Southern Belly Read online

  SOUTHERN BELLY

  Also by john T. Edge

  A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South

  Donuts: An American Passion

  Hamburgers & Fries: An American Story

  Fried Chicken: An American Story

  Apple Pie: An American Story

  Southern Belly

  The **Ultimate** Food Lover’s Companion to the South

  John T. Edge

  pen & ink illustrations by Blair Hobbs

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2007

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2007 by John T. Edge. All rights reserved. Revised and expanded edition,

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, June 2007.

  Published in different form in hardcover by Hill Street Press in 2000.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Pen and ink illustrations by Blair Hobbs.

  Design by Anne Richmond Boston.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Edge, John T.

  Southern belly: the ultimate food lover’s companion to the South / by John T. Edge;

  pen & ink illustrations by Blair Hobbs.—1st paperback ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: Athens, Ga.: Hill Street Press, 2000.

  Includes index.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-547-6

  1. Cookery, American—Southern style. 2. Restaurants—Southern States—

  Guidebooks. I. Title.

  TX715.2.S68E3285 2007

  641.5’975—dc22 2006032603

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Paperback Edition

  For my father, John Thomas Edge Sr., who taught me how to use knife, fork, and pen

  Contents

  Introduction: An Appetite for Context

  Alabama

  Arkansas

  (North) Florida

  Georgia

  Kentucky

  Louisiana

  Mississippi

  North Carolina

  South Carolina

  Tennessee

  (East) Texas

  Virginia

  Thanks

  Photograph Credits

  Places

  Introduction

  AN APPETITE FOR CONTEXT

  The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down. A good appetite gives an eater room to turn around in.

  —A. J. Liebling

  My appetite is faceted.

  I crave honest food: fiddler catfish, rolled in spiced cornmeal and fried in a castiron skillet; pimento cheese made with hand-shredded sharp cheddar, chopped pimento peppers, homemade mayonnaise, and precious little else; dusky collard greens swimming in potlikker; whole-hog barbecue, pulled from a hickory-stoked pit, hacked into juicy bits, and doused with a thin sauce of vinegar and pepper; deviled eggs spiked with sweet pickle relish and dusted with paprika; red tomatoes eaten out of hand as their summer-ripe juices trace down my forearm.

  What is more, I have an appetite for the lore that defines life in the South. When I sit down at table, I want to commune with cooks past and present. I want to know their life stories. I want to understand their struggles. In other words, I’m as interested in the 1964 fight to integrate Ollie’s Barbecue in Birmingham, Alabama, and the life story of Greenville, South Carolina, mayonnaise maven Eugenia Duke, as I am in whether Deacon Burton of Atlanta, Georgia, fried his chicken in lard or shortening.

  The third facet is more oblique. In the pages that follow, I seek, for the most part, to showcase restaurants and artisans that matter. Herein you’ll visit places where community is fostered. You will meet people whose time at the stove reinforces the tethers of civic life. Such roles comes with experience and so, by and large, the people you meet and the restaurants you visit will be veterans of the Southern scene. Two decades is the general measure I use for inclusion, but there are, of course, exceptions.

  If I did my job well, this book will read like a social history of Southern food. Not a history of the conventional kind mind you, but a mosaic-like portrait of the South as told through its foods, a pastiche of people and places that sates both mind and belly. To my mind, much of what has been written about Southern food is quaint condescension, foisted upon the reading public by interlopers with a taste for good macaroni and cheese but no understanding of the cultural milieu we call the South. I aim to fix that, and point the way to some of the best eats that ever crossed your palate.

  In large part, I write of commercial establishments and the people who run them. In an ideal scenario, you would travel the South, stopping off at this farmer’s kitchen to sample a wedge of cornbread shot through with crisp pork cracklins, or that fisherman’s hut for a stew of oysters and cream gilded with a skein of rich, sweet butter. Yes, Southerners are a hospitable people, but invitations to sup at a stranger’s home are few these days, so I have chosen to write of people and places that require no special access or knowledge save a good map. Let me be very clear: I don’t rank the restaurants profiled herein, nor do I tell you what hours they are open. In other words, this is not just a guidebook. A guidebook would only tell you where to eat; Southern Belly aims to tell you a story and to serve up some great eats alongside.

  This is a very subjective work, a proudly personal, admittedly skewed take on life beneath the Mason-Dixon divide. My South includes Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

  In defining what constitutes the South, I ignored matters of Confederate or Union affiliation during the Civil War or mapping based on where kudzu grows, or where soft drinks are known generically as Coke versus pop, looking instead to whether a preponderance of the citizens staked a claim to being Southern. And so, based on recent travels through eastern Texas and northern Florida, I welcome those precincts to the fold. And, once again, the District of Columbia slipped in the back door. Raise a hue and cry if you like, but it’s my book. Here’s hoping a perusal of these pages makes for good reading—and good eating.

