$7 • SPRING 2016 • A QUARTERLY PUBLICATION FROM THE SOUTHERN FOODWAYS ALLIANCE

THE BALLAD OF RICKY PARKER SOUTHERN, REBORN ISSUE #59 SPRING 2016 FEATURE 28 THE ONE TRUE PITMASTER Rien Fertel and Denny Culbert

2 52 FIRST HELPINGS THE SOUND OF ONE CHIP DIPPING 6 Phil McCausland PACIFIC SOUL Gustavo Arellano 58 GREEN, I LOVE 10 YOU, GREENS A GHOST IN THE FREEZER Jessica B. Harris Jennifer V. Cole 62 14 LET THEM THE VIPER AND EAT THE TORTOISE Emma Sloan David Ramsey 66 21 DON’T CALL IT SOUTHERN, REBORN A POT PIE Monique Truong Debbie

Cover photo by DENNY CULBERT Houston Cofield Houston southernfoodways.org 1 Spring 2016 GRAVY #59 SPRING 2016 NASHVILLE *Outside of Is the South’s 4th Largest City* , that is. IN PREPARATION FOR THE SUMMER FOODWAYS SYMPOSIUM JUNE 23–25, First Helpings WE LOOKED AT SOME OTHER NOTABLE 4S IN MUSIC CITY.

nashville is PUTTING ON known for its & threes. THE RITZ word on the NASHVILLE IS street is HOME TO FOUR that the next realized remarkably late trend is the HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES meat & four.* in the game that this edition of AND UNIVERSITIES (HBCUs): Gravy I is about comfort food. Food *We made that up. Fisk, Tennessee State, as solace. Food preparation and con- But wouldn’t American Baptist, sumption as acts that soothe and it be great? and Meharry Medical. restore us. “What’s the theme this time?” asked everyone from Richie, our graphic FOUR THINGS TO DO IF YOU ARRIVE EARLY: designer, to my husband, Kirk, at var- ious points in the production cycle. JUN JUN “We’re not doing that anymore. TASTE The feature is about barbecue, but a dipped or topped Ritz with an un- 18 of 19 Ringo Starr really, there’s no theme. Well, okay, adorned one. It’s a vehicle, yes, but a bunch of the stories are set in the it’s more than that, and must be ap- at the Mid-South. But that’s not a theme. preciated as such. Turn the cracker Ryman We’re not doing themes.” upside down so that the salt lands on Here at the SFA, we’re always doing your tongue. Bite it in half and feel it JUN Visit Athena at themes. flake apart. Savor the hint of butter, Centennial Park’s I’m not a cook who finds zen in a which is surely not real butter at all. Parthenon and let 22 WALK the Goddess of pot of boiling water, nor an eater who A quarter-sleeve later, and the world Eat Nashville’s Wisdom prepare practices mindfulness on a raisin. My is right again. you for three SoBro/Downtown days of learning comfort food is Ritz crackers. By The writers and characters in this FOOD TOUR about the city’s themselves. With peanut butter. Pi- issue find solace in fried corn. In foodways. mento cheese. Regular cheese—fancy cheese dip. In collard greens. In or otherwise. Salami. A hot dip, if the whole-hog barbecue, and in pulled Summer Symposium tickets

October 1937 ABC’S NASHVILLE go on sale to SFA members universe is really on my side. shoulder. May their stories comfort is in its fourth season. When possible, I like to alternate you. —SCM on Wednesday, 4/6.

Tip No. 59 Are you an SFA member? Join or renew for 2016 at southernfoodways.org. In addition to supporting our work, you’ll be eligible to purchase tickets to the Summer Symposium.

Ladies’ Home Journal, Ladies’ Home Museum; Jennifer Justus Parthenon The

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Featured Contributor RIEN FERTEL

Rien Fertel (left) and Denny Culbert (right) RIEN FERTEL put seven years of research into his new book The One True Barbecue: Fire, Smoke, and the Pitmasters Who Cook the Whole Hog (which he would sub-subtitle “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Barbecue”). Photographer Denny Culbert was his copilot for much of the journey. The pair conducted dozens of oral histories for the SFA, including the stories of a shrinking number of pitmasters who cook whole hogs over wood coals. Rien chatted with SFA graduate fellow Kate Wiggins about the experience.

Take us on a tour of the Barbecue Bus. dynasty. When Bill Dennis opened the area’s first fixed barbecue stall in 1900, his THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO TAMPA It’s a green-certified, diesel-chugging, wife Susan killed, dressed, and cooked the he devil looms large, They rolled this mix into crusts of Mercedes-chassised mini motor home hogs before hauling them via even in the kitchen. In the day-old Cuban bread and water, deep- (sleeps 6!). Though the smell is thankfully to the shop. late nineteenth and early fried them, and either sold them for long gone, the “Oink if you love BBQ!” T decals remain. My family is from Wilson, and I grew up twentieth centuries, a confluence of five or ten cents or served them at eating barbecue from Parker’s and Bill cultures provided Tampa with its own home as an inexpensive meal. Whole hog barbecue has traditionally been Ellis’s. While I’ll concede that the version of the croquette. SFA oral The tradition remains in the Tampa a masculine domain. Did you come across wood-cooked stuff is better, my bigger historian Sara Wood learned that this area. For more on the devil crab’s con- many women? issue is this: Do any of these places have spicy street food earned its name for tinued life in Florida foodways, check corn sticks? I found that though, yes, barbecue is a being “hot as the devil.” out the oral histories, available on mostly male-centric enterprise (and is too Corn sticks, hushpuppies, and cornbread: During strikes, Italian, Spanish, and southernfoodways.org. often marketed and discussed as such), barbecue ain’t often found without a side Cuban cigar factory workers incorpo- women have left and continue to leave of -based bread. But my favorite is rated their culinary traditions into Gravy’s summer issue will feature a their mark. The Dennis/Jones clan of the sweet muffins from Bum’s preparation of the plentiful Tampa Southern food named after its Ayden, , famously pride Restaurant in Ayden—no barbecue themselves on being the oldest whole-hog accompaniment needed. Bay blue crabs, adding sautéed onions traditional five-cent price. Slugburger

Cigar City Magazine Cigar and peppers (known as sofrito), oral histories go online April 25 at An excerpt from Rien’s book begins on page 28. sauce, and red pepper flakes. southernfoodways.org. Katie Culbert Katie Courtesy

ONE BIG SELF: CREOLE FEAST UP IN THE OLD HOTEL AN INVESTIGATION by Nathaniel Burton GRAVY BOOK CLUB by Joseph Mitchell by C.D. Wright & Rudy Lombard SFA staffers read more than The late Robeson County, This book-length poem Lombard set out to record North Carolina, native and cookbooks. In this space, we is inspired by the late the unheard black voices New Yorker writer profiled the poet’s interviews with of New Orleans’s recipes, share our favorites. Oral beauty of eccentrics and the incarcerated men and culinary traditions, and historian Sara Wood offers places fading into the margins women at three restaurants. It is a gorgeous of the modern world. this issue’s recommendations. Louisiana prisons. oral history of the city itself.

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its jambalaya, ribs, and mint juleps, Southern standards. Popcorn Diego Velasco ushered in the era of the celebrity shrimp fill tacos, pulled pork sits holds court behind the chef in OC, and fostered a nascent on Hawaiian rolls, and the bar at music scene by bringing in DJs po-boys come slathered in a Sri- Memphis and bands that created a new na- racha-spiked mayo. He can do a Café. tional image for the region—a mean crawfish boil and a fine place USA Today would go on to shrimp and grits, but Velasco— call America’s “capital of cool.” who, with perfectly tousled Here’s the funny thing: Memphis and an immaculate , Café isn’t named after Memphis, looks more music producer than Tennessee. It’s named after chef—doesn’t claim authenticity. Memphis, an Italian arts and fur- “Whenever Southerners come niture collective from the 1980s in, I tell them my food is Southern that café co-owner Dan Bradley cuisine for an Orange County studied as an arts undergrad at the demographic,” the forty-three- University of California-Los year-old says, almost apologeti- Angeles. And that Memphis, in cally. “I’m intimidated whenever turn, isn’t named after the city but a Southerner comes in! I tell rather “Stuck Inside of Mobile them, ‘Before you throw the book with the Memphis Blues Again,” Bob Dylan’s seven-minute epic about…something, anything, except Memphis, Tennessee. PACIFIC SOUL Southern culture has stood for STUCK INSIDE OF ORANGE COUNTY WITH many things, but this particular interpretation is a beautifully THE MEMPHIS COOL AGAIN postmodern one: The idea of by Gustavo Arellano Memphis helped a Chicano from Southern California teach one of the squarest places in the U.S. kentuckian named william spurgeon founded my adopted how to be hip. Gimme a Hammond home of Santa Ana, California, in 1869. Magnolias bloom every spring around B-3 organ riff courtesy of Al Athe Old Orange County Courthouse, planted there over a century ago by Green, and let’s begin this tale… at me, realize where we’re at. It’s pioneers who brought with them the most fragrant memories of the states they left a resemblance.’” behind. Henry W. Head, the assembly member who represented the district when memphis café is a squat, dark Velasco’s career is a testament it seceded from Los Angeles County in 1889, served under General Nathan Bedford space with an open kitchen, a bar to the South’s eternal lure. He was Forrest and fought at Shiloh. serving more than 100 whiskies, raised by a single mother in the and a soundtrack that veers Mexican-American suburb of Memphis Our connections to the South but Memphis Café in Costa Mesa. between 1980s new wave and Montebello, on the outskirts of Cityscape, aren’t just moldering in the ar- Run since its debut by chef Diego yacht rock. It sits just south of the East Los Angeles. Velasco’s family oil on board by Lamar chives. For the past twenty years, Velasco, it’s one of the most influ- 405 Freeway, Costa Mesa’s own worked in the Garment District Sorrento. Memphis has taught OC how to ential restaurants in Orange Big River. I’ve patronized the in downtown LA, but young eat and drink and live well—not County history. It introduced place for fifteen years now, drawn Diego quickly gravitated toward

the city on the Mississippi River, pan-Southern cuisine to us with Delilah Snell by Velasco’s California take on the kitchen. From a young age, he

