Best Food Writing 2015 (21 page)

For Guerra, the answer is education. He teaches community baking classes and weekend workshops for adults; he worked with Avalon
Organic Gardens to help them develop their bread program; he teaches seed-to-loaf classes at Tucson Village Farm for kids. (“There are always two kids out of 60 who are going to be bakers,” Guerra says. “They come up to me at the end of class and say, ‘I've figured it out.'”)

“I want more people to make a good loaf themselves,” he says. “And I want the business to grow organically. If I can get more people making good bread, maybe they'll come back and work for me someday.”

Guerra has traveled across the world to teach other bakers about his business model—the idea of a community-supported baker is exportable to other communities, he says. The idea of entrepreneurial leadership driving food system change is replicable in other locales.

But for now, when he's at home, Guerra focuses on the craft. For now, he loves the solitude. As his kids become independent teenagers—as they move out of the house and into the world—he'll think about doing the same. For now, “I love that my hands are in every loaf,” he says. “When I'm in here alone, I can really just laser focus on the craft.”

It's all about the bread. And it's not really about the bread. It's about the craft—but really, it's about the community. “I want to be a village baker in all senses of that term,” Guerra says. “People want to belong. I want to do more than just live here—I want to belong. The local food movement makes me belong to a local tribe. Maybe that's why we're so fanatical about it. Taste, sure, but belongingness.”

“I might make a loaf with Hayden's Red Fife,” says Guerra, “and it smells like dirt, like soil, like dust. It smells like Arizona.”

Traditions
Traditions

The Lunch Counter
The Lunch Counter

B
Y
J
OHN
T. E
DGE

From
Garden & Gun

          
Director of the University of Mississippi's Southern Foodways Alliance, John T. Edge is also a columnist for
Garden & Gun
and the
Oxford American
, and teaches at the University of Georgia. In his upcoming book
The Potlikker Papers
, he tells the history of the modern South through food. What could be more iconic than the dime store lunch counter?

Lunch counters, with starburst stainless backslashes, vinyl spinner stools, and long tables of elbow-polished linoleum, are architectural and cultural icons. Everyman spaces, where lawyers and laborers sit side by side to savor burgers and fries and sweaty tumblers of tea, they were conceived as sites of workaday communion.

At their best, lunch counters reflect our egalitarian ideals. The problem is, for much of the South's history, they were not at their best. Until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many restaurants were reserved for whites, while black citizens ate their burgers and fries standing up, or at a cordoned section of the counter, or after walking around to the back door.

I spent grammar school mornings in the post-segregation 1970s on a Waffle House spinner stool, eating breakfasts of over-easy eggs and butter-troweled toast as blacks and whites alike slurped coffee from stoneware mugs, dropped quarters in the juke, and exchanged the affirming pleasantries that make restaurants incubators of community. Watching the grill cook at our local in Macon, Georgia, as he spatula-flipped patty sausages with his left hand and cracked eggs with his right,
my father, who worked on federal civil rights cases in the sixties and seventies, would tell me stories of the struggle to desegregate the region and sketch the promise of gathering all at a common table.

I think of those morning discussions each time I take a seat at a restaurant with a counter. Even as I order a bowl of the cheddar-bound macaroni and cheese that Ashley Christensen serves at Poole's Downtown Diner—a swish modern restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina, that attracts an inclusive crowd—I can't help but fix on that design form and on the role those counters played in our region's tragic past. When I slide onto one of the stools at Poole's serpentine counter and order an old-fashioned, I conjure how such places of pleasure were once sites of contention.

I'm not falling on my sword. I believe that an acknowledgement of our past better prepares me to enjoy the pleasures of this present. In that spirit, I recently took a stool at Brent's Drugs, in Jackson, Mississippi, a model of the lunch counter form, with a boomerang-imprinted aquamarine counter and Tab placards mounted on the back bar. Two bites into a breakfast of fried eggs and stone-ground grits, I flashed to the ugly moment back in May 1963, when an integrated group, led by college students, attempted to gain service at a Woolworth's lunch counter in downtown Jackson, while a mob of protesters threw salt in their eyes, dumped mustard on their heads, and stubbed lit cigarettes on their forearms.

Three miles and fifty-one years separate Woolworth's then and Brent's today. Neither distance seems great. Two generations after the Civil Rights Act legally desegregated America's restaurants, hard appraisals are as necessary to our current understanding of good food as facing down the evils of factory-farmed pigs before ordering that next slaw-capped barbecue sandwich.