  SOUTHERN BELLY

  ALaBAMa

  kra three ways: fried, boiled, or stewed with tomatoes. A casserole of sunny, yellow squash enrobed in a caul of cheese. Red, ripe tomatoes, pearly ears of corn, collard, mustard, and turnip greens sold by the bushel at the Montgomery Curb Market. That’s what I like about Alabama. But, Lord, let’s not forget oysters from Wintzell’s in Mobile or ribs from Tuscaloosa’s Dreamland or West Indies salad from Bayley’s down in Theodore. Along the way, we meet Eugene Walter, the patron saint of Mobile, and Birmingham’s Ollie McClung, who in 1964 fought the Supreme Court to keep his barbecue restaurant segregated.

  Bob’s, the 1950s-era predecessor to Bob

  Sykes Bar-B-Q of Bessemer.

  Bessemer

  BOB SYKES BAR-B-Q

  In the fall of 1957 Bob Sykes traded in the first new car he had ever bought—a 1954 Ford with low miles and good tires. In exchange, he received a one-year lease on a building in Birmingham’s Central Park neighborhood. Sykes named his little drive-in the Ice Spot. “I guess they didn’t really need the car,” recalls his son, Van, present-day proprietor of the family business. “He and my momma could walk to the place from home.”

  At first they served burger
s and hot dogs, shakes and sodas. But in time, Bob Sykes’ yen to serve old-fashioned pit barbecue would displace more mundane fare. “My daddy got to experimenting on the weekends with barbecue,” Van tells me. “He wanted to get it right, to serve something he was proud of. He grew up in the little farming community of Cumberland City, Tennessee, near Clarksville, back when they would still hold hog killings on cold winter days, and there was this local black man that everybody knew by the name of Buck Hampton. Mr. Hampton would travel from farm to farm, building a pit and smoking meat for people. He was kind of a pitmaster for hire. I think my daddy was trying to re-create that taste from his past when he started out. Years later I can remember riding with my daddy back home to look for Mr. Hampton. He was an old silver-haired guy. Daddy told him how he was cooking the meat, what he was doing, and Mr. Hampton told him about a few adjustments he should make.”

  In the ensuing years Bob and his wife, Maxine Sykes, would move the restaurant from Birmingham to the nearby steel mill town of Bessemer—changing the name to Bob’s Hickory Pit and then Bob Sykes Bar-B-Q—eventually growing their business to a fourteen-unit chain and winning a regionwide reputation for tender, smoke-suffused pork shoulder meat and spareribs. In 1963 Dot Brown joined the crew and her recipes for coleslaw, potato salad, beans, and peerless, meringue-crowned lemon pie are still in use today. “She was like a second momma to me,” says Van.

  Today Bob Sykes Bar-B-Q is set in a vaguely 1970s-era building with a towering fun house sign out front and an open pit just inside the front door. That’s just the way Van wants it: “My mother’s determination and business sense built this location back in 1977. And I’ve tried to change it as little as possible. My nephew, Jason Jewell, is working with me now. We still start the fire at 3:30 in the morning, salt down the meat, and smoke it over green hickory wood for eight to ten hours. My pitman, Alonzo Scott, has been with us since 1978. He knows how to build a fire right. He knows that on a cold, misty, overcast day, the fire’s going to burn slower, and so he has to prop open the back door of the restaurant to get enough air moving around. My woodman has been bringing me my green hickory since 1995. By now he knows better than to slip some oak in on me. He knows what I want. That’s not the kind of knowledge that can be duplicated. That’s what barbecue is all about.”

  1724 NINTH AVENUE / 205-426-1400

  BRIGHT STAR

  When Bright Star founder Tom Bonduris arrived in Alabama from his native Greece, Bessemer was a boomtown, a steel-making center to rival Pittsburgh. “My great-uncle was not the only Greek to arrive in the early 1900s,” co-owner Jimmy Koikos tells me. “Back then, there were Greek immigrants opening all kinds of cafés. Bessemer was a place with a future, a place full of hope, and they called their restaurants names like the Gold Star and the Bright Star.”

  During the early years, the Bright Star was a simple café with a horseshoe-shaped bar and a few tables scattered about. But as Bessemer prospered, so did the Bright Star. By 1915 an elegant oil mural was hanging in the dining room, rendered by an itinerant painter who was more than willing to trade brushstrokes for beefsteaks. Under the leadership of Bill Koikos, the café was transformed into a grand dining hall. The elder Koikos—born in Telata, Greece, in 1894—moved to Bessemer in 1920 and began working at the Bright Star the day after his arrival. He remained at the restaurant for the next sixty-eight years, until his death in 1988.

  Today his sons Jimmy and Nick are in charge, and though the logos are wearing off the monogrammed china, the restaurant still exudes a timeless, if not fussy, beauty. Dark wood panels the walls and heavy linen naps the tables; red leather booths beneath and brass chandeliers glinting above.

  The food is Greek to the core: tenderloin of beef marinated in oregano, lemon juice, olive oil, and garlic; broiled chicken livers in the same bright sauce; a salad made of mesclun topped with a tangle of anchovies and a fat slab of feta. Sure, there’s catfish on the menu, and they even offer a chicken breast that purports to be Southern fried, though I’ve never seen a soul order it, especially when presented with a menu chock-full of Greek treasures.