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Memphis learned to love the holiday spec- made a pact with two friends: One Café’s Creole tacle of food, especially Ash would manage a restaurant to Fashioned Wednesday for Mexicans, with learn how to run one, another and shrimp its tortas de camarones (shrimp would find funding, and Velasco po-boy. balls served in a red chile broth would leave business school at Cal alongside cactus) and capirotada State-Fullerton to enroll in the (bread pudding). “Seeing those California Culinary Academy in traditions,” he says, “taught me San Francisco and learn “why the about the importance of food to South cooked like that.” people beyond just eating.” He was an anomaly in those Velasco was introduced to days, when most aspiring chefs Southern food at eighteen, while in the West focused on French, working at a hot-springs resort in Italian, California, and Pacific Orange County. He connected Rim cooking. But Velasco and his with members of The Rebels, a partners were undeterred. They New Orleans swamp-rock quartet opened Memphis Café in 1995, in who lived in a trailer on the prop- an old dive bar. main watering hole), businessmen cultural appropriation erty. They were the house band “I remember thinking we were rubbed elbows with politicos, is a tricky thing. OC’s Memphis may at a local roadhouse, the kind of going to get squashed,” Velasco artists, hipsters, gang members, not be a simulacrum of the Bluff joint where bikers broke bottles admits. Cuisine in OC in those musicians, and immigrants. The City, but it exemplifies its best qual- and swung pool cues. The group— days consisted of overpriced Memphis bar program became the ities: the funkiness of the Bar-Kays, one a shrimper, another a Houma white-linen spots or chain restau- cocktail equivalent of a Bryant the heaping portions at any rib Indian, another a Cajun—took the rants—and definitely didn’t coaching tree. Its alums now work shack, the camaraderie and hospi- bother with regional American. at OC’s best restaurants, and they tality tourists feel at Graceland. “But we weren’t trying to do ev- taught the county how to love old Proud to be of the South, whether VELASCO’S CAREER erything for everyone. We just did fashioneds and Manhattans. in the Volunteer State or in the IS A TESTAMENT what we wanted to do.” Velasco sheepishly admits that Land of Real Housewives. TO THE SOUTH’S Memphis Café arrived at a he made his first trip to Memphis, Years ago, a friend of mine—a ETERNAL LURE. seminal moment in Orange County Tennessee, only four years ago. Memphis native who, in yet history. In the 1990s, the notorious Before that, he went by feel. another awesome cross-cultural Stepford suburbia suddenly “It’s in the ambiance,” he says. turn, now runs one of the most young cook under their . became a tastemaker for America’s “It’s professional but friendly. influential Chicano presses in the “They had come to Southern youth, from music (No Doubt, More laid-back. It’s about how country from El Paso—was in California to make it big,” Velasco Social Distortion, The Offspring) we treat people.” Orange County and needed a says. “But on their time off, all they to fashion (Quiksilver, Vans, And Velasco isn’t slowing restaurant recommendation. I did was cook—gumbo, black-eyed Oakley). Memphis Café became the down. He recently introduced meekly suggested Memphis. “An peas, sticky chicken. I remember crossroads for disparate scenes, in jalapeño shrimp and grits, cov- OC restaurant named after once during a Super Bowl, they the same way its eponymous city ered in red-eye gravy and a thick Memphis?” he snickered. But cooked like the dickens—dark and could host Sun and Stax records, slab of country ham. “Even he went. deep and soulful and haunting Elvis, Justin Timberlake, and Three twenty years later, Southern food “It wasn’t Memphis,” he wrote and awesome.” Six Mafia, all drinking from the still excites me,” he says. “And the following day, “but it was Velasco was so moved by their same replenishing well. I’m just beginning to learn.” wonderful.” food that he roomed with the band At the Costa Mesa mothership

members for a year. Afterward, he and its Santa Ana branch (my Delilah Snell Gustavo Arellano is the editor of OC Weekly and Gravy’s columnist.

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when I had unexpected kidney her death, our family took up A GHOST surgery, I swear she sat with me camp at my grandparents’ house. and stroked my hand while I was We all needed to be there. We IN THE asleep on the operating table. As were also scared of letting Grand- I awoke, pulling away from the daddy, his ribs bruised and his tug of anesthesia, I couldn’t figure being shattered from the wreck, FREEZER out where she had gone and felt retreat to the house alone. IT WAS HER CORN, I had lost her all over again. We During that week, my cousin MADE BY HER HANDS continue to feel her presence, Jamie and I used Ti Ti’s though less spectrally these days. bowl as therapy. We’d made bis- by Jennifer V. Cole Her cooking haunts me most. cuits at her side for years, the Ti Ti wasn’t a great cook. (Ti privilege of being one of her girls. Ti, pronounced tie-tie, comes But she had left no written recipe. from Vashti—vass-tie—which is Self-rising flour, buttermilk, and also my middle name.) She would Crisco, mixed by hand. That’s all trot out newfangled recipes from we remembered. Proportions? this or that magazine for every Tackiness? No clue. We were de- family holiday. Dishes she’d never termined to get as close as possi- made before. Ninety-nine percent ble to the taste memory still fresh of the time, they were colossal in our minds. I bet we turned out failures. Holiday leftovers took on proportions as ample as a funeral spread, with family WE CONTINUE TO members accepting gallon-sized FEEL HER PRESENCE, Ziploc bags for the ride home, all the while lightly protesting, “No, THOUGH LESS y’all will eat this. We don’t need SPECTRALLY THESE to take any.” Thank goodness for DAYS. HER COOKING the ham Granddaddy insisted on HAUNTS ME MOST. buying every year to supplement her feast. But she baked my favorite bis- twenty dozen that week. A Wife, A Mother, Our Ti Ti cuits on the planet. They were We made one batch somewhere Passionate Teacher and Defender of the Unchampioned cakey and dense, the top and in the middle that was perfect. A True Southern Spirit bottom crisped by a Crisco- As the daughter of a poor Mis- swathed cast-iron skillet. She sissippi Delta farmer, Ti Ti also hese were the last our annual family beach vacation. always flipped the biscuits knew her way around vegetables. words I wrote for my Granddaddy was driving, a fact halfway through cooking to make That is, she knew how to cook Tgrandmother, the woman he’ll never unburden himself sure both sides got a smoldering them the way Granddaddy—who who taught me to read at age four from. For the next year, as we took kiss from the pan. And man, could tended a garden for decades, mas- and coaxed my writing along. For turns spending nights at the these biscuits soak up some cane saging the earth every growing her tombstone. house, family members would syrup, poured in amber ribbons season—liked to eat them. She Nearly six years ago, we lost her often report seeing her, always in that stretched from the bottle like always had a simmering pot of

in a car accident on the way to her purple nightgown. Last year Angie Mosier pulled taffy. The week following butterbeans cooked down to

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corn she ever made. She died the next week. IT WAS THE LAST Tethered to our agrarian past BATCH OF FRIED with the foods that fill our tables CORN SHE EVER and stock our larders, Southern- ers hold the land as our legacy. As MADE. SHE DIED words like heritage and heirloom THE NEXT WEEK. fill menus across the country, seed savers are the modern communi- ty bank, holding memories of past harvesting the greens left in her meals in the mason jar equivalent grandfather’s fields shortly after of a safety deposit box. his death, crying as she held the Recipes live on, textual proof of leaves he had cajoled from the soil our generational ties. My paternal before his departure. Food is the grandmother, Mamaw, a master product of love and labor, usually of the kitchen, generously shares in equal parts. When left behind, her recipes for caramel cake, it reminds us that our loved ones chocolaty “Jane Cole ,” were once very much alive. and chicken pie. After she’s gone, I have fantasies of sitting down I’ll have memories of feeding the with my Granddaddy at his sourdough starter in her kitchen kitchen table, plates overflowing and will feel confident that I can with Underwood corn and bis- Ti Ti’s corn nuggets of velvety paste barely hands lost their grip. She wouldn’t replicate her tender loaves. Until cuits as close to hers as I can get, contained by the thin skins. Her ever let anyone help. “I can do it I found that bag of frozen corn, I and savoring the memory of Ti Ti shining glory was creamed corn, myself, thank you very much,” hadn’t realized the heady emo- with him. Of giving him one more which she called fried corn. She she’d say in a singsong voice. The tional pull of an actual foodstuff. actual taste of his life with her—a wouldn’t use just any corn. Her woman was fierce. For days she’d My Ti Ti was gone, but if I wanted, life that ended too soon. I consid- family had their own hybrid stand at the stove, stirring enough I could eat a final bite of her home er hanging onto it until he’s gone they’d cultivated for years, a butter and cream into the skillet cooking. It wasn’t a recipe for and sharing it with my Momma starchy dent variety they called to render that unbending corn creamed corn; it was her corn, as a tribute to her parents and a Underwood corn, the family supple, and tuck it in the freezer made by her hands. celebration that they are finally name. Forget the taste and mouth- alongside the bream and crappie When I told friends about together again. Sometimes I think feel of plump kernels bursting that she pulled from the pond. finding Ti Ti’s corn, they respond- about selfishly eating it alone and with sunshine. Even at its peak, A few months ago, as I was ed with stories of their own. “I listening to recordings of her Underwood corn is hard and putting ice cream away in my have a jar of green beans that my voice I made six months before chewy. You have to coax the cob Birmingham home, I came across beloved grandmother put up. If she died. For now, that Ziploc bag with a sharp knife and blistering a quart-sized bag of Ti Ti’s corn. it’s up to me, it’ll be buried with waits inside my white Kenmore, determination to yield any milk. I have no clue how it got there. I me to sustain me on my journey alongside my guarded rations of After they married, Granddad- don’t recall raiding Granddaddy’s to the sweet hereafter,” said Sheri bacon—a reminder of her love, dy planted fields of Underwood deep freeze. As I looked at the Castle. April McGreger recalled frozen in time. corn for Ti Ti. She would spend Sharpie-scrawled date on it—6- summer days and nights over the 27-2010: underwood—in her Jennifer V. Cole is a writer based in Birmingham, Alabama. At the kitchen sink, scraping cob after unmistakable handwriting, I re- age of six months, Ti Ti baptized her with bourbon to help with her

cob until well past the point her alized it was the last batch of fried Cole Jennifer V. teething. She never lost the taste.

