Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (36 page)

I know it was good because I grew up going down to my Uncle Sig's in
Happy Jack, where his wife Helen and my mother did what they could to
recreate that feast every holiday. Sig was in charge of getting the duck and rabbit, in or out of season. Helen and Sig ran a restaurant there, Sig's Antique
Restaurant-in fact the first restaurant in the family. We had the run of it for
the feasts. The table laden with food from which we served ourselves was often
longer than the table at which we were seated.

Let me pause and share with you an assumption I'm working from here.
We may not all subscribe to William Blake's recommendation that "the road
of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," but I'm fairly certain we can mostly
all agree that those huge slabs of red meat at Ruth's Chris are a celebration of
excess. Is it an accident that her business, a gauntlet thrown down before the
anti-red meat forces, nonetheless doubled and trebled during the economic
and cultural excesses of the 8os and 9os? And what I'm arguing here is that
that celebration of excess came out of my mother's experience of her greatgrandmother's table. That table represents in my mind an utterly Pickwickian
scenario, and just as Dickensian is the effort of memory that lay behind it,
with all memory's vagaries and illusions and idealizations. Dickensian, too,
was the role of trauma as a motivating force, the spring of action, for this
recreation. What happened is this. Mom's grandmother, Angeline, died in her
twenties when Mom's mother, Josephine, was almost eight. Her brother, three
years younger, records their mother's horrible death by anthrax. He, or perhaps they, was taken by open skiff fourteen miles downriver to their mother's
deathbed at grandmother's house in Home Place. "I remember vividly," he
wrote, "when we got there, that she was dying. Her face was swollen to the
breaking point, and when she saw me she tried to smile, and then she announced that she was to die at a certain hour, which she did at exactly the
hour she predicted. I was then about four years old, too young to understand
the agony she had gone through."

Nichole, their father, remarried, and in doing so redoubled the family
trauma, for my mother's great-grandmother, also named Josephine, announced that if he, Nichole, thought he was taking his kids with him down the
highway to live with his new wife, well then he would do so over her dead
body. Those kids were staying right here, and she would raise them. My guess,
then, is that my mother's mother was traumatized not only by the early loss of
her mother, but by what must have felt to an eight-year-old like desertion by
her father. Nichole, the dad, moved just a few miles down the highway and raised a new family of eight, half brothers and sisters to my grandmother.
They were not allowed to speak. My cousin Audrey describes the families
passing one another at mass on Sundays in silence but with longing looks.
Pure Dickens.

I imagine that my mother's great-grandmother's grandiose feasts were her
way of keeping the family together and that consuming those mountainous
meals-seventeen sacks of oysters for the dressing!-were a way the family
soothed themselves from the trauma of separation and loss that was carried
down through the generations and which my mother was heir to. But this effort of memory, motivated by loss and the need for comfort, only goes so far
to explain my mother's success in creating a table where a cornucopia of comfort food was king. For if memory lay behind it, what lay ahead was not the
past but simply the present moment. Somehow, my mother managed unconsciously to weave the two, past and present, together in a way that totally effaced the past. Josephine and her daughter Angeline, lost at too early an age,
have no role in the corporate story. The name Mom grew up with in Happy
Jack, Ruth Ann, short for her birth name, Ruth Angeline, after her lost grandmother, was long forgotten in the move to New Orleans. So too the bounty of
Mom's great-grandmother Josephine's table, which was transformed into the
bounty of Ruth's holiday table and, I believe, into Ruth's Chris's table. But key
vestiges remain. Ruth's Chris's famous creamed spinach is in reality the exact
recipe that in our family is called Uncle Martin's creamed spinach. This Martin is the brother of Angeline, who died of anthrax. It was he who took
Josephine and Nichole downriver by skiff in the dead of night to see their
mother on her deathbed.

Mircea Eliade, the great University of Chicago mythographer, explains that
the sacred is invoked by creating a special time and place, in a word, a special
presence, or what he calls a "heirophany," a temporal revelation of the sacred.
What plagues the modern world is that we are always somewhere else, in the
past, in the future, daydreaming of some better place, trying to escape from
where we really are. The priest or shaman or artist, through ritual and
through art, makes this moment and this place holy. The success of Ruth's
Chris is largely due to this rite. Somehow my mother created a holy place. Was
it the sizzle, the commitment to quality, the downhome broads, many of
whom, like her, were single mothers and who welcomed you like family and
asked if you wanted "yer regular rib eye medium rare, extra cracked pepper."
Was it her own special presence, sitting at her desk with cigarette, coffee,
adding machine, and playing cards always at hand? Or was it all these things? Or, biggest mystery of all, was it the absence/presence of Josephine, invisibly
overseeing the whole show, keeping our families together as she did hers, by
stuffing us with huge helpings of incomparable comfort food?

