My Southern Journey (9 page)

TRAVELING FOOD

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: May 2011

I
t was always dusk and, it seems, always summer. My aunts would steer their Chevelles and Monte Carlos onto the gravel at Pee Wee Johnson’s joint. Change purses clutched in their fists, they would step into line with mill workers, pulp-wooders, and downy-faced soldiers destined for Vietnam. That takeout window in Jacksonville, Alabama, united us all with a common desire: the perfect footlong. These came skinny, dressed with yellow mustard, thin, hot chili, and Spanish onions, the whole mess weeping into waxed paper. Their aroma filled the car and the world beyond, and every turn of the tires tortured us until we finally found a picnic table or shade tree somewhere down Alabama 21. But often we just ate on the go, wiping chili off vinyl, listening to the Happy Goodman Family on the radio, and feeling, somehow, a little more free.

It was not fast food but traveling food, a paper-sack delicacy we grabbed before an all-night gospel singing in Sylacauga, or on the way to buy a truck in Cedartown. It can be found on gas station countertops and off forlorn interstate exits, advertised on badly wired marquee lights that blink FRIED CHICK N, or on plywood that screams BOU-DIN!!! It might be pickled eggs at a fish camp on Lake Okeechobee, Saran-wrapped fried pies at a truck stop outside Laurel, Mississippi, or good wings and crisp potato wedges at a Shell Station on Highway 78 near Winfield, Alabama. In a wasteland
of tepid tomatoes and mummified chicken fingers, there still exist across the South some fine dishes, served on paper plates, prepared by people who have solved the great mystery of simple food.

Drake’s Citgo on Highway 411 in Leesburg, Alabama, served a mouthwatering pork cutlet on hot biscuit, or about any other part of a pig that can be made to lie flat. Drake’s is now Coosa Corner, but to my big brother, Sam, it will always be Drake’s. “The ol’ boy who owned it had a dog that, if you threw a rock in the river, would dive down and get that rock,” Sam said. “That
exact
rock.”

Stories like that season a place. Most food joints leave you with, at best, a commemorative cup. Louisiana may be the wonderland of traveling food. Years ago, after being dumped by a Cajun, I drove through that wet country to eat my way free of a broken heart. I ate rice dressing on Bayou Teche, and boudin at every other gas station. I ignored signs for alligator, because it tastes like an unholy union between a chicken and a Gila monster, and my heart never has been broke that bad.

Some foods need to travel with you, taste better if they do. At Ted Peter’s Famous Smoked Fish in St. Petersburg, you can eat a plate of mullet, potato salad, and coleslaw at the restaurant, or out a few miles away, propped against a hump of sand, looking out at the Gulf. Mullet are like bad whiskey, cheap and strong, but not at sunset, not here.

It is the same with a Hicks’ tamale, in Clarksdale, Mississippi. It tastes fine indoors. But when you peel it at the edge of an endless field, on the hood of your car, there is just the pudding-like texture and smooth, hot, garlicky taste, because there is nothing else out here, as far as you can see, but lonesome.

There used to be so many more such places, before the chains. But there are still good fries at T-Ray’s in Fernandina Beach (they must fry them twice to get them that crisp and greasy) and drive-by barbecue at 1,001 places in North Carolina. In my hometown, there are still perfect, dripping hamburgers, at the Rocket and Cecil’s, and at Tweeners, owned by Pee Wee Johnson’s girls.

I guess that is why I don’t like to fly. There is no good food, only the rush and wait, the airplane seats fit for gymnasts. But in the Memphis airport, I found an antidote: Interstate Barbecue’s thick-cut, smoked bologna sandwich, topped with coleslaw. I ate it at 30,000 feet. I expected to see Pee Wee’s angel, flying alongside.

FULLY DRESSED

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: November 2013

T
he word “stuffing” had a lot of connotations when I was a boy. None of them had anything to do with food.

Sofas had stuffing. But then again, I rarely heard the word “sofa.” We sat on “couches.” The first time I heard the word “sofa” I thought it was “Sofia,” and I never did figure out why anyone had to sit on the poor woman. Once, I heard someone say they had to restuff their Sofia. This haunts me still.

I digress. Teddy bears had stuffing for insides. Baseballs had it. We were urged to “knock the stuffing out of it.” If you caught a big fish, or shot a deer, or even a big gobbler, you could have them “stuffed and mounted.” I was mightily confused.

Thanksgiving turkeys, however, did not have stuffing, though sometimes my Aunt Jo did shove a whole stick of margarine in there. Stuffing, I would be educated, was another word for dressing. And our dressing, as God intended, was cooked separately, in a shallow baking dish or pan.