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Magallanes a passing (if Las Tortugas is tucked in a non- clean-shaven) resemblance to the descript strip mall. Past a shoe “Most Interesting Man in the store, a bank, Clipps Hair and Nail World” of the ubiquitous televi- Salon, and State Farm Insurance, sion commercials. Part of the there’s a simple sign on the cor- pleasure of visiting Las Tortugas ner: deli mexicana. Consider it is the chance to meet Pepe, a a surprise attack—some of the wind-up doll of joie de vivre, too- finest Mexican food in this coun- good-to-check stories, and folk try is hidden away in the kind of wisdom. “Mexican food,” he says, spot you might expect to house “is part of the celebration of liv- a Subway. ing. It’s not just going to eat so Pepe opened Las Tortugas in you don’t starve. Eating in Mex- 2003 as a personal mission. The ico is part of the party; it’s part of incredibly diverse food scene in the fun.” Mexico City is marked by elegant When I inquire about the huge simplicity, beautiful presenta- serpentine ring Pepe wears, he tion, and fresh ingredients. By smiles and says, “I’m glad you contrast, most Mexican restau- asked.” Pepe is an adrenaline rants stateside were serving up junkie. He’s been riding and rac- huge portions of cheap, pro- ing motorcycles since he was a cessed food, with Americanized teenager. Now he owns around twists. “The reason I opened this twenty. The snake ring referenc- place is that I wanted to show es his biggest and baddest motor- people the experience of quality cycle, which is built with a Dodge that I grew up with in Mexico Viper engine. “So people started City,” Pepe explains. calling me Viper Man,” he says. He modeled Las Tortugas after THE VIPER AND “I decided to take up the alter ego the taquerías and tortarías that of a kind of superhero.” serve the “light, fresh food that Viper Man flies, too. Pepe start- people eat every day,” says his THE TORTOISE ed skydiving at age nineteen, son Jonathan, forty-one, who IN MEMPHIS, A TASTE OF MEXICO CITY when the sport was just beginning runs the place nowadays. (Pepe by David Ramsey in the early 1960s. “One of my still helps out and holds court.) friends joined this parachuting “He was trying to be faithful to osé “pepe” magallanes never stops. on a recent visit to club,” Pepe says. “It was not sky- the places he loved in Mexico the restaurant he founded, Las Tortugas Deli Mexicana in the Memphis diving as it is today—it was just City. Places where the owner was J suburb of Germantown, the dapper seventy-one-year-old regaled me with jumping out of an airplane and the chef who went out to the tales of the restaurant’s beginnings, the unique joy and spirit of Mexican cuisine, hoping for the best. So I got very market, brought in food, and the unlovely history of flour tortillas and Tex-Mex burritos, how he came to meet interested.” He’s done more than made it in front of you. It’s an Walter Payton and Muhammad Ali, and his adventures racing motorcycles and 6,000 skydives. Pictures of the intimate thing—and the flavors skydiving. As the stories spun, he backslapped regulars, fetched me aguas frescas airborne Pepe, falling thousands and colors, it’s just a totally (“the way the lime cleanses your palate, it’s perfect, yes?”), gave me an iPad tour of of feet with a rapturous, wind- different experience.” restaurants in his native Mexico City, and explained his passion for the vibrant, blown smile on his face, hang on Before we get sidetracked with

colorful food he grew up with. Cofield by Houston Photographs the restaurant’s walls. heady talk of cultural authenticity

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light eating,” adding, “this is not farmers and scouring more than a food truck, okay?” While the half a dozen markets, Jonathan restaurant often puts a high-end does as much local sourcing as spin on street fare, the atmo- he can. “It’s constantly evolving, sphere remains casual. The din- someone new entering the fold, ing area is small, simple, and someone leaving,” he says. “It’s festive. The walls are filled with up to us to always be on the hunt laminated signs offering up rants and find new opportunities— and aphorisms from Viper Man. eggs from this farm, pork from One sign lists the top ten ques- that farm.” Two years ago, Las tions customers ask at Las Tor- Tortugas started ordering whole tugas (Number 1: “Is Jonathan Berkshire hogs from Newman married?”); another floats the Farms in Myrtle, Missouri, to idea of Pepe for President. butcher in-house. Customers The key to ordering is the initial have come to learn that the menu or the values and pitfalls of culi- include perfectly ripe avocado, chat at the register with Pepe or will always be in flux depending nary fusion, let me just get to the tomatoes, queso fresco, poblano Jonathan, in which you get tips on what Jonathan can find. “We point: The food at Las Tortugas peppers, and sliced sweet onion. on what’s fresh today and hear have to protect their expecta- is astonishingly delicious. The Pepe jokes that if New Orleans is the specials, like smoky tions about the food,” he says. “If core of the menu is tacos—served famous for po-boys, you might from nearby Claybrook Farms. we can’t find what we’re looking on corn tortillas, along with a call these rich boys. Jonathan welcomes returning for, we’re not going to serve creamy-spicy, avocado-based sal- “The torta is really a staple of customers by name; Pepe esti- something inferior.” sa verde and a snappy pico de Mexican cooking and cuisine, as mates that his son has 3,000 During the summer, Jonathan gallo—and tortas, traditional popular as hamburgers in the names memorized. New custom- can nab beautiful corn, water- Mexican sandwiches. Meat op- ,” Jonathan says. ers get the lowdown on the menu melon, tomatoes, and cantaloupes tions range from the classic (the “Great meat or seafood, vegeta- and the core values that inspired juicy marinated pork in the pas- bles, salsa—the same things you Pepe to open Las Tortugas, a tra- tor tacos brought me back to my see in a taco, it’s just as easy to put dition that Jonathan is proud to “THE SAME favorite hole-in-the-wall finds in them in a torta.” carry on. Their homage to au- THINGS YOU SEE Mexico) to the luxe (a five-ounce The daily specials depend on thentic Mexican cuisine isn’t just IN A TACO, IT’S portion of filet mignon grilled what’s available and in season. about the style of cooking, Jona- JUST AS EASY to order). The showstopper, if it’s available: than explains to first timers. Just TO PUT THEM The eponymous tortuga (Span- a torta stuffed with bright red as Pepe used to do, Jonathan ish for turtle) is the restaurant’s Gulf shrimp. Gulf shrimp at a starts each morning with several IN A TORTA.” take on the traditional torta, in- Mexican restaurant in landlocked hours of shopping, selecting every spired by Pepe’s favorite tortarías Tennessee? Turns out they’ve item that the restaurant will grown in Tennessee and Missis- in Mexico City. As soon as loaves partnered with a shrimper on the serve. “This is what Mexican food sippi. For spices and of bread come out of the oven, the Gulf Coast of Mississippi who is famous for,” Jonathan says. not available locally, he works middle is hollowed out—like the drives up with his fresh catch on “When you go to Mexico and the with a Memphis-based import- shell of a tortoise, thus the nick- ice, packed in coolers in the back food is good, this is why. Because er—bringing in fresh tamarind name—and the bread is grilled of his pickup truck. they just bought it fresh. The ev- from Mexico, for example, which and then stuffed with goodies. In Pepe calls the style at Las Tor- idence of this is in the food: You the cooks shell and seed by hand addition to generous portions tugas “the most upscale presen- are going to taste it.” for a bright, punchy agua fresca. of meat or seafood, the fillings tation of Mexican traditional Tapping in to a network of local Meanwhile, he partners with

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produce managers at several cream, no burritos, no fajitas. supermarkets and gets first pick Some of those laminated signs from what comes in on the trucks echo the point. My favorites were in the morning. a couple that took the form of Jonathan has developed tech- Pepe-penned letters to Califor- niques to maximize quality for nians and other border-state res- produce that doesn’t grow in the idents. “To Californians with an mid-South, like mangoes and av- attitude implying that Mem- ocados. When I mentioned that phians are ignorant about Mexi- can cuisine,” begins one, “we’ve got news for you.... We are from NO CHEESE DIP, Mexico City.” Another manifesto NO DOLLOPS OF establishes the Las Tortugas mis- SOUR CREAM, sion: “setting the record straight NO BURRITOS, about what is truly fresh classic NO FAJITAS. Mexican cuisine with absolutely no influence of the American way of cooking.” I was surprised at the consistent If you want cheese on top of perfection of the avocado garnish- your tacos, Jonathan and com- es, he explained his method: “I pany will politely decline. “My only buy avocados that are green father has a passion for preserv- and hard as a rock, the most un- ing the integrity of the dish,” ripe I can find—because I want to Jonathan explains. control the environment that the avocado ripens in. A ripe avocado pepe’s family owned a strip- in the store is almost always bad mining company back in Mexico because it’s moved between warm City. His father instilled a work and cool climates. If it matures in ethic in him from a young age; a constant temperature, it’s going before he could drive a truck or to mature wonderfully, but the a bulldozer, he worked as a peon. only way to ensure that is if you “I worked in that place since I get them green and do it yourself.” was nine years old,” Pepe remem- He stores hundreds of avocados bers. “Taking rocks from here to at the restaurant, allowing him to there, that kind of deal.” pick the best ones at just the right He used to sneak into the kitch- moment of maturity. en as a boy to spy on the family The Las Tortugas tradition also cooks, and slowly taught himself means, as Jonathan puts it, “stay- their tricks—he once ate all thir- ing true to the identity of authen- teen eggs the cooks had prepared tic Mexican food.” That’s part of for the family just so he could his spiel to new customers: No watch them make another dish. hard-shell tacos or flour tortillas, “I remember the cooks used to no cheese dip, no dollops of sour complain—I would go over there