The role of lunch counters in the social life of our region began to change in February 1960, when four black freshmen at what is now North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University walked into an F. W. Woolworth Company store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and requested service. Protesters in Southern border cities like Baltimore and Oklahoma City had staged previous sit-ins, demanding equal treatment. But this one struck in the heart of the Deep South, where Jim Crow reigned. The students were quickly refused. A larger group of
students returned the next day. All took their place at the counter and ordered food that never came.

Within two weeks, students in eleven cities had staged sit-ins, mostly at lunch counters in downtown department stores. They were organized and insistent. Students in Nashville, wary of violent reprisal, developed protocols: “Do show yourself friendly on the counter at all times. Do sit straight and always face the counter. Don't strike back, or curse back if attacked. Don't laugh out. Don't hold conversations. Don't block entrances.”

By the end of February, sit-ins spread to thirty cities in eight states. Some white merchants responded with harebrained strategies. Instead of serving an integrated crowd, department store and drugstore managers in Charlotte and Knoxville unscrewed the seats from their lunch counter stools. In the
Carolina Israelite
, North Carolina journalist Harry Golden unpacked the absurdity of the moment. “It is only when the Negro ‘sets' that the fur begins to fly,” he wrote, proposing a tongue-incheek solution, the Golden Vertical Negro Plan, in which segregated sit-down lunch counters would be refashioned for integrated stand-up meals.

When President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, on July 2, 1964, he outlawed discrimination and segregation in places of public accommodation. Many restaurants integrated within the first week. On July 3, Cafe du Monde, the coffee and beignet stand in the French Quarter of New Orleans, served its first black customers without incident. On July 5, the Sun and Sand motel in Jackson, Mississippi, served its first black dining room client, but closed the swimming pool.

Others adopted the principles of massive resistance. The most well-known included Maurice Bessinger of Maurice's Piggie Park in Columbia, South Carolina, who integrated his barbecue restaurant after losing a Supreme Court battle but continued to fight through the 1970s, when he served as president of the National Association for the Preservation of White People and ran a losing campaign for governor while wearing a white suit and riding a white horse.

Some responses were more sophisticated. The owners of the Emporia Diner in Virginia developed a two-menu system. Blacks got menus with higher-priced fried chicken. Down in North Carolina, proprietors of Ayers Log Cabin Pit Cooked Bar-B-Que in the city of Washington
took a cruder tack when they agreed to serve blacks but posted a sign by the register: ANY MONEY FROM NIGGERS GIVEN TO THE KKK.

When my friend Brownie Futrell was a boy, he asked his father, publisher of the local newspaper, what the sign meant. “It means we can't eat here anymore,” came the answer. Futrell, a white son of the South, had to wait a long time before pondering a return. The sign remained in place until 1970, when the U.S. Attorney General filed suit to force its removal. True redemption came later, after Ayers closed, when the Solid Rock Holiness Church, a black congregation, began worshipping in that same space.

Old habits die hard. When I moved from Georgia to Mississippi in 1995, the Crystal Grill in Greenwood still displayed one sign that identified it as the Crystal Club, a name adopted in 1964 that defined the restaurant as a so-called key club, off-limits to blacks. As recently as 2001, I was turned away from a New Orleans restaurant when I arrived with a Korean American friend. “We can't accommodate you,” the owner said as we peered past him into a half-empty dining room, draped in linen and set with gleaming flatware.

Today, the symbolism of the long unbroken table remains important, especially among Southerners schooled from infancy in Last Supper imagery. Sharing a meal signals social equality. Like sex, eating is a deeply intimate act. And no eating space is more intimate than the lunch counter, where diners stoop to sit and eat with people of other sexes and other races.

Many of us now live in gated communities and relax at private clubs. One of the drivers for that privatization was the struggle that began over lunch counters and escalated to include all restaurants. Remnants of the South's post–Civil Rights Act flirt with key clubs can be glimpsed at schools like the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where I work.

Here, many of the white elite opt out of the university cafeteria system to eat at sorority and fraternity houses. Passage to those dining rooms is no longer determined by skin color, as it was in the 1960s. Today, class is as likely to drive campus segregation as race. And, yes, some black students now eat in fraternity and sorority dining rooms. But each time I watch a lunchtime stream of white students file into the sorority houses that line the street alongside my office, I can't help
but think that a new generation is losing out on the same opportunity I squandered back in the 1980s when I took my lunches of country-fried steak and green beans at the all-white Sigma Nu house at the University of Georgia.

