Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

by Fannie Flagg

  Marion smiled at the old woman. “Well, if you insist. Patsy, what do you say?”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. And listen, Patsy, if you ever get anywhere around these parts again, you be sure and look me up, y’hear?”

  “Yes ma’am, I will.”

  As they pulled out, Bill tooted his horn and the little girl waved goodbye.

  The old woman stood on the side of the road and waved back until the car was out of sight.

  The end.

  2 cups flour

  2 teaspoons baking powder

  2 teaspoons salt

  ¼ teaspoon soda

  ½ cup Crisco

  1 cup buttermilk

  Sift dry ingredients together. Add Crisco and blend well until like fine meal. Add buttermilk and mix. Roll out thin and cut into desired size biscuit. Bake in greased pan at 450 degrees until golden brown.

  Naughty Bird’s favorite!

  SKILLET CORNBREAD

  ¾ teaspoon baking soda

  1½ cups buttermilk

  2 cups cornmeal, sifted

  1 teaspoon salt

  1 egg

  1 tablespoon melted bacon fat

  Dissolve soda in buttermilk. Mix the cornmeal with salt, egg, and buttermilk. Add hot, melted bacon fat. Pour into greased iron skillet and bake at 375 degrees until done.

  So good, it will kill you.

  COCONUT CREAM PIE

  3 egg yolks

  ⅓ cup sugar

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  2½ tablespoons cornstarch

  1 tablespoon melted butter

  2 cups scalded milk

  1 cup grated coconut

  1 teaspoon vanilla or rum

  ¼ teaspoon nutmeg

  9-inch pie shell, baked

  Beat egg yolks. Beat in sugar, salt, cornstarch, and butter gradually. Pour in milk and blend. Cook over boiling water, stirring constantly until thick. Add coconut, and cool. Add flavoring and nutmeg and pour into shell. Cover with meringue and bake 15 to 20 minutes in 300-degree oven.

  Yum, yum.

  PECAN PIE

  9-inch pie shell, unbaked

  2 cups pecans, chopped

  1 cup sugar, brown or white

  1 cup light corn syrup

  1 tablespoon flour

  1 teaspoon vanilla

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  3 eggs

  2 tablespoons butter

  Line the pie shell with chopped pecans. Combine the sugar, corn syrup, flour, vanilla, and salt and mix until blended. Beat in the eggs one at a time, mixing well each time. Pour into the nut-lined pie shell, and dot with butter. Bake at 350 degrees until firm—about 1 hour.

  Sinful stuff—Stump’s favorite.

  SIPSEY’S SOUTHERN-FRIED CHICKEN

  1 good-sized fryer

  Salt and pepper

  Milk

  1 ½ cups sifted flour

  Cut chicken into serving pieces. Rub well with salt and pepper. Let stand awhile. Then soak in milk about ½ hour. Put flour, a little salt and pepper, and chicken into a bag, and shake well until every piece is coated. Fry in hot, deep fat at 400 degrees, until golden brown. Leave heavy pieces in fat a little longer than the smaller ones.

  So long, Mr. Chicken.

  CHICKEN AND DUMPLINGS

  2 cups white flour

  3 teaspoons baking soda

  1 teaspoon salt

  ⅔ cup milk

  ⅓ cup Crisco oil

  1 pot of chicken stew

  Mix flour, baking soda, and salt together. Then add milk and oil. Spoon-drop into boiling stew, cook for 15 minutes, turning dumplings often.

  Should float off the fork.

  FRIED HAM WITH RED-EYE GRAVY

  Slice ham about ¼ inch thick. Cook slowly in a heavy frying pan until evenly browned on both sides. Sprinkle each side lightly with sugar during cooking. Remove the ham and keep it warm, then add about ½ cup of cold water or a cup of coffee. Let it boil until gravy turns red. Blend and pour over the ham.

  Good eats!

  GRITS

  2 tablespoons butter

  1 teaspoon salt

  5 cups boiling water

  1 cup hominy grits

  Add lots of butter and salt to the boiling water. Slowly stir in the grits. Cover and cook slowly for about 30 to 40 minutes, and stir till you like it.

  Keeps you regular.