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and elbow them out,” he says. is how I enjoy life—not fishing.” As a college student in Mon- Less than three years later, they terrey, Pepe met Nancy Martin, returned to Memphis to open a SOUTHERN, REBORN an American student from Mem- restaurant. He had no history in MY BOILING SPRINGS BECAME A WELLSPRING phis doing post-graduate work the food business. Pepe says that by Monique Truong in Spanish. He fell in love, and his naiveté turned out to be the they kept up a long-distance secret to his success. courtship when she returned “I thought when you opened a home. Four years later they mar- restaurant, you went out and was born in saigon, I was seven when my family ried, and Nancy joined Pepe in bought food, bring it back, cook South Vietnam, in 1968. came to Boiling Springs as refu- Mexico City, where Pepe ran the it, and do the dishes,” he says. “I I I was reborn in Boiling gees from the Vietnam War. I mining business. didn’t know anything about food Springs, North Carolina, in 1975. didn’t add the English language to In 1980, Pepe and Nancy, now service companies. I went out Not a “rebirth” in the religious my Vietnamese. I traded it whole- with two sons in tow, moved to and picked up the best of every- sense of the word but in the sale. Now when I try to speak my Tennessee. Nancy worked as a thing. So that was the reason for shape-shifting transformation first language, I’m told that my Spanish professor at the Univer- the success.” that refugees and immigrants accent is c ng, which in this sity of Memphis (“she speaks Jonathan, who had been working undergo upon our arrival here in context means the opposite of Spanish better than I do, gram- in sales in Florida, came back to the U.S. With a new language, supple. In my new home, the given matically speaking,” Pepe says), Memphis to help his father with often a new name, and always a name that I answered to during The author while he continued to run the the restaurant two years after it new daily bread, we necessarily my young life became, literally, a marches mining operation back home. opened. In 2010, Pepe passed the become someone new. For a child, dirty word. I went from Dung—the in the 1977 Shelby “When it came time for us to torch to his son. this metamorphosis is even more “D” is pronounced like a “Y”—to Christmas move, I thought it was going to The first time Jonathan put up acute and thorough. Monique, a name on my Catholic Parade. be a good adventure—but my his own dish on the special board, business was still in Mexico,” he a pumpkin-seed green mole, cus- says. For the next twenty years, tomers loved it. “It was the first he commuted back and forth be- time that people ever paid mon- tween Memphis and Mexico City. ey for something that I had By 2000, he had earned enough made,” he remembers. “To have money to retire, and sold his part someone come up and tell you of the business. He and Nancy that’s the best mole they’ve ever moved to Naples, Florida, to relax. had—I’ve never experienced any- (Pepe’s version of relaxing includ- thing else like that. To have the ed skydiving and racing motorcy- creative liberty to choose what cles at speeds of almost 200 miles you want to make and have the per hour in Daytona.) The life of confidence that people are going the retiree, however, was not for to like it—that’s it, I was done, I Pepe. “When you have too much could not imagine a more satis- fun, you lose the flavor,” he says. fying career, period.” “I retired, and it was boring. Work Like Viper Man, like son.

David Ramsey is a writer in Nashville, Tennessee. His work has been anthologized in Da Capo Best Music Writing, Best Food Writing,

Cornbread Nation, and the Norton Field Guide to Writing. Courtesy Truong Monique

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baptismal certificate but otherwise Keds (brand new or well-painted never used. As for my daily bread, with white shoe polish, which I I LIKE TO THINK THAT I’M A PART OF it found companionship and think was the frugal option we THEIR COLLECTIVE MEMORY AS comfort with slabs of hicko- went with), white ankle socks (my MUCH AS THEY ARE A PART OF MINE— ry-smoked bacon, thick slices of mother bought two pairs because THAT WE BELONG TO EACH OTHER. sugar-cured ham, and country she didn’t want my feet to get cold), sausages, flecked with black beige pantyhose (also two pairs for pepper and generous with sage. the same reason of ensuring moment of celebration, a notewor- in Boiling Springs and Shelby, and Within two years in Boiling warmth). On the morning of, un- thy place and time—and they are writing a version of herself as the Springs, I was a baton twirler, one derneath the leotard’s polyester, also taken as evidence and proof. novel’s narrator, a child who is of the quintessential rites of my mother stuffed me into a thick I like to think that this nine- profoundly different from her passage of Southern girlhood. acrylic sweater (again, for the frigid year-old and her baton showed up community in many ways, begin- I’ve a photo that was taken in temperature, which judging from in other people’s photos from that ning with her synesthesia, a neu- 1977 in the nearby town of Shelby, the photo and the way that the folks day, too, inhabitants of Cleveland rological condition in which her North Carolina. lining the street were dressed, was County who had lined the parade words are accompanied by phan- I was nine years old, marching probably in the low fifties). route, whose photos are now as tom flavors, most of them lifted with my baton-twirling troupe in When I look at this photo, I’m faded as mine, their Kodachrome from a Southern table? (The word the annual Christmas Parade. Our truly surprised that I’m smiling. colors washed-out, except for the “later,” for instance, brings with mothers had been given mimeo- The inner sweater was unbear- still-vivid red. I like to think that it the richness and tang of pimento graphed sheets with detailed in- ably itchy; my sneakers didn’t fit in this way I’m a part of their col- cheese, “fiduciary” a sweet pull structions about our costumes. because of the extra pair of socks; lective memory as much as they of Cheerwine, and “character” Where to mail-order the skirted sweat was dripping down my back are a part of mine. You know, that serves forth pickled watermelon red leotard, how much white fur because Shelby was a small town we belong to one another. rind, with its equal parts vinegar trim would be needed for hand- in the foothills of the Blue Ridge This photo documents a small and sugar with a linger of cloves.) sewing around its neck and skirt, Mountains, not the Antarctic; Southern town being itself. Whites, In other words, what happens satin ribbon for our hair, a pair of and, in all honesty, I still wasn’t African Americans, one lone Viet- when I claim my Southern rebirth quite sure why I was waving a namese American girl, we are all as an inspiration, as raw source The author, metal rod around. Was it a kind inside this frame. The photo isn’t material, and as the living con- age nine. of dance? A form of martial arts? an idea of a small Southern town, nective tissue to a specific alimen- Had my mother enrolled me in a constructed elsewhere, mass-mar- tary and literary tradition that paramilitary corps, like those keted, and reflected back onto gave birth to my novel? Harper cookie-pushing Brownies? itself and places beyond for instan- Lee, Carson McCullers, and North This was the first and only time taneous messaging and ready Carolina’s own George Moses that I would march in the Shelby consumption. It takes more than Horton—a man who began his life Christmas Parade. My family a split second to understand. It as an enslaved person and who moved to Centerville, Ohio, the requires explanation, context, and became the first African Ameri- following summer. My baton a willingness on the part of a be- can poet to be published in the twirling days were over. In south- holder to embrace complexity, U.S.—I wrote their names into the ern Ohio, girls my age played plurality, and flux. pages of my novel in homage to soccer. Maybe they twirled what they meant to me as a reader, batons, too, but I was never again so, what happens when this a writer, and a human being. one of them. little girl grows up and writes a All this and more I shared Photographs are taken to memo- novel, conceiving it as a re-imag- with my publishing house when

rialize something consequential—a Courtesy Truong Monique ined Southern Gothic, setting it I was asked to fill out an author’s

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WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I CLAIM MY I found these two cover designs toward was South America. An laughably and disturbingly mis- Isabel Allende or a Gabriel García SOUTHERN REBIRTH AS AN INSPIRATION, representative of my novel. As a Márquez novel would look almost AS RAW SOURCE MATERIAL, former attorney, I would even say at home underneath these covers. AND AS THE LIVING CONNECTIVE that they constituted false adver- What was left unsaid during the TISSUE TO A SPECIFIC ALIMENTARY tising. Couple these designs—and meeting was too embarrassing and AND LITERARY TRADITION THAT there were others that were far damning to say to my face: My GAVE BIRTH TO MY NOVEL? worse, and none included a morsel publisher believed that American of food—with the face-to-face readers would not buy, literally and meeting in which I was told that figuratively, my book if it was pack- questionnaire, detailing back- Red Bridges Barbecue Lodge. For the marketing and publicity ma- aged as a Southern novel. Their ground and personal information, her sake, we can only hope that’s terial wouldn’t in any way charac- assessment was that a Vietnamese in order to help them with mar- the case, as it would have kept her terize my book as a Southern American woman writing a com- keting and publicity: How did I warm in her inexplicable state of novel. Though I can’t remember ing-of-age novel set in and fed by get the idea for the book? What’s undress. The other cover depicts the exact words, they were some- the American South wasn’t a my personal connection to the a partially clothed gal in profile thing close to this: We’re going to selling point because I, the author, subject matter? What areas of the with a platter-sized, wine-red hi- steer clear of that. My publishing was an anachronism. I was hard- country do I have a connection to? biscus in her hair. She looks like house wanted to steer clear of my to-believe and improbable. My My publisher wanted to know she’s starving for a meat and three. novel’s regionality, as if its South- palate and my dinner plate were how best to package my book and Neither one of these images ern milieu was or a limited by my race. I had no easily how best to package me. My novel signals to me a novel set in the pothole or an unexploded land- understood or identifiable role would emerge out of this process American South; a coming-of-age mine. Better back it up and go within the publisher’s flat, static, a fully fungible object, encased in novel and a family narrative that another way. From the look of binary, black-and-white idea of the a shiny wrapper, designed to takes place from 1975 to 1998; nor these designs, I think the direction American South. In the parochial entice readers and to promise, in a food-laden snapshot of a girl that my publisher was heading world of New York publishing, if a glance, what they would find on whose words are coupled with the the pages inside. foodstuffs that graced the South- Two covers A novel’s cover design is the ern table as well as the food fac- rejected by the author clearest indicator, an unequivocal similes that disgraced that table for her pictorial representation, of what during an era when convenience second novel. the publisher has distilled its relentlessly pummeled flavors. content and its author down to. The South in the mid-70s for me At first, I was shown two pro- was a Janus-like feast of boiled posed covers for my second novel, peanuts, , butter- Bitter in the Mouth. milk biscuits, ambrosia salad, fried One features a bare-chested , and peach cobbler at one woman made modest by two stra- end, and at the other sodden tegically placed red roses, fes- corpses of vegetables in cans, tooned with golden arabesques, albino sponges marketed as loaves and hidden in the shadows. Maybe, of bread, and gelatinous conden- behind that scrim of darkness, sation of soups, which we were all she’s in fact sitting in front of a encouraged to use for making jumbo plate of chopped pork and absolutely everything as long as it