All that said, there are frequent and sustaining flashes of contemporary hope. After a long absence, Southerners are returning to communal dining. Large unbroken tables, considered class equalizers during the French Revolution, copied by American hotels in the nineteenth century, and interpreted as lunch counters in the twentieth century, are regaining popularity. At restaurants like Snackbar here in Oxford, the communal tables are where the real gossiping and elbow rubbing and oyster slurping and community building go on.

On that recent trip to Jackson, I noted the same thing at the Beatty Street Grocery, a backstreet café that abuts a scrap metal yard. All of the action was at the counters, where white construction workers in dusty brogans and black government bureaucrats in gleaming cap-toes gathered at the same high-tops to eat three-buck fried bologna sandwiches on toasted white bread. Fifty years after the South fitfully desegregated its restaurants, the welcome table ideal has yet to be realized here. But that ideal may finally be in reach.

Hot Country
Hot Country

B
Y
J
ANE AND
M
ICHAEL
S
TERN

From
Saveur

          
Since the 1970s—way before “eating local” became a catch phrase—Jane and Michael have crisscrossed America, hunting for beloved regional spots to feature in their Road Food books and columns. But are they brave enough to go for the extra-hot version of Nashville's famous hot chicken?

“Make me hurt,” murmurs a slender young woman in business pinstripes and high heels before placing her order at the window inside Bolton's Spicy Chicken & Fish, a tumbledown eatery on Nashville's east side. Twenty minutes later, we watch as she carries a wax paper package to a table. She peels back the wrapper, revealing a massive hunk of fried chicken enveloped in a glistening veil of pepper-red crust beside a slew of dill pickle chips. There is a slice of white bread on top of the chicken, as well as below, to soak up the spicy grease. It looks like a sandwich, but the bones are still in there, and its heft makes picking it up seem absurd. While plastic knives and forks are available, like everyone else here, she doesn't use them. This is chicken to tear apart with your fingers, to pick at, to gnaw every bit of meat off of every single bone. This is Nashville hot chicken.

With each bite, beads of perspiration build on the woman's brow. She undoes the top buttons of her blouse, removes her earrings from her earlobes and drops them on the table; she begins to sniffle and breathe heavily, to fan herself and whisper, “Mercy!” several times, as
if in a euphoric trance. Finally, when she wobbles to her feet to throw away the bones, she sighs, “I'll be okay,” to no one in particular and steps out into the sunny Music City streets.

Bolton's is one of a handful of Nashville restaurants specializing in hot chicken, as well as hot fish. While the fish—usually fried whiting splashed with hot sauce and served as a sandwich—has comparables in other cities with thriving soul food scenes, hot chicken is in a class by itself.

Each hot chicken joint has its own carefully guarded recipe, but the basic idea is to marinate chicken in a brine of buttermilk infused with cayenne, paprika, garlic powder, and other spices. Then it is dredged in more spice and double-fried. Finally, when the chicken is fresh from the hot oil, it is slathered in a fiery buttery paste that melds with the crust, creating a crunchy, pepper-charged coat, resulting in an infernal delight. Yet, stunning as hot chicken is, heat alone is not what hooks devotees. Aqui Simpson, who opened a hot chicken restaurant in 2007 called 400 Degrees, is convinced it's as much about flavor as ferocity. Good hot chicken should be spicy, yes, but that heat should be tempered by sweetness, juiciness, and an umami richness.

It is said that hot chicken was created as a form of revenge in the 1930s to purposely hurt the first person ever to eat it. Thornton Prince, the proprietor of a fried chicken restaurant, had a lady friend so irritated by his carousing that early one morning, upon his return from who-knows-where, she served him a plate of chicken with enough pepper punch to drop his sorry ass. But the booby-trapped bird backfired: Mr. Prince liked it. He liked it so much that he put it on his menu. Today, Prince's Hot Chicken Shack, now operated by Thornton's great-niece André Prince Jeffries, is the Olympus of Nashville's hot chicken universe. Proprietors of all the other hot chicken places in town learned to love it here first. It was Prince's that first tucked the ferocious bird between slices of bread, and Prince's that scattered pickle chips around it. The seemingly unassuming strip mall joint is also responsible for establishing the near-ubiquitous heat scale of mild, medium, hot, and extra-hot. Prince's medium is as incendiary as a four-alarm Texas chili. And the hot version tests our pain-pleasure tolerance so emphatically that we have yet to find the will to try extra-hot.