  FRIED CATFISH

  2 pounds catfish, cleaned and skinned

  ½ cup sifted flour

  Salt and pepper to taste

  ½ cup yellow cornmeal

  3 tablespoons bacon fat or Crisco

  Wipe the fish with a damp cloth. Mix the flour, salt, pepper and cornmeal. Roll Mr. Catfish in the mixture and fry in hot bacon fat until golden brown on one side. Then turn and brown the other side. Total cooking time about 8 to 10 minutes.

  Thank God for catfish!

  MILK GRAVY

  Use hot drippings from chicken or pork chops. For each 3 tablespoons of drippings, stir in 3 tablespoons of flour and blend well. Cook and stir until lightly browned. Gradually add 1 ½ to 2 cups hot milk. Cook and stir until thickened.

  Goes with everything.

  PORK CHOPS & GRAVY

  4 slices bacon

  4 large thick pork chops

  ⅓ cup flour

  Salt and pepper

  1½ cups milk

  Fry the bacon first, then dip the chops in flour, with salt and pepper. Save what’s left of the flour. Fry your chops in the hot bacon drippings until brown on both sides. Turn down heat, cover, and cook till chops are tender and thoroughly cooked—about 30 minutes. Stir your leftover flour into the fat and cook until browned. Pour the milk over the chops and simmer until gravy is thickened.

  Big George could eat eight at a time.

  SNAP BEANS

  1 hambone, cooked

  2 pounds snap beans

  1 teaspoon sugar, brown or granulated

  A few hot red pepper flakes

  Salt to taste

  Place hambone in pot and add water to cover beans. Bring to a boil. String the beans and snap or cut into desired lengths. Add to the pot along with the sugar and pepper flakes. Cook over medium heat for 1 hour.

  Happy beans … fun to eat.

  SIPSEY’S BLACK-EYED PEAS

  1¼ cups dried black-eyed peas

  4 cups water

  1 onion, chopped

  1 piece salt pork or 8 pieces bacon

  A little red pepper

  Put all the ingredients together in a pot and cook slowly until tender—about 3 hours.

  Even better the next day!

  CREAMED CORN

  6 ears sweet white corn

  2 tablespoons butter

  ½-1 cup milk and water Salt and pepper

  Cut corn off cob, then scrape the cob down with the back of a knife to get what’s left. Cook with butter over low heat and slowly add milk and water and salt and pepper till you like it. Stir for 10 minutes till just right.

  Good for you.

  LIMA BEANS & BUTTER BEANS

  1 quart fresh beans

  Salt and pepper to taste

  1 piece salt pork or 6 pieces bacon

  Add water just up to the top of the beans. Let it come to a boil, then simmer until tender. Add salt and pepper till you like it.

  Right out of the Victory garden.

  CANDIED YAMS

  ⅓ cup butter

  ⅔ cup brown sugar, packed

  6 medium-sized sweet potatoes, cooked, peeled, and sliced

  ½ teaspoon salt

  ⅓ cup water

  2 pinches cinnamon

  In a heavy frying pan or skillet, heat together butter and brown sugar until melted and blended. Add the sliced sweet potatoes and turn until coated in the syrup and brown. Add salt, water, and cinnamon, cover, and cook slowly until potatoes are tender.

  Sweeter than candy.

  FRIED OKRA

  Wash your okra well and cut off the stems. Cut pods in
to sections about ½ inch long. Roll in cornmeal and fry in hot bacon drippings and deep hot fat until a nice crisp brown. Drain on paper towel, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and serve hot.

  Better than popcorn.

  TURNIP & COLLARD GREENS

  Wash greens well and take the leaves, roots, and stems off from the collards. Boil a hambone or some fatback or bacon. Add greens, a red pepper pod, and salt, pepper, and sugar to taste. Cover tightly and cook until greens are tender. Drain and place on serving platter; reserve the liquid. Serve the liquid as “pot likker” to dunk your cornbread in.

  Will cure what ails you!

  FRIED GREEN TOMATOES

  1 medium green tomato (per person)

  Salt

  Pepper

  White cornmeal

  Bacon drippings

  Slice tomatoes about ¼ inch thick, season with salt and pepper and then coat both sides with cornmeal. In a large skillet, heat enough bacon drippings to coat the bottom of the pan and fry tomatoes until lightly browned on both sides.

