My Southern Journey (12 page)

Think of the magic that Celestine Dunbar and her family created in their place on Freret Street, before the waters took it—fried seafood platters that came so fast from the fryer that you could scorch your hands and fried chicken that made grown men damn near cry, served with stewed okra, and sweet potato pies, and good cornbread. You could eat all the barbecued chicken and stewed cabbage you could stand on a weekday, give the nice lady at the cash register ten dollars and have enough left to tip like a sultan, ride the streetcar, and buy a grape snowball. The allure of that fried chicken held me so tightly that after the city drowned I traced it to Loyola, where Mrs. Dunbar would make young people the best lunch in the whole academic world—many of whom had no idea from whence the source of that magic came. I have forgotten most of the food I have eaten in this life. I have never forgotten one crumb of hers.

I know cynics will say it is just cooking. Maybe. I mean, how complicated is this food, really?

You simmer some beans, roast some fat hog, boil some shrimp or some blue crabs, concoct some gumbo. You have been taught, over generations, not to fear the saltshaker, or the butter, or the garlic, and you do not sprinkle cayenne so much as you ladle it. You give onions, green pepper, and celery a celestial name—trinity—to raise them above the mundane of simple ingredients, but it is still just a seasoning.

But how do you explain the difference in grabbing lunch elsewhere in this poor ol’ sorry world to sitting down to a plate of creamy red beans and braised ham shank at Betsy’s Pancake House on Canal Street, where the fat from the meat slowly, slowly drips down to season the already perfectly seasoned beans, as much like other beans as a Tiffany necklace is like a string of old beads left in a tree. How do you explain how anything—anything—served on a melamine plate with a side of potato salad can rival meals you have paid $200 to enjoy, and, if you were true to yourself, you would actually rather have the plate of beans? For the rest of my life, I will remember watching my teenage stepson devour a plate of Betsy’s beans and smoked sausage without taking time to talk or apparently even breathe, then announce that he really, really wanted to go to school in New Orleans. He lived the first 16 years of his life on chicken fingers and cheese pizza. But he knew magic when he tasted it.

It is the same outside the city, from corner to corner, pocket to pocket in this state. You can even be hexed in a Holiday Inn.

In Gonzales, just off the interstate and affixed to a chain hotel is a Mike Anderson’s restaurant that prepared a crawfish bisque that is nothing like the chalky, fake mess most places prepare. It is a rich, brown stew, redolent—I have always liked to say redolent—with onions, bell pepper, crawfish tails that do not taste like they came from a hold of an oceangoing freighter, and crawfish heads stuffed with a dressing that is best devoured by fishing it out with a crooked finger. Local people—not just tourists and weary travelers—piled in by the carload on weekend nights, proof that it is not just the visual or sensual appeal of this state that fools us into thinking things taste better here. I mean, it’s in a damn Holiday Inn…

Sometimes, though, the spell this place casts settles around me so completely that I wonder if I can ever leave it and eat the way regular people eat. It happened in the warmth of a corner table at the Upperline in New Orleans, on something as humble as cornbread. But here the sweet cornbread came topped with grilled, spiced shrimp, and shaved purple onions, and something that looked like rich folks’ mayonnaise but I now think might have been some kind of potion. They only gave me two little squares, about six bites in all. I looked at the empty plate with such awful regret, thinking, “If I had just taken smaller bites…”

It happened again at Commander’s Palace, white lights glinting
in the trees on the other side of the glass. A waiter brought out a dish called bread pudding soufflé and poked a hole in the top of it with a spoon so he could ladle a rich, sugary sauce deep into the thing. I forgot, after a spoonful or two, that I was bound up like an asylum inmate in my too-tight sport coat, forgot every warning my doctor ever gave, forgot that when you leave this place there are potholes of doom ready to swallow you whole and daiquiridazed drivers waiting to run you down.

You forget everything here, in this Louisiana, for a spoonful of time. If that is not magic, I by God don’t know what magic is.

SEASONED IN THE SOUTH

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: November 2014

T
he first time I noticed them, Thanksgiving was coming. The knives in my mother’s kitchen were black with age, the blades paper thin, wickedly sharp. They made better steel when steel was dear, in a time before world wars, maybe long before.

But most of the points were broken; the wooden handles—only a Philistine would use a plastic-handled knife—were also worn thin, slick and smooth. When I was a boy, I saw hoe handles that looked like that. You don’t give up on a good hoe handle, not for a generation or so. You drive a nail through the split, twist some electrical tape around it. And one day, when you are gone from this earth, your grandson will finally break it in two and prop the handle, just the handle, in the corner of the shed, like some old man who has finally retired and does not know what else to do but lean.