hushpuppies from Shelby’s own wasn’t just soup. Courtesy Truong Monique

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the editors, marketing executives, that the state flower of North Car- and publicists can’t imagine it, olina is the dogwood, not the mag- then, of course, the book-buying nolia, which is Mississippi’s own. public at large—rubes that we all That was too fine a point for them. are—couldn’t as well. Within the Despite their better judgment, they limited territory of my publisher’s were heading southward after all, imagination, that was the end of but they weren’t going to consult a the story, and it would not be a map and get all state-specific about Southern story. it. Mississippi’s magnolia went on Except in my case, it wasn’t the my paperback cover as well. end, because I had a dogged liter- On both editions, you’ll notice ary agent on my side, a bestselling that my bio includes no mention novel already to my name, and that I lived in Boiling Springs. It was—and still am—stubborn as a says only that I live now in New mule. The point for me was Crystal York City. In my interviews and Gayle clear: To deny the Southern during my readings and appear- origins of my novel was to deny ances, I always offer up this fact me of my Southern girlhood. It and connection because it’s was hard work twirling that baton, meaningful and poetic justice hard work to attend classes every that my Boiling Springs became week with little girls—all of them a wellspring. white—who assiduously ignored Given my publisher’s haphazard me because my newly arrived steering, I’m amazed that the mother had no idea that by enroll- Atlanta Journal-Constitution found ing me in their class that she and their way to Bitter in the Mouth. The I had violated an otherwise Observer did too, and the well-understood color line, and novel and I ended up on its front even harder work to smile through page. Even the Earl Scruggs Center, it all. No New York publishing located in the very heart of Shelby, house was going to erase me from found it and me. Every time another Boiling Springs and Shelby. These Southern institution contacts me, I places belong to me, and I to them. give thanks that I stood up for my In the end, I had to come up with novel and for a depiction of the my own ideas and proposals for the American South supple enough to book cover, which finally led to an include this little girl. agreed-upon design: the interior of As Theodore Roosevelt would say a wide open magnolia rendered in if he, like me, had been reborn a the soft hues of nostalgia. little girl in Boiling Springs, “Speak Of course, I told my publisher softly and carry a big baton.”

Monique Truong is the author of two novels, The Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth. Her third novel, The Sweetest Fruits, is

Courtesy Truong Monique forthcoming from Viking Books. She presented a version of this piece at the 2015 Southern Foodways Symposium. The final hardback cover forBitter in the Mouth. 26 Spring 2016 | 27 A DYING BREED ricky couldn’t say for sure how many hogs he’d prepped since 1976, when he began tending the pits at Scott’s Barbecue, the year Early Scott took the thirteen-year-old boy on Ricky Parker, as an apprentice and, eventually, son. It was immediately clear like his barbecue, to Scott that no one could smoke hogs like Ricky. He was a pit- contained multitudes. master, body and soul, born to the rough trade. He would master - pit, fire, and hog. Shovel, sauce, and spice. He would master By RIEN FERTEL barbecue. The young Ricky could remain on his feet for twenty and DENNY CULBERT hours straight: cleaning the pits, stoking the fire, shoveling coals, smoking hogs, serving customers. And the customers liked Ricky: courteous, handsome, a bit wild. Dedicated to finishing the job and doing it well, Ricky would eat standing up—“I eat on the run,” he liked to say—and rarely if ever slept for more than three hours a night. Sleep didn’t come easy when you were cooking with live flame. He’d close his eyes and experience terror-filled dreams of his pit catching fire, his hogs rendered inedible, the Henderson County Fire Department arriving too late to save his smokehouse, which now lay a conflagrated heap of charred timbers and sheet metal. Ricky would rather stay awake to watch the fire.

His eating and sleeping patterns, or part of the whole-hog pitmaster’s life. lack thereof, remained constant through He repeated a boast that he recited to the summer of 2008, when I first watched just about everyone who came to inter- Ricky Parker smoke a pig. At first sight view him: “I got to buy four or five pair of him—slender and gangly, his skin of shoes a year. I do a lot of walking, a lot bronzed from working in close quarters of pacing.” He told me that he was to fire—I questioned how he could pos- married to his work more than he was sibly find time even to dress himself, to his wives, past and present. He spoke energy enough to shave that perfectly in self-mythologizing tones. He was sculpted Van Dyke . Three hours special, an original, a dying breed. For 28 of sleep and working like this? How can all he knew, he was the last of the great - he be standing? How can he be alive? pitmasters, a man who strove to smoke Spring 2016 But Ricky assured me that this was all as many hogs as humanly possible. southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 29 liked to say. Ricky gave the world his all For example, a customer could request by providing everything the pig had to the wetter, fleshier meat from the inside offer. This is what made the offerings of of the shoulder, or the crusty exterior Scott’s Barbecue distinctive: this every- bark charred by flames. One could go thing, the very wholeness of whole-hog even deeper, literally, into the very heart barbecue itself. of the pig, to demand the meat from the Ricky Parker’s menu offered two sizes undersides of the ribs, or the rib bones of wax-paper-wrapped sandwiches— themselves; the jowly flesh nearest the regular and jumbo—alongside barbecue neck, or the delicate tenderloin. Cuts sold by weight (priced at $7.50 per pound could be mixed and matched—a pulled when I first visited) and stuffed into a part from this, a chopped bit of that—to paper tray decorated in red and white imagine the perfect sandwich. gingham. Ordinarily, the meat arrived Over a ten-minute stretch perched at cleaver-chopped to a medium coarseness. Scott’s lunch counter one summer after- But whether delivered by or tray, the noon I witnessed the full range of pos- barbecue could be ordered crudely sible orders. Through the Plexiglas hacked, finely minced, or pulled, straight window that separates the meager prep no chaser, from the hog. area from the dining room, customers Depending on one’s tolerance for heat, shouted rapid-fire lists of ingredients the barbecue could be dressed with sweet, and techniques, combinations that mild, medium, and hot homemade sauces, ranged from the mundane to the extraor- all made fresh by Ricky Parker. Most locals dinary, the unusually healthy to the dis- ate their sandwiches topped and dripping tressingly heart hazardous. Ricky counted sleep in hours and shoes prices, hog futures, and unemployment with coleslaw, which came in two variet- A quarter pound of plain barbecue, in pairs, but, above all else, Ricky counted rates, Parker calculated that 2013 would ies: the standard mayonnaise-heavy please. his life in hogs. be his year. He could stop counting hogs version, called white slaw, and a red Regular barbecue, , extra Annually, beginning with my first visit after this achievement. He could slow variant made with ketchup and vinegar. chopped, no fat. in 2008, I’d make a pilgrimage to eat down, ease into retirement, pass the pit- Sandwiches could be further tricked out Jumbo, dark, pulled with a lotta fat on Ricky Parker’s barbecue. Each year, as I master’s shovel off to his son Zach. He with fat rings of raw Vidalia onion. it, mayo slaw, extra hot. Occasionally, a ate my chopped pork sandwich, he’d tell might even learn to sleep. Scott’s sold a few varieties of potato customer would drop terms that remind- me about a future date circled on his But until then he would keep on chips and often stocked some fried pies ed me of the so-called “secret menu” at mental calendar: July 4, 2013, the holiday cooking. Because no one could smoke made by a John Gordon from his house In-N-Out Burger, a West Coast fast-food weekend over which he aspired to cook hogs like Ricky. No one worked to make up the road, but there were no other sides chain where a rabid fan base fetishizes one hundred whole hogs. One hundred! barbecue like this anymore. Few cared except baked beans, which were bur- an in-the know language of keywords Hardly an arbitrary number crudely like Ricky Parker, the world’s greatest dened, in the best way possible, with and food hacks. At Scott’s, these orders culled from a beer-fueled backroom bull pitmaster, the man who counted hogs to heapings of barbecued pork. sounded foreign, like they could not pos- session, but the apogee of human keep both himself and barbecue alive. Smoking whole hogs allowed Ricky to sibly come from a pig. achievement. The age of modern Methu- provide eaters with any edible portion A medium middlin’. Or, even more selahs. In sports, the most notable of of the pig; in addition to portion sizes bizarre: You got any catfish today? statistical achievements. One zero zero. and spice levels, customers, as if peering Middlin’ is what most people common- A symbol of perfection. One hundred THE BALLAD OF RICKY PARKER through the window of a butcher shop’s ly refer to as bacon, the fatty underside pigs. One pitmaster’s dream. Three digits’ display case, could select their individ- of the hog, which earned its vernacular worth of whole hogs. A century of swine. the whole hog is the perfect ual cuts to get the taste and texture they nickname for its location at the animal’s Ricky Parker knew with some certain- blend of barbecue: Every little bit of the wanted. At Scott’s, one could eat a dif- midsection. The catfish is a rarer cut of ty that no pitmaster, living or dead, had animal can be consumed in a single, dec- ferent barbecue sandwich every day of swine, a six-by-three-inch strap of meat ever reached that number. Through a adent, maybe even gluttonous bite. “You the week. The combinations and permu- embedded under the tenderloin with the complex formula of weather data, gasoline got a little bit of everything,” Ricky Parker tations were near limitless. shape and fleshy shade of a catfish fillet