Its intensity explains why hot chicken is one preparation in which an
otherwise bland breast is like a blank canvas to paint with spice. That's not to say that versions made with dark meat aren't a thing of extraordinary pleasure. At Hot Stuff Spicy Chicken & Fish, a spiffy-clean storefront southeast of the city, we poke the tines of a fork through the brittle red crust on a thigh and watch as juices come pouring out. This piece is crazy moist, sopping the bland supermarket bread with a slurry of spices and chicken fat, transforming it into a starchy, savory pudding that almost no one leaves behind.

Hot Stuff's chicken comes in degrees of heat that go from Lil Spice and Lemon Pepper to X-, XX-, and XXX-hot. Ordinary hot (no X) clears our sinuses and takes our breath away. While a manager suggests sweet fruit tea as a salve, it has little effect on a ravaged tongue. What does work, we find, is cake. Hot Stuff's counter is arrayed with slices of layer cake made by local baker Spencer Middlebrooks. And the cooling effect of his tall, silky yellow cake with caramel-tinged mocha frosting is just what our blazing taste buds need.

Though the city's hot chicken joints are informal, this is by no means fast food. For good hot chicken, you wait. Each order is fried to order because a heat lamp would risk a softened crust on a dish in which frangibility is fundamental. Regulars know to phone in their order 20 minutes before they arrive. On the small tarmac around Pepperfire Hot Chicken, which has no indoor dining, cars crowd willy-nilly as their drivers read newspapers, talk on cellphones, or doze while listening for their names to be called on the loudspeaker.

Isaac Beard opened Pepperfire in the fall of 2010 and is one of the few white men among Nashville's hot chicken purveyors. Beard, a Nashville native, is convinced that this specialty of the city's African-American communities can captivate the country just as its profile in his hometown has grown into a source of citywide pride and the inspiration for an annual hot chicken festival every Independence Day. He may be right. Recently, hot chicken joints have started popping up as far away from Nashville as Brooklyn's Peaches Hot House and Cackalack's Hot Chicken Shack in Portland, Oregon.

Hot chicken does have a way of inspiring devotion that verges on addiction. A woman we met in line at Prince's gleefully told us she eats extra-hot five days a week (the restaurant is closed Sunday and Monday). I can't help it, she said. “I just need it.”

Nashville Hot Chicken
Nashville Hot Chicken

        
The secret to Nashville's famous hot chicken is in the layering: The bird is marinated in a spicy buttermilk brine, then dredged with more flour and spice, double-fried, and finally slathered with a fiery butter paste to create a crunchy, peppery coating. One bite into its burnished orange crust reveals first a tangy crunch, and then a deeper, complex spice that leaves a lingering fire behind. Adjust the heat by adding as much—or as little—cayenne as you like.

Serves 2–4

            
3 cups buttermilk

            
¾ cup cayenne

            
9 tablespoons granulated garlic

            
9 tablespoons paprika

            
6 tablespoons onion powder

            
3 tablespoons sugar

            
1 (2½–3 pounds) chicken, cut into 8 pieces, or 3 pounds chicken wings

            
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

            
Canola oil, for frying

            
2 cups self-rising flour

            
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted

            
Sliced white sandwich bread and dill pickle chips, for serving

            
1. Combine buttermilk, ¼ cup cayenne, 3 tablespoons each granulated garlic and paprika, 2 tablespoons onion powder, and 1 tablespoon sugar in a bowl; whisk until smooth. Add chicken and toss to coat; cover and chill at least 4 hours or up to overnight.

            
2. The next day, drain chicken, rinse, and pat dry; season with salt and pepper. Heat 2 inches oil in a 6-quart saucepan until a deep-fry thermometer reads 300°F. Stir remaining cayenne, granulated garlic, paprika, onion powder, and sugar in a bowl; transfer half to another bowl and whisk in flour. Working in batches, dredge chicken in flour mixture; fry, flipping once, until golden and almost cooked through, 6–7 minutes, or until an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thickest part of a thigh reads 150°. Transfer chicken to paper towels.

            
3. Increase oil temperature to 350°. Stir remaining cayenne mixture and melted butter in a bowl; set paste aside. Dredge chicken once more in flour mixture and fry until cooked through, 2–3 minutes more; drain briefly on paper towels and brush with reserved paste. Serve with bread and pickles.