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Travel Report: Mississippi

Blues legend Eddie Shaw hits all the right notes at the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale.
May 2010

Published in :: On the Town

Savoring the Delta, One Dish at a Time

From fatback-seasoned turnip greens and fried okra to Mississippi hot tamales, the area around Tunica is brimming with distinctive dishes you don’t want to miss.

BY SUSAN PUCKETT
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SHANE LUITJENS


SOUTHERN COMFORTS
Turnip greens made by long-time cook Dorothey Irons at the Blue & White
Restaurant; fried okra and dipping sauce at Blue Levee

The Hollywood Cafe stands amid fields of cotton and soybean, a few miles from the glittery lights of the casino-hotel complexes in Tunica. Built of brick, with a tin awning and raised cement porch, it still looks more like the plantation commissary it was a century ago than the spirited restaurant it is today. Marc Cohn immortalized The Hollywood (and the gospel singer named Muriel who played the piano there) in his 1991 hit, “Walking in Memphis.” Mississippi novelist John Grisham, once a frequent customer, also mentioned it several times in A Time To Kill.

But, as far as locals are concerned, something else has kept it in the spotlight for 41 years: fried dill pickles. The way co-owner Mike Young tells it, The Hollywood Cafe’s signature dish came about on a whim not long after it first opened as a honky-tonk. Late one night, a customer wanted something to eat, but, “The kitchen had run out of everything except for a bunch of dill pickles,” Young says.

A clever cook dunked the slices into some batter and dropped them into hot oil. Crispy and spicy on the outside, with a burst of tangy juice when you take a bite, fried dill pickles are now a standard dish in restaurants throughout the Delta. Young estimates that The Hollywood fried 134,000 pickle slices last year.

These addictive nuggets—usually served with ranch dressing for dipping—are just one of the many staples of the distinctive, bed sheet-flat landscape known as the Delta. A wildly fertile floodplain formed by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, it begins in Memphis, TN, and extends 250 miles south to Vicksburg, MS.

And from this land come people who are famous for making both art and food out of whatever material or circumstances they’ve got to work with. Sharecroppers turned hard luck into blues lyrics. Jim Henson found inspiration for his Muppets characters along the riverbanks in his childhood hometown of Leland, MS.

And perhaps no dish expresses this local torrent of creativity better than the hot tamale.


The Hollywood Cafe
co-owner Mike YoungMexican migrants who came over from Texas to pick cotton are said to have introduced tamales to black field hands around 1900. Wrapped in corn husks or parchment, these cornmeal cylinders filled with spicy ground beef or pork are served all over the Delta, in steakhouses, soul food restaurants, roadside stands, mom-and-pop groceries and even fine-dining establishments. Some are made with fine masa harina (or corn flour) like traditional Mexican tamales, while others are made with cornmeal. “The cornmeal gives them their characteristic gritty texture,” says Amy Evans Streeter, an oral historian for the Southern Foodways Alliance who has spent years documenting the dish on the interactive Mississippi Delta Hot Tamale Trail website (www.tamaletrail.com). She also points out that Delta tamales are not steamed, but simmered, and the resulting “juice” is sometimes served with them. Spices vary from one vendor to the next, but most have undertones of cumin, garlic and cayenne. At Hick’s World Famous Hot Tamales & More in Clarksdale, Eugene Hicks makes his with spicy ground beef and serves them with Saltines.

Just as Mississippi tamales began as a working-class food on plantations, so, too, did okra, a relative of the cotton plant. Slaves brought the first tough, fuzzy, green pods to the American South from Africa, and they quickly took root in the Delta diet, whether boiled, fried, stewed or pickled in the pod. They’re such a fixture on Delta tables that the unofficial mascot of Delta State University is the “Fighting Okra.”

Okra is a mainstay at the Blue Levee, located behind some old gas pumps where state highways 1 and 8 meet. “We serve it in all shapes and forms,” says Chef/ Owner John Lewis. “We put it in gumbo and succotash. We also boil it. That’s not my favorite way to eat it, but some of the farmers who come in for lunch like it.”