30 | southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 31 32 | southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 33 34 | southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 35 36 | southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 37 38 | southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 39 40 | southernfoodways.org if every spectacle includes and Two-hundred-pound pigs are much too concludes with an explosive ending, the heavy, too bulky to reliably turn on a spit. climax of Ricky’s whole-hog cooking was Conceivably, a pitmaster could rotate a the “flip,” that final moment, after twelve hog every hour or two, but the energy or more hours of cooking, when with a involved in hefting the carcass up and heave and heft he flipped each hog so over, anywhere between four and twelve that the outer, or skin side, of the whole times in a cooking cycle, within arm’s for “dizzy dog,” a specific breed raised enveloped the hog’s outer upturned skin beast was rotated upward to earthward reach of fiery coals, as the meat becomes to run in a wheel— like those favored by with a single layer of tinfoil. A steel grate, revealing what had long remained hotter to handle and increasingly grease hamsters—which spun a chain connect- the exact same lattice-type framework hidden: what was once a fleshy pink slicked with rendered fat, would make ed to a fireplace spit. Also called kitchen that held the pig on the pit, was placed corpus transformed into a beautiful mess the endeavor unbearable. Multiply that dogs, cooking dogs, underdogs, and the atop the now foil-topped hog. Ricky then of slightly charred rib bones protruding by twenty hogs all cooking at once, and Vernepator cur, or “the dog that turns tightly fastened these two grates togeth- from a ruddy-gold mass of roast meat. even the most vigorous of pitmasters is the wheel,” these short-legged, long-bod- er with strands of wire, sandwiching the Whether by hand-cranked spit or en- faced with an impossible task. ied Sisyphean pups also worked in early hog in between. With a great inhale and gine-spun rotisserie, the heat source for For anyone who’s turned even a spit New England sculleries. The cruel treat- flexing of biceps, he hoisted this massive roast needs to be distributed full of chickens over a roaring fire, the ment of the turnspit dogs eventually fell hog sandwich up and toward his chest, evenly to ensure a well-cooked pig, side work becomes quickly monotonous and out of favor, and helped lead to the for- using the bars of the pit’s grill to guide of , whole fish, or what have you. tiresome. Before the modern-day mech- mation of the American Society for the and glide the bottom-most grate, before Think of the perfectly toasted marsh- anization of the rotisserie, turnspit dogs Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and pushing out and, releasing his weight to mallow, its caramelized surface achieved kept meats slowly rotating over the open the Canis vertigus became extinct. gravity’s fortunes, upending the hog to by twisting it over the campfire; without fire. In the sixteenth to mid-eighteenth Luckily, for the sake of mutt and man, land belly up. motion, the marshmallow will burn un- centuries, throughout Britain and its pitmasters long ago figured out that One by one, day by day, across thir- evenly, blacken, and might even combust. colonies, including America, households whole hogs did not need constant turning ty-five years, Ricky Parker flipped hog But a whole hog is not a marshmallow. might have owned a Canis vertigus, Latin if they remain belly, or meat side, down. after whole hog. I attempt to total the Well-insulated pits, hardwood coals numbers but my head spins dizzily just shoveled at timed intervals and deposit- thinking of Ricky: our Vernepator pit- ed consciously around the carcass’s pe- masterus, the man who spun the wheel. rimeter, and vigilance against flame and flare-ups will keep a pig evenly heated, ricky parker had met the enemy its meat uniformly browned. But even- and it was a stainless-steel box, the size tually all hogs need to be rotated, flipped and shape of a pool table, a closed-lid upward so that the meat can meet its oven big enough to fit a whole hog, with maker and greet the world as barbecue. four legs on wheels for added mobility, Ricky Parker, naturally, had his flip in case one needed to roll it closer to any technique systematically diagrammed, 240-volt electrical outlet. A product of a series of steps from which the pitmas- nearby Jackson, Tennessee, this contrap- ter and his pit hands would never deviate. tion went by the generic name Hickory First, he needed to determine that a hog Creek Bar-B-Q Cooker—though there is had been cooked through to doneness. no Hickory Creek anywhere on this side Tenderly squeezing its thick, round of the state. This was the very latest in hams, like a doctor probing for foreign smoking technology, a modern marvel bodies, he could feel if the skin had sep- that promised to take the work out of arated from the flesh underneath. It felt, barbecue, and it was everything Ricky to me, like handling a slightly deflated hated. Within a half-hour’s drive of Lex- basketball: applying a bit of pressure ington, I had met several pitmasters— formed an indention that would snap though you could hardly still call them back into shape when released. He then that—who switched from wood-fired pits

Spring 2016 | 43 44 | southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 45 RICKY PARKER’S SONS ZACH AND MATT

46 | southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 47 48 | southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 49 Copyright (c) 2016 by Rien Fertel. From The One True Barbecue: Fire, Smoke, and the Pitmasters Who Cook the Whole Hog by Rien Fertel to be published by Touchstone, a Division of Simon and Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

Turn to page 4 to read more about Rien Fertel and Denny Culbert.

50 | southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 51 Comfort Food

on my floor mattress, and intro- promised to bring the vat to the duced myself to the world of house party she planned to host THE SOUND OF Arkansas cheese dip. A novice, I later that night. She grinned. didn’t know Arkansans ate it warm. At fridge temperature, the many southerners know the ONE CHIP DIPPING dip was defiant. cheese-dip drill: Toss cubed A SEARCH FOR THE MEANING OF ARKANSAS CHEESE DIP Conway, Arkansas, where I Velveeta, a can of Ro*Tel, and by Phil McCausland lived, is known for three colleges, maybe some cumin into a Crock- archaic liquor laws, and native pot. Heat until liquefied. Arkansas son Kris Allen. When Allen won restaurants finesse their own rec- season eight of American Idol in ipes. The degree of complexity May 2009, local diner Stoby’s of- varies, as do the secret ingredi- fered him free cheese dip for life. ents. Stoby’s recipe is the pride of For one brief, brilliant segment Conway—and my unsophisticated of network television, the rest of palate assumed it deserved top the world learned about Arkansas honors—but it earns sneers in cheese dip. But, as with Kris Al- Little Rock. len’s career, everyone but Arkan- After logging a bit more time in sas soon forgot. My upstairs the state, I learned of Arkansas’s neighbors, who made Stoby’s dip long history with the dip and the for the restaurant in a small-scale expectations that surround it. My industrial setup, gave me the con- most important directive from tainer as a sort of welcome-to- the-boarding-house gift. “I fucking love Stoby’s cheese I KNEW NOTHING dip,” the bartender at ZaZa—a OF THE DEBATES, salad and pizza restaurant, and PASSIONS, OR one of the few places in Conway LOYALTIES CHEESE to get a drink—told me as she DIP INSPIRED. filled a pitcher of beer. “It’s pretty good,” I said with a Heights Taco y first experience help me? Should I let him? And nod, not looking up from the the cognoscenti of Arkansas was & Tamale Co., with a gallon vat of would I have to consume the crawly snake I’d made with a to never confuse it with the white Little Rock. Mcheese dip was more cheese dip while perched sadly straw wrapper. stuff called queso. That’s blasphe- emotionally complex than I ex- on the futon mattress (sans frame) Her tone turned to gravel as she my. In this state, the dip is orange, pected. The giant vessel stared that functioned as my bed and wiped the sides of the pitcher with but even that is hardly a firm rule. out from the refrigerator and couch? a rag. “Pretty good? How’re you (Stoby’s has a B-side white dip, called to mind alarming ques- I did know that it would trump here only for a couple weeks and slightly spicier than the original.) tions. How many bags of tortilla all other sustenance in the house. already have a connection for it?” Some Little Rock establish- chips would be necessary to eat There are only so many days in I shrugged, ignorant of the ments eschew Velveeta and in- my way through it? Could I afford a row you can make supper out vaunted place of cheese dip in stead borrow from French tech- that many chips as an unpaid of rice, a can of black beans, and central Arkansas cuisine. I knew niques to build a Mornay-style magazine intern in a small Arkan- a container of salsa. I ripped nothing of the debates, passions, sauce or some variation of queso

sas town? Would my roommate open a bag of Tostitos, plopped Kish by Kelly Photographs or loyalties it inspired. Still, I flameado. As an outsider, I could

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ABOVE: never discern the vagaries that Texas was the true home of a liquefied cheese product. cheese dip. Not a bad slogan, if ABOVE: Mexico determine where a restaurant’s cheese dip, and told Rogers he Most Arkansans agree on the the owners were ever inclined to Heights Taco Chiquito, & Tamale Co., North dip lands on the spectrum from would rue the day he entangled gist of the cheese dip origin sto- use it. But because the recipe has Little Rock. Little Rock. good enough to canonical. himself in the debate. After ry, though it’s the kind of history remained secret for more than CENTER: Though locals tend to look months of research, the reporter that would elicit a nervous laugh eighty years, no one is really sure Stoby’s, Conway. kindly on all cheese dip efforts, contacted Rogers again and said from an academic. The tale be- what’s in it. A few enterprising they’re also proud as hell of their she couldn’t prove Texas had an gins with a man named Blackie souls on the Internet think it personal favorites. More often earlier claim. Cheese dip was Ar- Donnelly, owner of the afore- might just be Kraft American than not, it is familiarity or repu- kansan—probably. mentioned Mexico Chiquito. cheese, milk, flour, hot sauce, tation, not recipe, that determines Rogers considered that a big Like any eighty-year-old oral cumin, and some other powdered allegiance. And anyway, most win for the state. “The revelation history, the vague and the uncon- spices—but it’s the combination restaurants’ cheese dip methods that cheese dip appears to have firmed abound. Donnelly worked of an ambiguous history and a are closely guarded secrets. originated in Arkansas gives Ar- as a pilot and flew a small twin- secret recipe that is so enticing. In 2009, Nick Rogers—a former kansas a culinary cultural identi- engine plane between Texas and Donnelly brought his business Little Rock attorney, current so- ty that it has always wanted and Mexico for a time. Some say he to the Little Rock area in 1936, ciology PhD student at Georgia lacked,” Rogers says. “Arkansas, ended up in Arkansas because he explains Lisa Glidewell, who State University, and the founder by virtue of where it is geograph- crashed his plane there. Accord- owns and operates Mexico Chiq- of the World Cheese Dip Cham- ically—just to the north of Loui- ing to the current owners of uito with her husband and sib- pionship, held annually in Little siana, just to the south of Missou- Mexico Chiquito, Donnelly’s lings. Lisa’s father bought the Rock since 2010—made a twen- ri, just to the east of Texas—is at wife came up with the cheese dip restaurant and its very secret ty-minute documentary called In the intersection of these different recipe—informed by their fre- recipes in 1978 and turned it into Queso Fever: A Movie About regions of the Midwest and quent trips across the border. It a local franchise. Today, Little Cheese Dip. In the film, he claims Southwest and Cajun Country allegedly showed up on the Mex- Rock is still ravenous for Mexico Arkansas as the birthplace of and the Deep South. As such, Ar- ico Chiquito menu in 1935. Chiquito’s dip. cheese dip, placing its genesis at kansas is a little bit all of those If we were to accept this nar- “It was kind of outside North a Hot Springs restaurant named and a little bit none of those. It’s rative and get Biblical, following Little Rock,” Lisa says of the Mexico Chiquito in 1935. The Dal- a melting pot of its own.” A melt- “the law of first mention,” Mexi- Protho Junction location, swirl- las Morning News responded that ing pot that defines its cuisine by co Chiquito cheese dip is God’s ing a chip into a bowlful of the