  Does that mean that the Bright Star isn’t Southern? Hardly. Consider first the family’s longevity in the Bessemer community—nearly a century of feeding the sons and daughters of Alabama. And if that doesn’t do it for you, take the time to talk with Jimmy about the days when Bear Bryant was the head football coach at the University of Alabama and Shug Jordan was the man at rival Auburn University. For those who weren’t able to get a ticket to the game, a table at the Bright Star was the next best thing. Waitresses wore the jersey of their chosen team; the hostess wore a referee’s stripes. And Alabama and Auburn fought it out on the floor of the Bright Star over plates of red snapper in brown butter; broiled shrimp in lemon sauce; and fat, well-marbled porterhouse steaks. It was just like being at the game—only the food was far better.

  304 NINETEENTH STREET / 205-426-1861

  Birmingham

  NIKI’S WEST

  Like many of the Birmingham area’s storied restaurants—including the Bright Star in Bessemer—Niki’s is Greek-owned. “Your hosts, Pete C. Hontzas and Teddy Hontzas,” proclaim the place mats that paper the scarred wooden tables. But for the most part, this cafeteria is a study in ethnic assimilation. The favored beverage is sweet tea, rather than retsina; and breadbaskets are filled with popovers instead of pita.

  There’s a slight nautical theme to this old warhorse of a cafeteria, what with the stuffed marlins and swordfish that arc across the fieldstone walls. Mackerel almondine and deep-fried snapper throats often show up as specials, and the restaurant’s logo is a silhouette of a lone fisherman pulling a seine net up out of the sea. Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Thanks to its location—across the street from the Jefferson County Truck Growers’ Association terminal—vegetables are the kitchen’s true forté.

  On my most recent summertime visit the steam table boasted a good three dozen vegetables, including three kinds of okra: whole pods blanched in a bath of boiling water; thick slices, battered and fried to a crusty, dark brown; and ropy fingers, luxuriating in a tomato sauce. What’s more, there were vats of buttery creamed corn, fat, pillowy butter beans, earthy black-eyed peas, and bright, squeaky cabbage. One bite of the saccharine-sweet stewed tomatoes is all that it takes to remind me that, botanically, those bright red orbs are indeed fruits.

  233 FINLEY AVENUE / 205-252-5751

  BARBECUE AND THE BAR

  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a watershed in the black struggle for equality. It stipulated that any business engaged in interstate commerce could not discriminate on the basis of race. If a Georgia hotel hosted guests from South Carolina, then it was subject to the law. If an Alabama restaurant bought its produce from Mississippi, it, too, was subject to the law.

  In protest, many Southern restaurants closed. Others turned private, closing their doors to all but members. Known to some as “key clubs,” these private restaurants continued to cater to an exclusively white clientele. Others still dug in their heels and fought for the right to bar blacks as a matter of choice.

  Soon after the act was passed, the McClungs, father and son proprietors of Ollie’s Barbecue in Birmingham, filed suit in federal court seeking to enjoin the Justice Department from enforcing the public accommodations clause of the new law. At the time, service for black patrons was limited to take-out orders, and the elder McClung claimed that if he served blacks in the dining room, he would lose his white customers.

  Early on, a three-judge federal panel ruled in the McClungs’ favor, but Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black—an Alabama boy himself—stayed that ruling and the case was soon heard by the full court. The question addressed by the Supreme Court was this: does the U.S. Constitution give Congress the authority to force a privately owned restaurant to cease discriminating on the basis of race?

  On Monday, December 14, 1964, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in support of the Justice Department. By that Thursday, the Birm
ingham News was reporting that blacks had been served at the restaurant. The McClungs accepted the decision in the following statement released to the press: “As law-abiding Americans we feel we must bow to the edict of the Supreme Court. We are deeply concerned that so many of our nation’s leaders have accepted the edict which gives the federal government control over the life and behavior of every American. This could well prove to be the most important and disastrous decision handed down by this court. We plan no further legal action, but shall continue to pray that somehow the freedom of all our citizens will one day be restored.”

  The elder McClung has since passed away, but until September of 2001 his son continued to run the family business from a new outpost in the Birmingham suburb of Hoover. During a recent conversation he reflected on his family’s role in the landmark case. “It was about race and then again it wasn’t,” he tells me. “On the surface it was about who had access to public accommodations and who didn’t. On a deeper level it was about whether the federal government could intrude upon the day-to-day operations of small businesses. That was the camel’s nose under the tent. Today we have to deal with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and our bathroom is twice as big as it should be. Before ‘64, if somebody in Washington had told folks down here to do something like that, they would have been run out of town on a rail. Before ‘64, if I had been conscience-stricken enough to serve blacks in my restaurant, I would have. I wasn’t, mind you.”

  MILO’S SWEET TEA

  Sure, they stock bottles and cans of sweet tea in the cooler of most every Southern convenience store. If you like tinny-tasting brews spiked with aspartame and artificial lemon flavoring, then go ahead, knock yourself out. As for me, I’ll brew my own, or scour the grocery store refrigerator cases for a pint of Milo’s brand sweet tea.