My Southern Journey Read online

  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

  The 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

  The 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.

  I remember the moment. I believe I was sitting in a cool, dark place in the French Quarter, one of those places that Katrina would drown and remove, forever, from all but fond memory. It was fall, which means it was only eighty-nine in the shade, and as I recall I was mildly drunk on brown whiskey, though it could have been some sickly sweet rum drink and I am just embarrassed to say.

  I went in for some crawfish bisque, not the creamy kind but a gumbo-like concoction that was redolent with onions, peppers, and little bitty crawfish heads stuffed with, well, stuffing. It was a reason to live.

  I do not know why I ordered the oysters—maybe because I saw the words half dozen and thought this might be my chance to try them again and not be so wasteful. I did not try to slurp them from the shell, but carefully prepared them in the fashion I was told my grandfather ate them, when he drifted down to the Florida Gulf coast in the 1950s, to roof houses, fish, sleep on the sand, and eat things he could not find in the foothills of the Appalachians.

  I took a saltine, plopped down an oyster, forked on some cocktail sauce, daubed on a fingernail-size spot of horseradish, squeezed a lemon over the whole mess, and popped it in my mouth.

  Like I said, it had to be magic. One minute you hate, the next you love. But it was good.

  I know that oyster purists will say I did not truly taste the oyster, that I am a commoner, but they can kiss my #*!.

  The cocktail sauce and horseradish did not mask the oyster, only provided a little misdirection, a little
sleight of hand, and I chewed and liked it. They say you can taste the sea in it, and I think that is true. I even ate the last one naked, with just a little lemon, and it was pretty fine. It had to be New Orleans, I believed. In New Orleans, you walk on roads flecked with crushed oyster shell, and there is a whole culture of oysters, a mystique. Oyster recipes and oyster lore naturally pooled there, some of them indigenous, some trickling down from other places.

  “One time my mother bit down on one and there was a pearl in it,” says Jim Davis, director of the Center for the Book at the State Library of Louisiana. “My daddy took it and made her a ring out of it. We don’t know if the fact that it was cooked made it any less valuable.”

  In New Orleans, oysters are almost an art form. You eat them covered in spinach and garlic and bacon and cheese, eat them roasted, baked, even grilled over an open flame in their shells.

  And I came to like them all. At Upperline, one of the great restaurants of this world, I ate them in oyster stew, in heavy cream, but you could have dropped a coaster or a matchbox in there instead and it probably still would have tasted pretty good.

  In a half-dozen kitchens around town, I had them in oyster dressing, which I consumed in such quantities I wanted to die, and in gumbo so good you would pray, quietly, that the cook would say, “Babe, you want me to put this in some Tupperware, so you can take some home?”

  And of course, all over town, I ate them in po’boys and oyster loaves, dripping with hot sauce and tartar sauce, with cold root beer on the side. I was not just eating food, I was consuming culture, and as I came to love the city, I came to love its oysters.

  But it was not just the place, as it turned out. Once my resistance was broken, I ate them in Florida, ate them on the Alabama coast, and loved them, too. Maybe there is no magic to it at all. Maybe—as my mama always told me—as I get older I come to appreciate more of the world around me. Someday, she told me, I will even like butter beans.

  Recently, I got to eat dinner with one of the great writers of our time at one of the great restaurants of our time, Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham. Pat Conroy ate about 10 oysters, with nothing but a smile.

  I ate four, four of the best oysters I’ve ever had, and prepared one more—in the way my grandfather ate them—for my 15-year-old stepson, Jake.

  He gasped and choked only slightly, and fought it down.

  “I know, son,” I said, and gave him a pat.

  “It will,” I said, “get better.”

  BAD SLAW

  I almost lost my mind once, over coleslaw.

  I don’t mean I got miffed, or a little bit upset, or even perturbed.

  I mean, I got spitting, deranged, hollering-at-the-furniture, kicking-a-fencepost mad. The kind of mad that makes people reach for their children, and go, “Shhhhhhhhhhhh, Betty Lou. Just keep walkin’ and don’t make eye contact with the big crazy man.”

  Coleslaw is one of the easiest foods to prepare, at least in regard to steps in the preparation. It is slightly labor intensive, as in the cutting of it, but there is really only one hard and fast rule.

  Don’t let it go bad.

  When it does, do not put it under the noses of good people.

  They might, in good faith, take a bite.

  And this, I feel, should be a crime.

  What if I really had gone crazy, from wilted cabbage and tainted mayonnaise?

  I don’t think we, as a Southern society, should have to live with this abomination.

  Somebody should have to pay.

  It was a year or so back, when I had enough. I had a fried chicken craving going pretty strong. I had not had any good chicken in a while; I hadn’t even had any bad chicken.

  I am not a chicken snob. I believe Gus’s fried chicken, from the one on Front Street in Memphis, is the best chicken in the known world. Snobs, the ones who think fried chicken should be honey-drizzled or beheaded when it’s not looking, will tell you about this great little place in Soho… We will ignore them because they are … well, we will ignore them because I say so.