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central Arkansas for the first time THE FOOD WORLD and not finding cheese dip on MIGHT ALWAYS LOOK menus. One man said his son in- DOWN ITS NOSE AT sisted a Colorado restaurant make CHEESE DIP. it for him. The confused waiter returned with a bowl of melted cheddar cheese. dip that serves her family like a This dichotomy is what makes trust fund. “You actually had to Arkansas cheese dip so fascinat- drive there. It was probably a ing to an outsider. Arkansans good thirty minutes because the claim cheese dip as part of their interstates weren’t so great. It culinary history, yet I kept won- was this old, old building with dering if that gooey birthright was dirt floors. It was just a place that a mere accident of geography. you came to because you loved Gumbo, discussed to the point of the food.” cliché, tells the story of Louisian- ans mixing the traditions of its on my most recent visit to native and immigrant cultures: Little Rock, I wanted its citizens Choctaw, French, German, Span- to utter the ineffable: to explain ish, and West African. It relies on why cheese dip mattered. Was ingredients with deep ties to peo- Arkansas’s cheese dip phenome- ple and place—andouille sausage, world might always look down hash that almost certainly came Blackie non akin to attaching a “World filé powder, okra, Gulf shellfish. its nose at cheese dip. from a can. I associate these dish- Donnelly in front Famous” sign to an unexception- The terroir of Arkansas cheese As I left Little Rock, I burrowed es with happy memories, and they of Mexico al burger joint? The assertion of dip isn’t rarefied. A delivery from deeper into these viscid just taste good. Beyond my need Chiquito, provenance is a secret known only the Sysco truck, or a visit to any holes. The numerous origin ex- for basic sustenance, that’s all I North Little Rock. to Arkansans, who are unaware American grocery store, yields planations, the slack history, and really want out of a meal. The that it’s a secret to anyone else. the necessary components. the shadow of Tex-Mex added to Arkansans get that every time ConcheeZtadors, cheese dip Acquaintances in Little Rock told Despite Arkansans’ insistence my frustration. I couldn’t ascribe they hit the drive-through at champions. me of their shock on leaving that cheese dip is their creation, a tidy symbolism. Mexico Chiquito or slide into a it’s also a first cousin, if not a sib- Maybe cheese dip matters sim- booth at Stoby’s or switch on ling, to Tex-Mex. When critics ply because Arkansans love it. their Crockpot, and it’s even bet- first differentiated Tex-Mex from While the region evolves, cheese ter because it’s naturally social. Mexican food thirty years ago, it dip is unflinching. Most people No matter the petty divisions was a cuisine deemed an edible have a nostalgic affinity for a food created by politics or religion or mess—an American bastardiza- that is less than haute cuisine. For pop culture, the people of central tion marked by huge platters with me, a Pennsylvania-raised child Arkansas will unite around a too much dairy. It described a of Irish and German parents, it’s bowl of cheese dip—even if one food as both native and foreign. Oscar Meyer’s spreadable liver- of them thinks there’s a better There has been a small shift in wurst or a plate of corned beef version just up the road. appreciation since then, and chefs aren’t as afraid to attach them- Phil McCausland is a New Orleans–based writer whose work has selves to a cuisine that was once appeared in The Oxford American, The Atlantic, VICE Munchies,

considered a slur. But the food Courtesy Chiquito Mexico and Eater.

56 | southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 57 Global South

For artists, green is composed seeming contradictions between of blue and yellow, and is the the lieder, a genre of German Ro- GREEN, I LOVE strongest of the secondary colors. mantic music, and the decidedly Impressionists embraced the funky scent of the cooking greens. YOU, GREENS color in the late nineteenth My paternal grandmother was THE COLOR OF MEMORY century, when the innovation of an urban farmer before her time. pigments in tubes allowed for She was also a forager, known to by Jessica B. Harris painting en plein air. Farmers cull the dandelion greens from know the exact shades of green the lawns of Fisk University that signal all is well: the celadon when she visited Nashville from of a ripening lettuce or the mal- her Napier, Tennessee, home. By achite of a citrus leaf, the lush, the time I knew her, she lived in deep hues of growing. It is the the South Jamaica projects of green of an increasing number of Queens, New York, and grew her chefs and restaurateurs who grow Southern staples (peanuts, okra, and cook, who have reacquainted mustards, turnips, and collards) us with the tastes of true fresh- in the small allotment that was ness and with old savors rescued available in those days. She from oblivion. wasn’t a particularly good cook, For me, green is also the color of but at greens and beaten biscuits memory, because as an African she was a wizard. A mixture of American Northern Southerner, collards and mustards, her green is about greens. We eat them greens forever marked me. When on New Year’s Day for folding I went away to school, she’d wrap money—unless we’re in New them in funky care packages that Verde que te quiero verde Orleans, where we smother filled me with delight. “Green, how I love you, green”1 cabbage. Jazz great Thelonious I began my career as a culinary Monk, a native of North Carolina, historian back in the dark ages of wore a collard leaf as a boutonniere. the 1980s, and I remember pro- o wrote the spanish poet federico garcía lorca, evoking African American poet Langston claiming that collards were Afri- all of the pastoral beauty of the color that is connected with country gardens Hughes wrote in his 1961 work, can. At some point, I said as much Sand ripening fields. It’s connected with virility and with youth. French King Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz: on a television show. Soon after, Henry IV was called Le vert galant—The Evergreen Gallant, or The Gay Old Spark. I was blindsided by a phone call The Spanish call a dirty old man un viejo verde. In China, green is considered yang IN THE POT BEHIND THE from the culinary historian Karen and is associated with female virtues. Green was the color of protection in ancient PAPER DOORS WHAT’S COOKING? Hess. Karen and I were friends, Egypt, and the god Osiris, known as the Great Green, was often depicted with green WHAT’S SMELLING, LEONTYNE? and I knew she took delight in skin in paintings and statues. Green is the color of the prophet Muhammad and is LIEDER, LOVELY LIEDER finding errors of scholarship. I venerated in Islam, where Paradise is supposed to be full of lush vegetation (as is only AND A LEAF OF COLLARD GREEN did my best to avoid her wrath. natural for a religion that began in the desert!). While green can symbolize sickness LOVELY LIEDER LEONTYNE. When I picked up the phone, she and envy, it more often means hope and growth, as it is the color that represents rather gently asked, “You do know nature in all of its possibilities. Iemanja, the water mother of the Yoruba people of “Leontyne” is the great African that collard greens are not Afri- southwestern Nigeria, takes blue-green viridian as her color, symbolizing life itself. American soprano Leontyne can?” I didn’t, but I damned sure Price from Laurel, Mississippi, checked further and got myself 1 Note: There are several ways to translate this line. This is among the most straightforward. Ferebee by Matt Illustrations and the poet is riffing on the straightened out after that.

58 | southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 59 Global South

Collard Green Room at Project Row Houses, Houston, TX.

GREENS ARE A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF THE CULINARY CROSS-FERTILIZATION THAT CREATED THE CUISINE OF THE SOUTH.

Collards, although claimed by names as to be bewildering to all bounty of the local waters. to white-tablecloth restaurants, African Americans with a ven- but the most intrepid botanist. In Finally, you arrive at New Or- where trends celebrate this mul- geance, are European. “Collard” the New World context, we get leans gumbo. Leah Chase’s Holy ticultural dish and return us to is a corruption of “colewort,” and spinach, mustards, turnips, and Week gumbo z’herbes, at its ori- the past. The matrix vegetable colewort is any non-heading cab- the ubiquitous kale, as well as the gin, celebrated the tradition of may be European in origin, and bage. The Africanism in the pot, less-used dandelion, purslane, foraging. It traditionally uses the African hand is still tasted in if you will, is the consumption of creasy, poke, and more. nine, eleven, or thirteen varieties the seasoning of the pot. The the potlikker in which they were A culinary curve bending from of greens, indicating the number chef might even add foraged cooked. Greens, then, are the ex- Africa through South America and of new friends to be made in the greens or a spice that indicates ception to what seems to be the the Caribbean to the United States year. Recently at Patois, also in the increasingly complex tangle Southern culinary rule: The mis- traces the migration of leafy green New Orleans, I had a turkey an- of cultures that is now the South. attribution favors the African stews from Old World to New. It douille gumbo that was remark- Expertly handled, the final result American hand in the cooking begins on the African continent able for its addition of small strips resonates with the toothsome pot. Confusion persists. Greens with the greens-inflected meat of collard greens to the soup, a flavors of fresh vegetables, cele- are firmly planted in the African and fish stews like Nigeria’s efo, fillip that may have been born of brates the multiple heritages that American experience. They are a Benin’s sauce feuilles, and Sene- kitchen necessity, but one that have gone into the preparation, perfect example of the culinary gal’s soupikania. Across the Atlan- brings us full circle, to my grand- and simultaneously offers a taste cross-fertilization that created tic in Brazil, the leafy greens turn mother’s greens. of memory and a taste of the New the cuisine of the South. up in efo, a dish that maintains its We return not to her small, South. It’s all there in a leaf of Northern European greens are Nigerian name as well as the Ni- cramped kitchen in Queens, but collard, green. simply a New-World substitution gerian use of palm oil. Move up for an Old-World food. The Old that curve and you’ll next find the Jessica B. Harris is a founding member of the Southern Foodways World here is Africa. European callaloo of the Caribbean, a soup Alliance. After speaking at the first SFA Symposium, she encouraged collards replaced a myriad of leafy that depends on leafy greens as John T. Edge to date Blair Hobbs, who is now his wife. She delivered a

greens that go by so many different its main ingredient, along with the Photo by Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress version of this talk at the 2016 Blackberry Farm Taste of the South.

