of congenial, familial New England home cooking where everything seems to be infused with either pie spices or pan drippings. ‘Mr. Fletcher food,’ I call it.