  Anyway, I needed some chicken, and Gus’s was nowhere close, and no one—at least no one who was speaking to me in my rough zip code—was going to fry me any, so that meant fast food or supermarket delis. I am enough of a snob to say this is not often a good idea, but I was hungry.

  I do not usually do deli-fried chicken because of the fatal flaw in the supermarket fried chicken apparatus. The chicken is often fine, though I am still fairly certain that several hours under a heat lamp has never done fried chicken any good.

  But that’s not the big flaw with supermarket chicken. The flaw is that, while the chicken (though perhaps old as Abraham) might taste fine, the condiments will not. Specifically, the coleslaw will not taste like anything approximating food.

  The coleslaw in the deli counter even looks like something that does not approximate food. The slaw, even in your high-end supermarkets, appears to have suffered greatly from time. I don’t know what happens to slaw in a deli case but it ain’t nothin’ good. It ranges from mightily shriveled to Spanish moss to, “Oh, Sweet Lord.” People there try to fool us by making slaw out of broccoli, or apples, or other unnatural things, but there is just something in the chemical properties of cabbage that does not respond to being encased in a counter next to some dessicated teriyaki chicken wings. But I digress.

  Some do not even have slaw prepared in-house. The option is the mass-produced, trucked-in slaw that you can buy in a vacuum-sealed plastic tub. This is not food, in any culture. Cabbage, unless pickled, does not respond to the passing of weeks. Neither, ugh, does mayonnaise. The rule—if I was king I would make it an edict—for coleslaw should be that it should never be anywhere near a truck. I will not eat Gulf shrimp in St. Paul. Coleslaw should not take to the highway.

  But, they sell it. They sell it because people eat it.

  God help us, they do.

  So, I go see the Colonel, or drive through at Popeye’s, or another fast-food option.

  The Colonel is not with us anymore, and it’s probably a good thing he left this world before he even suspected that, someday, his beloved chicken restaurants—I mean, the man used to drive around to his restaurants to taste-test the gravy—would someday share a building with fast-food burritos.

  I simply cannot abide this. I do not brag about awards that much, not now that I am old and no one who knows me even cares, but I am the winner of the coveted James Beard Award, which makes me a blue ribbon-wearing, bona fide expert on the preparation of food.

  That is, of course, a big, fat, hairy lie. But let’s at least assume that, as the son of one of the finest cooks who has ever lived, and a man who has dined all over the world, I know the difference between a rice cake and a plate of sausage gravy. And this son of the true South cannot get his mind around the fact that the teenagers behind the glass of the drive-through are forming tacos in the same assembly line that should be devoted, heart, mind, and soul, to my three-piece dinner.

  But it’s still pretty good chicken, as is the chicken offered by most of the others. (Though, Popeye’s kind of bothers me, too. I mean, it’s called Popeye’s. Why is there no Popeye? I loved Popeye. But there is not one cardboard cutout or action figure or … not even a Wimpy. I do not miss Olive Oyl. She always kind of bothered me.)

  Anyway, these chains, along with a handful of others, are the logical alternative to the troubling slaw that accompanies the otherwise fine deli chicken. And so I am a fairly regular customer of their drive-through windows.

  As I was that day I had that awful fried chicken jones. I went through a drive-through, got me a whole bucket and the appropriate condiments, including slaw. Slaw is perfect with chicken. It cools and balances the meal. It is said to be healthy, before you whip in a quart of mayonnaise.

  I went home, turned on the Atlanta Braves to see if they have, in the past five years or so, found a way to manufacture a run, and sat down for the perfect evening, just me, my chicken, and four hours of stranded runn
ers. I mean, my grandma could lay down a bunt.

  The first bite of chicken was heavenly.

  The coleslaw never made it to my lips. It had gone bad. It had probably gone bad two days before. I slam-dunked it in the garbage. It did not matter that everything else was fine. I had counted on that coleslaw. I needed that coleslaw.

  I balled up my fists. I might have cursed. Yes, I did. I did curse.

  I am not one of those people who will return to the drive-through and rant. I don’t call. What good does it do?

  So, I just slumped on the couch, morose.

  The Braves, their slump broken, were gleefully circling the bases.

  Does it have to be this way?

  It would be one thing if it were just fast food, where quality control often consists of, well, nothing. But I have stared suspiciously at coleslaw in even high-end places.

  One of my favorite restaurants, in Baton Rouge, gave me coleslaw that, I believe, was held over from … well, dinners past. And I had just written about how good it was.

  I think, among the myriad signs of the decline of life as we know it, this is, sorta, one.

  It’s as if chefs and cooks and drive-through mavens have decided it is not real food, that it is not perishable at all, like a packet of ketchup or a shaker of salt.

  We must stop this. We must rise up, as a people, and say no to rancid coleslaw, must stand strong in the rushing tide of apathy that threatens not just our quality of life, but life itself.

  For I fear that bad coleslaw can actually kill you.

  The next time you are served a half-pint of tainted slaw, do not just pick at it, regretfully and in silence. You know you have done this. You know.

  No, you must raise the offensive article high above your head and shout, “Nay!”

  Or go ask for a fresh one.