60 | southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 61

ach january, as a particular local dessert: the do- LET THEM Americans lean into the berge cake. It honors the personal well-trodden “new year, experience rather than the public EAT CAKE Enew me” mantra, New Orleanians experience that does. have a mere five days before they I remember my first doberge. NEW ORLEANS CONFECTIONS, face down the bacchanal of Car- When I was ten or twelve, my dad SACRED AND PROFANE nival. Beginning on January 6— brought home a huge box for my by Emma Sloan Twelfth Night—a parade rolls mom’s birthday. Inside was a down St. Charles Avenue, parties cake: round, tall, and covered in rock the city, and king flood a shiny and seamless dark brown the market in a purple, green, and icing decorated with big white gold blur. roses. It looked nothing like the Like Mardi Gras, king cake be- grocery-store sheet cakes that speaks deep Catholic roots that dominated the birthday-party have been embraced and appro- circuit. My mom cut and lifted priated as a city tradition, not out a perfect, triangular slice: six merely a religious one. The market layers of cake and five more of a is wide open on king cakes—pret- dark filling. ty much every bakery and grocery I was in awe when they ex- store has its own version—so qual- plained that this had ity, price, and flavors vary widely. come from a New Orleans bakery At the very least, you can expect a called Gambino’s, which sounded sweet bread twisted into an oval fantastically cosmopolitan for a girl shape, filled with cream cheese, growing up in south Mississippi fruit compote, or classic cinnamon, with a pet pig and more trees than gently iced, and heavily sprinkled in purple, green, and gold. King cakes also come with a tiny plastic THE CAKE IS SO TIED baby—but you already know that. TO NEW ORLEANS Dutiful celebrants will make sure THAT IT’S HARD TO every office party and social gath- TASTE THE CULTURAL ering has at least one king cake. AMALGAM FROM The Lenten season that follows Mardi Gras reminds you of what WHICH IT SPRANG. comes after celebration: thanks, reflection—and for some, self- neighbors. Mom told us how my discipline. The citywide celebra- grandparents began the family do- tion shows the power of a commu- berge tradition, bringing home a nal experience, one in which ev- cake each time they passed through eryone is a king for a day. A birthday New Orleans or Baton Rouge celebration, crowned with a cake, (which has its own Gambino’s). is the recognition for making it Sam Scelfo Jr. tells me that Gam- A king cake–flavored doberge by Debbie through one more year. New Orle- bino’s recipe and method for do-

Does Doberge. Johnson Pableaux ans birthdays are often graced by berge has never changed. He says

62 | southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 63 Dessert

The King of that Beulah Levy Ledner created Night, when, according to the New King Cakes the original recipe in Depres- Testament, three kings arrived in from Willa sion-era New Orleans. She sold it Bethlehem bearing gifts for the Jean Bakery in New to Joe Gambino in the 1940s. Gam- baby Jesus. The king cake blue- Orleans. bino did not alter the recipe, and print—an oblong brioche dusted neither did Scelfo, who bought the with sugar—came to New Orleans bakery in 1978. Doberge tradition- and, as most things decadent in ally comes in two flavors: choco- the city, has blown up over time. late and lemon. For the indecisive King cakes are omnipresent consumer or taste-divided fami- from January 6 to Mardi Gras, lies, Gambino’s offers a conjoined sometimes impolitely showing up doberge that is half chocolate and at the end of December. This year, half lemon. These are the two fla- Haydel’s Bakery, frequently cited vors that Ledner created, and as one of the best bakeries for a Gambino’s honors the tradition. king cake in New Orleans, teamed Doberge is based on the Dobos with Uber to deliver orders on unlikely she ever made a doberge. recipe for almost a century, other , a nineteenth-century Twelfth Night. Smoothie King Most home bakers aren’t up to bakeries in town successfully bake Hungarian confection first served offered a king cake–flavored the task of baking multiple cakes, and sell their own renditions of to Emperor Franz Joseph I of smoothie that tasted like cough cooking the custard filling, assem- the doberge cake. Austria-. Ledner light- syrup without the buzz. I’ll cop to bling the layers, and then icing Debbie Does Doberge (no, it’s ened the recipe; instead of the but- enjoying the king cake­–flavored the beast. So they leave it to local not a Dallas-based company) ex- tercream that fills a , vodka mixed with a cream soda, bakeries, making doberge cake periments wildly with flavors she layered the cake with custard. but at some point, all of this king that much more special. outside of the lemon-chocolate Doberge is the product of many cake stuff can feel like a sugary My maternal grandparents binary—goat cheese, peanut but- cultures. Created by a Jewish bak- circus. Like catching beads at a grew up eating Gambino’s, and ter and jelly, Key lime—and their er, inspired by a Hungarian cake, parade, after the fifth or sixth time, because of this, we are a Gambi- irreverent name hints at a will- and adopted by an Italian bakery, do you even want it anymore? It no’s family. There’s no reason to ingness to flout tradition. They it was ascribed a French-sounding is still just as special as it was on consider switching it up. Every offer a king cake doberge year- name to make it more palatable in Twelfth Night? It feels unfair to bite of Gambino’s doberge tastes round: white cake with cinnamon, a Francophile city. Yet doberge hold king cake to such a high stan- the same and offers the same feel- cream cheese icing, and your feels like none of these things. The dard. High demand, simple struc- ing. With each bite, memories of choice of fruit filling. cake is so tied to New Orleans that ture, and ability to be shipped eating it float to the surface. It’s easy to diagnose this Fran- it’s hard to taste the cultural amal- nationwide (FedEx even has a There’s a reason why a forty-day kencake as a crime, one that gam from which it sprang. specially sized king cake box) have period of fasting feels welcome tarnishes the integrity of both the King cake is much more visible turned it into the Bourbon Street after the weeks-long revelry of doberge and the king cake. Break- as the New Orleans confection. of New Orleans . Mardi Gras. Such a yearly celebra- ing the unwritten laws of tradition The product of a centuries-old If king cake is like hitting up tion is perfect. Doberge is a special by experimenting with flavors and baking tradition, king cake’s his- Bourbon while in town, doberge instrument of memory, a welcome casting a blind eye to season may tory is more lore than concrete is akin to scoring an invite to a herald of times past, present, and feel like an affront to the plastic fact. It’s generally traced back to chef’s private dinner party. Do- future. Though Gambino’s has baby Jesus. But I’m going to roll medieval Europe, when the Cath- berge is beyond the purview of kept a lock on Ledner’s original with it. olic state ruled France and Spain. most home cooks. Your Louisiana The cake’s royal designation stems grandmother might have passed Emma Sloan is a freelance writer based in New Orleans. Her writing

from its celebration of Twelfth down her recipe for gumbo; it’s Johnson Pableaux has appeared in Vice Munchies.

64 | southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 65 Cordial

Christmas cookies and yeasted sugar cake. The Moravian church AS IS THE CASE began in an area that is now the WITH SIMPLE DISHES, Czech Republic. Members came EVERY COOK INSISTS to America to exercise religious THAT HIS OR HER WAY freedom in the eighteenth centu- ry, bringing their baking tradi- OF MAKING CHICKEN tions with them. PIE IS THE BEST. Unless you’ve spent time in Winston-Salem, it’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of Moravian prepared, according to researchers chicken pie. You might even say at Old Salem, the eighteenth- the heretical: “Oh, you mean century restored Moravian settle- chicken pot pie.” ment in Winston-Salem. Do not ever call it pot pie unless For frugal home cooks, chick- you want some righteous wrath en pie was the final fate of un- to come down on you. productive laying hens. Meat Moravian chicken pie is simple: pies are made all over Europe, so Line a pie pan with crust; add it’s reasonable to think that the cooked chicken with broth or early Moravians brought the idea gravy; top with another crust; with them. Historical recipes are bake. No peas, carrots, onions, or scarce because cooks simply other vegetables inside. Some made chicken pie using what cooks sprinkle a butter-flour they had. crumble on the top crust or offer Records at the Moravian Ar- DON’T CALL extra gravy for serving. But there’s chives in Winston-Salem show no gussying up the pie with herbs that chicken pie suppers as IT A POT PIE and such. church fundraisers go back at Moravian chicken pie is the least to 1920. Today, nearly every WINSTON-SALEM’S MORAVIAN CURRENCY humble laborer in the vineyard, Moravian church in town holds by Debbie Moose providing warm, embracing meals a chicken pie sale sometime for the table and support for the during the year, as do a good num- church treasuries. ber of churches of other denom- oravian chicken such a part of food-related fund- Every cook insists that his or her inations. My mother, a Presbyte- pie isn’t just comfort raising in the city that churches way of making the pie is the best. rian, obtained her Moravian Mfood. It’s currency. At of all denominations hold sales. Some churches use whole stewing chicken pies from a United Meth- Moravian churches in Win- Some are once a year at holiday hens, while others go with all odist church, where volunteers ston-Salem, North Carolina, the bazaars, others are year-round white meat as a bow to current still crank out up to 180 pies at a price of building fellowship halls, operations with commercial preferences. The whole-hen time to freeze and sell year-round. replacing copiers, or repairing freezers and armies of volunteers. approach is probably closer to Moravian chicken pie is ecu- sanctuary roofs has, for genera- Many sweet-toothed North how chicken pie was originally menically delicious. tions, been stated not in dollars Carolinians know about the Mor- but in chicken pies. avian treats that I grew up with Debbie Moose is a writer based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her most

The chicken pie has become in Winston-Salem—paper-thin by Emily Wallace Illustration recent book is Southern Holidays: A Savor the South Cookbook.

66 | southernfoodways.org Spring 2016 | 67 Gravy is a publication of the Southern Foodways Alliance, a member-supported institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF GRAVY PODCAST John T. Edge PRODUCER AND HOST [email protected] Tina Antolini [email protected] PUBLISHER Mary Beth Lasseter GRAVY PODCAST INTERN [email protected] Dana Bialek

EDITOR GRAVY PRINT For more information and recipes, visit www.simmonscatfish.com. Sara Camp Milam GRADUATE ASSISTANT The SFA thanks Simmons Catfish for their years of support. [email protected] Kate Wiggins

DESIGNER Richie Swann [email protected]

In 2016, the SFA explores the Corn-Fed South, from bread to syrup. JOIN US AT SOUTHERNFOODWAYS. ORG SFA members receive a subscription to Gravy and other benefits. THE MISSION of the Southern Foodways Alliance is to document, study, and explore the diverse food cultures of the changing American South.

Our work sets a welcome table where all may consider our history and our future in a spirit of respect and reconciliation.

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68 | southernfoodways.org InnovatI ng sI nce 1896

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