November 1, 2009
Posted by Ed Levine, July 6, 2008 at 2:00 PM
Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. —Ed Levine
By John T. Edge | Shauna Anderson wants to be your chitlin vendor of choice. "Selling chitlins is all about trust," she tells me when I visit the suburban Cape Cod home she has transformed into a combination restaurant and commissary for chitlin deliveries. "Chitlins are very personal. A good cook knows that clean chitlins are where it all starts," she says of the laborious process of scouring pig intestines, a skill she learned from her grandmother.
Anderson opened her chitlin business in 1995. At the time, she was working as an accountant. Her idea was simple. Cleaned chitlins were hard to come by. And tax season only lasted a few months. She would clean chitlins during her downtime. It was an idea whose time had evidently come, for consumers, wary of the tlow-rent white buckets of chitlins available at traditional groceries, bought every hog intestine that Anderson and her compatriots could clean.
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Posted by Ed Levine, June 22, 2008 at 5:00 PM
Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. —Ed Levine
By John T. Edge | The Sheik on North Main Street, in business since the 1970s, is one of the six fast-food shops in a Jacksonville chain. Like the unaffiliated Desert Rider downtown and Desert Sand on Beach Boulevard, they serve sandwiches—club, ham and cheese, bacon and egg, that sort of thing—tucked into pita bread. By my count, a couple dozen or more sandwich shops around town share a similar bill of fare. Come breakfast, pita cheese toast is a favorite. So is the link, egg, and cheese sack. Not to mention the breakfast in a cup, a sundae-like stack of grits, patty sausage, and eggs. At lunch, the steak-in-a-sack and the cold cut-stuffed camel rider are the main events.
Whiteway Deli
1510 King Street, Jacksonville FL 32204 (map); 904-389-0355
Must-Haves: The desert rider sandiches and the tabouli omelet
The term camel rider might play as a pejorative in most cities, but here in Jacksonville—which has among the largest Arab Middle Eastern communities on the East Coast—it's a marker of influence among immigrants and the descendants of immigrants who, fleeing the economic decline and religious persecution of the Ottoman Empire, began settling in the area in the 1890s.
Many Arab immigrants made their way as peddlers. Some opened groceries, which in time evolved into sandwich shops. Assimilation was the watchword. Mohammed became Mo. Saliba became Sal. Men with surnames like Hazouri built houses of worship like Mount Olive Syrian Presbyterian Church. By 1915 the Syrian American Club was thriving. The Ramallah American Club followed in the 1950s.
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Posted by Ed Levine, May 25, 2008 at 3:00 PM
Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. —Ed Levine
"Back in the kitchen, they shuck a dozen, set them topless over a pecan- and oak-fueled fire, swab each with butter and Parmesan cheese, and cook until the shells shade toward black, the oysters lips curl, and the cheese burbles and spits."
By John T. Edge | If a team of New Urbanists set out to design the perfect waterside joint according to the tenets of Gulf Coast vernacular architecture, they would be hard-pressed to find a more honest template than Gilhooley's, an end-of-the-road kind of place, perched on a tongue of land that thrusts into Galveston Bay. On the drive down from Houston, I pass ragtag RV parks, house trailers on stilts, a store called Junk and Disorderly, a boat christened The Filthy Whore of San Leon.
Nowadays fishermen—some commercial, others recreational—rule this randy spit. But in the early years of the twentieth century, San Leon was sold as a planned community, a "city of gorgeous flowers and beautiful shrubbery," a "playground for untold thousands." One real estate prospectus promised "cool, delightful breezes in summer" and pledged that San Leon would soon rival Coney Island and Atlantic City. Another, and this one was key, heralded "[e]xtra large and deliciously flavored oysters in almost unlimited quantities."
Exceptional of the oysters, most of the pledges were wishful thinking at best, swindles at worst. Oysters still matter in San Leon. The best place to get a bead on how much they matter is Gilhooley's, owned and operated since 1987 by Phil Duke, and always serving local bivalves, harvested by Croatian oysterman Misho Ivic.
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Posted by Ed Levine, May 3, 2008 at 1:00 PM
Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. —Ed Levine
Photograph from Dyobmit on Flickr
By John T. Edge | Southerners have had a long love affair with all things fried. We eat fried chicken by the tub, savor fried oysters drenched in hot sauce, munch fried okra like popcorn, and still relish a mess of fried chitlins now and again. But dill pickles? Fried? Despite the empirical truth of their vinegary and greasy goodness, there are some things that give even a Southerner reason to pause.
And so it was when I first encountered fried dill pickles. I paused—long enough to ask three questions: Why would anyone do such a thing to a perfectly good pickle? Who was the first brave soul to drop a mess of pickles in hot oil? And, when did this great event first take place? Simple enough questions—or so I thought.
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Posted by Ed Levine, April 26, 2008 at 1:00 PM
"Got some boiled / Got some toasted / Got some stewed / Got some roasted." —Tony Wright, peanut vendor
Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. —Ed Levine
By John T. Edge | Street vendors were once ever present on Southern streets. In Canton, Mississippi, Frank Owens walked the courthouse square, selling pecan, chess, and blackberry pies from a cut-down cardboard box. In Lufin, Texas, a tamale vendor known as Hombre worked high school football games. In the French Quarter of New Orleans, Sam De Kemel peddled four-for-a-nickel waffles while wearing a white chef's tocque and playing a bugle.
Reform movements geared toward improvements in public health introduced onerous regulations and wiped out most of them. The fast-food industry finished off the rest. Or so I thought. Of late, I've begun to spot a few retro renegade operators. I've met a man who vends red velvet cakes from the trunk of his car. I've met a woman who sells pimento cheese sandwiches from a basket bolted to the front of her ten-speed. I've met a passel of hot dog vendors. (For a year I, too, owned a weenie wagon.) But no one has honed a shtick like Tony the Peanut Man, peddling sacks of peanuts since 1991 in Charleston, South Carolina.
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