But I wanted my mother, the best cook in the entire universe, to have new, proper tools for her most important job of the year: fixing Thanksgiving dinner. I gave her some fancy kitchen knives—it must have been almost a decade ago now.

“Go to town with ’em, Ma,” I told her.

I never saw them again. I think maybe she buried them in the backyard, or furtively disposed of them at a yard sale.

There is no good food, she finally explained to me, “cooked on
new stuff.” It is like there is a memory in it, in the iron and the old wood, maybe some magic. You cannot see it or feel it, only taste it.

“I have biscuit pans older than me,” she said.

She will cook Thanksgiving dinner with tools passed down to her from the great cooks of antiquity, not only in pots and pans given to her by my grandmothers, Ava and Velma, but passed along from their mothers, and even deeper back in time. “My cornbread skillet—you know you can’t have good dressing without good cornbread—come from your Granny Bragg, and I know she got it from somebody, probably her mama, who got it…”

My mother’s little house burned down some 20 years ago, around that skillet. She went and got it from the ashes. How do you hurt a skillet, in a fire?

My Aunt Jo won her turkey pan in a raffle at Coleman’s Service Station in Jacksonville, Alabama, about, she believes, 1961. My Uncle John wrote his name on his gas ticket, and the owner of the station, Mr. Coleman, drew it from a jar. It cooked an average of four turkeys a year for about 50 years. It cooks pretty good, my mother allows, for new stuff.

They do not look, these tools, like anything on the food channels. They do not have gleaming copper anywhere on them, except in the rivets on the old knives. They are battered and dented but not rusted. Rust waits on idle metal. These pans, these skillets, are never idle.

“People may not believe it, but you can get iron—that good iron for your body and your blood—from an iron skillet,” my mother said.

If that is not true, it ought to be.

SUMMER SNOW

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: August 2014

I
t was long before Katrina, in those hot, sticky, normal years when people complained how dry things had been. The drought made the already insubstantial dirt weak and powdery, and the piers of the shotgun houses sank into the earth. It is not unusual in New Orleans for an old house to lean, drunkenly. My favorite story was about a house that leaned so much it fell on a bar—just collapsed. Top that.

But it is not what you want to hear when you are looking for a home. You want your house to appear, well, sober. The sweet real estate lady gently reminded me that New Orleans was just special like that. The potholes were eternal. The termites were, too. It was all part of the charm.

Then, perhaps afraid I was wavering, she bought me a snow cone.

Some few days later, I bought a house.

Since then, I have come to believe that the only real antidote to the mean or troubling things of late summer is a paper cone of shaved ice and a squirt of Day-Glo yellow pineapple syrup.

I am not silly enough to believe any crisis can be cooled this way. If you get a tax lien from the State of Georgia or get pulled over for speeding in a school zone in McIntosh, Alabama, a snow cone may not suffice. But if a red wasp nails you on your eyebrow, or you bounce across a New Orleans pothole and your manifold
falls off into the abyss to hit a poor man in China upside the head, then a cherry shaved ice might do it. Or a grape one—you pick. Either way, your mouth turns red or purple and you look like you are 5 years old, and even that makes you happy somehow, so it’s all okay.

I like pineapple because, at worst, you look a little jaundiced.

Most cities have snow cones, or snowballs, or snoballs; for some reason shaved ice and poor spelling and grammar seem entwined. I do not write much about grammar here because one reader actually told me that, since I was now writing for educated, middle-class people, I should try not to sound like I fell off a hay wagon. But that is another story.

In New Orleans, a city I lived in for just a few years but will never exorcise from my soul, there seems to be a steady supply: There is a fine snowball stand on Plum Street, not far from Loyola and Tulane. But the proverbial granddaddy of them all, Hansen’s Sno-Bliz, still leans on Tchoupitoulas Street.

Hansen’s, at the corner of Bordeaux Street, is thought to be the oldest in the country. The story goes that, in 1939, Ernest Hansen saw a man shaving ice from a cart and thought he could do it cleaner and better. He invented a machine that shaved fluffy ice, his wife devised the sweet syrups, and they sold snowballs under a chinaberry tree.

Katrina closed the long-standing location on Tchoupitoulas Street, and the Hansens (both in their nineties at the time) died soon after. But as New Orleans emerged, their granddaughter reopened it with the same methods, the same recipes. People who say change is good are ignorant of a great root beer snow cone.