  You’ll think you died and gone to heaven!

  FRIED GREEN TOMATOES WITH MILK GRAVY

  3 tablespoons bacon fat

  4 firm green tomatoes, sliced ½ inch thick

  Beaten eggs

  Dry bread crumbs

  Flour

  Milk

  Salt

  Pepper

  Heat your bacon fat in a heavy frying pan. Dip tomatoes in eggs, then in bread crumbs. Slowly fry them in the bacon fat until golden brown on both sides. Put your tomatoes on a plate. For each tablespoon of fat left in the pan, stir in 1 tablespoon of flour and blend well; then stir in 1 cup warm milk and cook until thickened, stirring constantly. Add salt and pepper till you like it. Pour over the tomatoes and serve hot.

  The best there is.

  A Conversation

  with Fannie Flagg

  Q: You began writing, I gather, for TV and later became an actress in TV, theater, and films. What took you back behind the camera to write novels?

  FF: I started working in the theater at age thirteen, writing skits for cast parties, etc. Then I went to New York and sold some material to be used in a revue at Upstairs at the Downstairs and appeared in that nightclub. The next week I got a job on Candid Camera writing, but several months later began acting on that show as well. I started out wanting to be a writer, but got sidetracked for many years as an actor. It took me many years to realize that acting and performing did not make me as happy as it did other performers. I always felt that something was missing from my life. Much later, I realized that although I was doing quite well, I was in the wrong profession. It was not until 1980 that I had enough courage to quit acting and go back to my first love, and I have never regretted that decision.

  Q: You won a Scripters Award for your screenplay, won stardorn for your acting, earned good reviews and bestseller sales for your novels. Which gives you the greatest pleasure? How do they differ? Do you miss intimate contact with your audience in fiction?

  FF: I have received the greatest pleasure from writing. The difference is that in acting you are simply performing another person’s words and your performance is always, in effect, conditioned by the director, other actors, etc. Writing novels is like painting or composing music. You have complete control of your work. It is yours and yours alone. I find that I have a much more intimate relationship with my audience in fiction, both from letters and personal contact at speeches and book signings than I ever did in acting. I feel that people know me so much more from my novels than from my acting. My novels are basically who I am and what I think.

  Q: Actresses are always saying that there are too few roles for mature women. You provided two in one novel and movie—the Kathy Bates part in Tomatoes, a middle-aged woman, and an older woman, Mrs. Threadgoode, done by Jessica Tandy, and both women are attractive. Was this at all a conscious effort or the lucky happenstance of art? In any event, you seem to have an affinity for characters who are well beyond the ingenue age. Why haven’t you developed the usual prejudice against anyone with gray, white, or thinning hair?

  FF: First of all, as a writer, I want my characters to be interesting to me and, ideally, to others. In order to be interesting they must be fully formed and have had experiences that cause them to have a certain outlook on life or to have formed strong opinions of their own. I have met relatively few interesting young characters. It takes years to become wise or bitter or whatever it is we are to become. These are the people that fascinate me. I tend to rail against the current fashion in American culture of glamorizing only very young, pretty girls and completely ignoring the most wonderful and sexiest of women, those who are adult. I find there is nothing more attractive than a genuinely adult man or woman. And yes, as a woman who used to be an actress, I have first-hand knowledge of how they still cast seventy-five-year-old men with twenty-four-year-old leading ladies while fabulous actresses over thirty are considered over the hill. I have always liked older people, people who could teach me something about life.

  Q: Who were your literary models, or heroines and heroes?

  FF: My first love was of Southern writers: Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, etc., but I find that I love any writers with passion for place and character and a certain time.… Dickens, Steinbeck, William Kennedy, Wallace Stegner, M.F.K. Fisher, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Raymond Chandler, and more.

  Q: You seem to write easily, naturally, like a good ol’ gal Southern storyteller. And humor is a large part of your appeal. Could there be that there is also a serious, literary person working below the surface?