The younger crowd he caters to at night is much more inclined to scarf down platters of fried okra, which he serves with housemade remoulade sauce. The demand in the Delta is so high for fried okra that many restaurants have started buying it pre-breaded and frozen. Lewis uses frozen okra, but he hand-breads it each day in cornmeal batter—the same recipe he uses for fried catfish, yet another Delta staple.


Paneed catfish from The Crown Restaurant

Catfish have always been plentiful in Delta waters, and when the market for cotton—long the area’s leading cash crop—shrank, some farmers converted the clay-rich soil into environmentally controlled catfish ponds. According to Roger Barlow, president of the Jackson, MS-based Catfish Institute, about two-thirds of all US farm-raised catfish come from the Mississippi Delta. A far cry from the wild-caught catfish from rivers and streams that have dangled from many a cane pole, farm-raised catfish are sweet, mild and versatile. Deep-fried catfish, served with slaw and onion-flecked nuggets of cornmeal batter called hush puppies, are as common in the Delta as hamburgers and French fries. Fried catfish also shows up on po’boys, in salads and even for breakfast, alongside eggs and grits; many restaurants also offer it grilled or baked.

Few know the catfish’s versatility better than Evelyn Roughton, proprietor of The Crown Restaurant in Indianola. “We don’t deep-fry our catfish, but we may do it paneed [a term for meat that has been breaded and pan-fried], with a sassy dusting of seasoned flour—sometimes with a garlic sauce, sometimes a dill sauce,” says Roughton, who in 1993 wrote the cookbook Classic Catfish: From The Crown at The Antique Mall. Opened as an antiques store in 1972, The Crown is now a combination restaurant/gift shop known for its innovations with catfish, including an award-winning smoked catfish pâte.

To most locals, however, “Delta pâté” means one thing: pimento cheese. This simple blend of grated cheddar, mayonnaise and pimento known as “P.C.” turns up as a spread for crackers, a stuffing for celery and a filling for finger sandwiches at many a social gathering. “Any refrigerator you open in the Delta is going to have a container of pimento cheese,” says Randall Andrews, the chef at Rust in Clarksdale. “It’s fully intertwined with our hospitality.”


SAY CHEESE
Rust’s grilled
pimento cheese
toast points
At his laidback restaurant, Andrews serves a grilled pimento cheese toast points appetizer. The dish was inspired by his father, who served pimento cheese sandwiches at a bygone hangout where he worked as a carhop. Andrews modernized the Southern specialty by substituting thick sourdough bread for sliced white and infusing the cheese mixture with manzanilla olives and toasted, chopped pecans.

Some of the most commonplace dishes in the Delta stand out not for how they’ve been updated, but for how they’ve stayed the same. At the Blue & White Restaurant, a classic Tunica diner that has been open since 1937, turnip greens are so loved that they vie with fresh-baked meringue pies and doughnuts in popularity. Every day, cooks pull and pick 30 to 40 pounds of greens by hand and simmer them slowly with fatback. Co-owner Steven Barbieri couldn’t give anyone the recipe if he wanted to. The secret to turning this inexpensive plant that once proliferated the surrounding farmland into an object of desire belongs to the cooks, some who have worked there for decades. “They season them a little differently every time, depending on how the greens taste that day,” Barbieri says. “There’s a real art to cooking them, and they are the masters.”

THE HOLLYWOOD CAFE
1585 Old Commerce Rd, Robinsonville (12 miles from Tunica Airport); 662-363-1225

HICK’S WORLD FAMOUS HOT TAMALES & MORE
305 S State Street, Clarksdale (35 miles from Tunica Airport); 662-624-9887

BLUE LEVEE
Intersection of Mississippi Highways 8 and 1, Rosedale (75 miles from Tunica Airport); 662-759-6333

THE CROWN RESTAURANT
112 Front St, Indianola (99 miles from Tunica Airport); 662-887-4522

RUST
218 Delta Ave, Clarksdale; 662-624-4784

BLUE & WHITE RESTAURANT
1355 Highway 61 N, Tunica; 662-363-1371

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