A history of Southern fare, and its current offbeat fusion

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NEW YORK (Reuters) -- All you Yankees who think the South is devoid of unique ethnic cuisine obviously have never sampled the Dixie delights of fried dill pickles, barbecue spaghetti or pork cracklins rendered in a Chinese wok.

"People think of the South as a monolithic place of black and white and it just isn't the case," John Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, said.

Edge's new book "Southern Belly, the Ultimate Food Lover's Companion to the South" is a study of more than 200 eateries, their often curious creations and the history of the culture in which they were generated.

"It's about quirky Southern eating but it also addresses bigger issues like race," Edge said. "In some ways it's a sneaky book. It's not all sweetness and light ... there's a bit of sourness in those fried green tomatoes."

In fact the book's release comes as one of its subjects, Maurice Bessinger, famous for his thick yellow mustardy South Carolina barbecue sauce and his chain of Maurice's Piggy Park restaurants, has come under attack for his racial views.

Last month at least six major retailers including Kroger and Wal-Mart ordered Bessinger's popular sauce and barbecue pork off their shelves following reports he was distributing religious tracts combining his love for the Confederacy, which fought to preserve slavery, with a view that slavery is not inherently evil because it is mentioned in the Bible.

Bessinger has also been in the news for replacing the American flag at his company headquarters with the Confederate flag, a racist symbol in the eyes of many Americans.

While the book discusses racism and how some restauranteurs bitterly fought desegregation, it also gives a lighthearted social history of Southern food and how its adaptation of ethnic cuisines has produced some offbeat fusion cooking.

Take, for example, that kosher delicatessen staple, the dill pickle. Northerners may be barrelled over to find that a dill pickle in the South is not just a popular partner to pastrami on rye. A fried dill pickle can even be a substitute for not-so-kosher catfish.

Why would anyone do such a thing to a perfectly good pickle? "We Southerners will fry anything we can get our hands on," Edge replied.

At least two different restaurants claim to have come up with the idea of fried dill pickles in the 1960s, he says.

"According to owners of the Hollywood Cafe in Robinsonville, Mississippi, fried dill pickles made their debut in 1969 when a desperate cook, confronted by a dining room full of patrons, a vat of bubbling oil and a scarcity of catfish, reached for an industrial-sized jar of dill pickle chips.

"The story goes that he rolled them in the batter intended for the catfish, served them to a crowd of incredulous, but famished, diners and then sat back to savor the praise."

But Bob Austin of Atkins, Arkansas, also claims to have invented the fried dill pickle, Edge writes. Austin said he came up with the idea in 1960 when he was operating the Duchess Drive In across the street from a pickle plant in Atkins.

"Staring out the window at that pickle plant all day, your mind gets to wandering. So I sliced some pickles and fixed up a batter. My batter beats all. And I'm not telling anybody what's in it," Edge quotes Austin as saying.

Although the Duchess is now closed and Austin has retired, pickles made with his recipe are still available -- but only during Picklefest, Atkins's annual spring celebration.

In neighboring Tennessee, Italian cuisine has stirred up an interesting offshoot known as barbecue spaghetti. The side dish, found in about 20 Memphis restaurants, is basically "well-cooked noodles" combined with barbecue sauce and some requisite "unknowable ingredients."

The roots of barbecue spaghetti go back to a railroad cook who used his noodle to create the concoction while travelling in the 1930s and '40s. The cook taught Frank Vernon, owner of the Bar-B-Que Shop in Memphis, how to make the dish. Vernon would not tell Edge the secret ingredients in the sauce but he did reveal that the oil from the meat was an important factor.

"One look at a plate of his barbecue spaghetti and you will have no doubt that oil is a primary ingredient. Indeed the plate glistens with it," Edge writes. "As for the noodles, in the Italian tradition, noodles are cooked until they are al dente -- meaning 'to the tooth.' These noodles, on the other hand, are more to the gum -- they nearly melt in your mouth."

One of the book's best examples of Southern fusion cooking is the story of Kim Wong, a "sixtysomething-year-old" native of Quonton province in China who followed his father to America in 1949 and settled in the Mississippi Delta.

In the 1960s, Wong moved his family to Clarksdale where he operated a restaurant and grocery store and supplemented his income by teaching karate lessons to local kids at night. The restaurant did well selling a combination of Southern-fried chicken and Quonton-style wok-fried sweet and sour pork, but the Wong family really struck oil in 1985 when it developed its own style of pork rinds sold by the bag.

For years, Wong's wife Jean, whom he met in Hong Kong, rendered lard from pork to use in Southern-style biscuits that the restaurant served for breakfast, but she tossed away the cracklins (rinds) that settled to the bottom of the wok.

This was at a time when hogs were killed only in the winter months and fresh cracklins were available only when a hog was slaughtered. So the Wongs started putting their cracklins in Ziplock bags and selling them by the cash register.

"People loved ours because they were available year-round and they cooked up crisper, too. Woks make the difference," Wong says in the book.

The cracklins were so popular that the Wongs closed the restaurant to make more warehouse space for the business. "They claim Bill Clinton buys them by the sackful," Edge said.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Southern Foodways Alliance

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