  FF: A serious literary person below the surface? Oh yes. I suffer from what most humorists do, a deep need to be taken seriously. And I have to grab her by the neck and shake her and say “Oh, shut up,” just tell the story and stop preaching. But writing humor is very serious and hard. Still, I find a novel without humor is not interesting to me. Life is, after all, very funny. If I did not really believe that I would jump off a building tomorrow.

  Q: It seems to me that a book group or a writers conference figured in your decision to write novels. What happened?

  FF: In 1976 I went to The Santa Barbara Writers Conference and won first prize for a short story about childhood that eventually became my first novel. One of my idols, Eudora Welty, was a judge and encouraged me.

  Q: Your affinity for most of your characters is striking. Your love for them almost leaks out. Your down home qualities, or theirs, are the reason for much amusement yet you’re never laughing at them. It’s more like laughing with them. Your Southern characters are colorful but never merely quaint. Why is that? You left the South. You’re a woman of some sophistication.

  FF: I may live in California, but I have never, as they say, left the South, nor has it left me. I go home to Alabama for several months each year and most of my friends are still there. I still find the richest and most endearing characters are composites of people I know or have met.

  Q: Rumor has it that in your new novel, Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! you’ve left the South—or some of your characters have. True? Why?

  FF: Yes, I have moved to the midwest. But note: Southern Missouri … and some of it is set in Selma, Alabama. Why the move to the midwest? I basically write about middle class people and the midwest is full of wonderful little towns that reflect the values of what I think this country is all about. I think these are the people, no matter where they live, that usually get ignored in movies, plays, novels, etc. I like them. I am one of them.

  Q: Your darker characters, the few who are genuinely evil, don’t produce the same generous spirit in you. Are you a good hater?

  FF: My darker characters are used to try to show the effects of some persons’ cruelty to their fellow human beings. I am not a good hater of people. I always seem to want to give people a break. I usually can understand how a person has become what they are and I believe that if people knew better they would do better. But I am a good hater of the results of what mea
nness and ignorance do to other people. Mostly it makes me profoundly sad.

  Q: Whether your characters are light or dark, I have a hunch that friendships count for a great deal with you. Tomatoes has some wonderful pairings, of friends likely and unlikely. Do I detect a deep feeling for the arts of friendship?

  FF: Yes. Being an only child and losing both my parents at an early age, I have found that the friends I have and have made over the years are the people who help me get through life, good times and bad.

  Q: Another writer, Jill McCorkle, says: “There is a wonderful Southern tradition of oral storytelling, and an inability to tell a tale without stopping at every turn to fill in the history of a place, the family, and everything that has gone before.” And also, “I cannot deny my strong Southern heritage and the open invitation to indulge in all those skeletons that are usually kept locked in the closet.” Does this describe you, too?

  FF: To some extent. I do believe that history of a family or a place is extremely important to understand what is happening today. I also think that most Southern writers love stories about people and situations, especially about their own families.

  Q: Why is it that when writers from the South get going, they make people from everywhere else seem taciturn?

  FF: I think the one thing people forget is that the South has an entirely different culture than most of the country. Southerners are as different in the way they use the language as Italians are from Germans and Swedes. What tends to confuse people is that we are all speaking the same language, but we use it in a different way. Put a woman from the South and a woman from Maine in the same room and they would have a hard time, not because of the language but because of the usage. A Southerner may take an hour to answer a question, whereas the lady from Maine might just answer yes or no.

  Q: I suppose it’s inevitable that I ask you how you write—when and where, with what instruments, by day or by night. Are you disciplined, doing so many words a day? Or are you nicely messy, and write when you simply can’t not write, when it won’t let you go? Virginia Woolf famously wrote of A Room of One’s Own. Do you have one?

  FF: Oh dear. I am dyslexic and have A.D.D.; therefore I am extremely limited. I write on a typewriter. I am hopelessly disorganized. My room looks like an invasion has taken place. I write in the morning and usually for at least four or five hours a day, if not more … never less. If one day I find that I cannot write, I get up and go out and roam antique stores, drive, walk, etc. I have one room away from the rest of the house so I can’t hear phones, faxes, mailmen, Fed Ex deliveries. I turn on a fan to help drown out any noise.