It was not something the great cooks in my family were willing to debate.

“Stick your hand up the back end of a raw turkey?” said my Aunt Gracie Juanita, shaking her head violently from side to side. “That is not natural.”

“Ain’t even human,” my mother said.

But the word stuffing was everywhere, come November. I heard it on the television, usually accompanied by images of a massive turkey with a golden cascade of breadcrumbs tumbling from its insides. Was I missing out? Why didn’t we have stuffing if they had stuffing on
Father Knows Best?

“You ain’t missing nothin’,” my mother told me.

I would learn that, like so many things I struggled to understand, it was a Southern thing, like why a faucet inside the house was a faucet but outside the house it became a hydrant. And Southerners, especially mine, did not tolerate in-the-bird dressing.

I would learn it stemmed from a generational fear of undercooked poultry. How could the turkey cook all the way through, my people reasoned, if the heat could not swirl around inside the bird? Onions, lemons, butter, and other seasoning were allowed, but a thick gob of breadcrumbs was salmonella waiting to happen. But even if bacteria were not an issue, the cooks in my family would have shunned stuffing for one simple reason: taste.

Our dressing started with an iron skillet of cornbread, mixed with onion, sage, and the fatty, golden nectar from boiled turkey or chicken, usually the pieces that would otherwise be thrown away. It was baked until a golden crust formed on the top, leaving the inside firm but creamy. Too dry and it set up like cake. Too wet and it was a watery mess. It had to be perfect, and usually was.

Years ago, I stood in a supermarket, staring at a “stuffing mix” of spices and prepackaged breadcrumbs—tiny, hard little cubes. Mama, I thought, was right again. But when I mentioned that we were having turkey and dressing at my house, my Yankee friends looked confused. You mean, they asked, the stuff you put on salads?

It is a miracle we fought only one war.

YOUR FIRST OYSTER

Garden & Gun
, February/March 2010

T
he first one I ate tasted like river mud.

It was not that earthy, pungent, essence
du monde
that well-traveled people like to go on about over their
quenelles aux huîtres.
It tasted like wet dirt, only slicker, fishier, like what a tadpole would taste like if you sucked it right out of the ditch, or a wet hoofprint.

Of course, I was not a gourmand then. I was a sun-scorched boy in a dockside restaurant in Panama City, intoxicated by the aroma of coconut butter suntan lotion and piña colada lip balm, and flabbergasted by ten thousand teenage Baptists in tiny two-piece bathing suits. I wanted to eat oysters because it seemed like a thing a man of the world would do in 1971, like being a spy against the Communists, or owning an MGB. But that taste, and that horrible consistency—somewhere among raw chicken liver, Jell-O, beef tripe, and Dippity-do—haunted me for years.

“What does one look like?” one of my brothers asked me at the time.

“Well,” I said, “it’s gray-lookin’.”

“What does it taste like?” he asked.

“Well,” I said, “it’s…it’s…” but it was just beyond me then.

How could people eat something I could not even say?

Maybe, I remember thinking, they might not be so damn awful
if they were cooked. I mean, I suspect that a pork chop would be pretty grim if you had to eat it while the hog was still kicking. But later, in high school, one of my mean girl cousins gave me a fried one from her seafood platter, and even though it was entombed in batter and well and truly dead, it still tasted like tadpole, but crunchier this time.

I spit that one out. At least, back then, I did not have to pretend to like them, to fit in. That came later, when I became a writer.

There are just some things that male writers, of a certain ilk, feel they have to do. I call it the Curse of Hemingway. We have to like to fish. We have to be proficient in blowing birds from the sky with shotguns. And we have to love oysters. We have to sit around a table in some sun-blasted shack on some desolate, mosquito-infested cay and slurp ’em right out of the shell. Or they take our vowels away.

I love to fish. I am not good at it, but I love it. In my youth, I slaughtered some birds, though it seemed like a lot of firepower to get a few mouthfuls of meat—and I still think quail hunting is just an excuse for biscuits and gravy. Then my wife put a dozen bird feeders in our backyard, cooed over finches, hummingbirds, and cardinals, and made me deeply ashamed.

But, even as I got a more sophisticated palate, I could only tolerate oysters. Oh, I put up a good front. Any real man can eat one oyster, two, even three. He just bellies up to it, chews, and gulps. There were worse things. Snails, I guess. Sushi. Turkey bacon.

But I could not make myself like them in my first forty years. I thought moving to Florida, twice, would change that, would at least break down my resistance. But that, too, had no real impact on my revulsion, and the young, oyster-hating man I was vanished into old age.

The change, when it did come, almost makes me believe in magic. And like most magic, here in my South, it happened in New Orleans.