I kept to myself this philosophy of the restaurant business that I slowly developed as I worked the floor of the flagship on Broad Street. But it became
clearer and clearer to me that Ruth's Chris (and the great restaurants like it)
had taken on an almost spiritual role in the modern world. With all our institutional sources of value challenged-church, state, family-where are the
holy places left to us but where we break bread? Breaking bread has always
been a sacred act, but now more than ever our profane world needs a place
where the heart can open to matters beyond the workaday world, whether it is
family or friendship or some kind of unnamed spirit, to what Joseph Campbell calls "invisible means of support." Let me not cast too rosy a glow over
this story of the inception of Ruth's Chris. Let me connect all the dots: if I
am right that behind my mother's incredible success lies this equally incredible family trauma, perhaps trauma helps to explain her success. The obsession
with comfort food, the indulgence of excess, the use of food to self-medicate,
all these are ways to deal with trauma. Not very healthy ways, I might add,
but also characteristic of the excesses of America's eighties and nineties, the
very decades when Ruth's Chris attained its national success. The excesses of
those decades cannot be explained by one cause. But surely the trauma of
our war-torn century must be considered an important factor. So perhaps
the Ruth's Chris success story fed on and fed, was a response to and responsive
to, not just the personal family traumas but the traumas of our age. Like most
empire builders, my mother stood on the shoulders of giants. They were
among her invisible means of support. As my good friend Lolis Elie said in
his tribute to my mother, "The food even of great chefs starts in the home,
cooked by women, and the idea that this woman, this single parent, started
this restaurant, mortgaged her future on it and made it work, and became
such an important institution around the world, is just because it puts it
back squarely where it should be, in the hands of women. And so in a certain
sense her success is a tribute to all those women who labored over pots
everywhere."

So, in view of this long culinary history I'd like to salute not just the presence of my mother, Ruth Fertel, but also the women that lay behind her skills
and dedication, her fortitude and persistence: Josephine Abadie Hingle, the
matriarch of matriarchs; her daughter Angeline Hingle Jacomine, my mother's
namesake, who died too young; and Josephine Jacomine Udstad, my mother's mother, who by all accounts was the sweetest woman in the parish. And last
but not least, for she just couldn't manage to get a granddaughter out of my
brother and me, Ruth Angeline Udstad Fertel.

I guess we might sneak one of the family's men in, so, thank you, Uncle
Nick, for your divine creamed spinach!

Out under the red and green and yellow fast-food neon that circles Columbia
like Mexican ball fringe, Doug Broome was always famous. As an eight-yearold curb-hop, he carried a pair of pliers in his back pocket for turning down
the corners of license plates on the nontipping cars; he was already planning
ahead. He grew up during the depression in the kerosene-lit bottom, one
block from the cotton mill and two from the state penitentiary. And, as the
tale goes, when he was nine, his father went out for a loaf of bread and, in
storybook fashion, came home eighteen years later. Doug left school in the
fourth grade and worked his way up from curb boy at the Pig Trail Inn out on
the Broad River Road, to Baker's on Main Street, and finally to a string of his
own restaurants all over town.

Doug had energy, incredible energy. It may be the kind you see in skinny
kids playing tag in a rainstorm or the stuff that comes with Holy Roller madness. He had black, curly hair and bright blue eyes, wore outrageous clothes,
and every year had the first strawberry Cadillac convertible in town. He won
most of the jitterbug contests at the Township, taking shots at everything
Gene Kelly was doing in the movies. He was wild with clothes. With cars. With
women. Some of his checks may still be bouncing.

Sometimes he would sit down and list the problems he was having with his
help. Someone was getting married before they were divorced, or divorced
without benefit of attorney. Some couples would leave for a Stone Mountain
honeymoon with the back seat stacked to the window level with Doug's beer
and the trunk loaded down with Virginia Hams and cigarettes. Someone was
always running off with a friend's wife or husband, getting drunk, wrecking
the wrong car, and getting locked up. And a few of the more spectacular cases
managed to do everything at once. But Doug would just grin and say, "We're
just one great big old family out here, mashing out hamburgers and making
friends." He never took them off the payroll. They stole a little, but Doug knew with some sixth sense about how much and made them work longer hours. It
was a good relationship, and when the union came around to organize, they
would just laugh and say they were already organized.

What I remember him best for happened one crazy night on Harden Street.
It was July. It was hot. Oral Roberts was in town. Oral Roberts was always in
town. He was still lean and hungry and doing Pentecostal tent shows. "No! I'm
not going to heal you. Jesus is! Jesus Christ is going to heal you. So I want all
y'all to place your hands on your television set, place your hands on your
radio. And if you ain't got a radio, any electrical appliance will do."

At the air-conditioned eight-thousand-seat tent, it had been standing
room only, and every soaring soul had descended on Doug's for hamburgers,
barbecue, fried chicken, and onion rings. Doug and I were on the big grill, the
broilers, the Fryolaters. Lonnie was on the fountain. Betty Jean, under a foothigh, silver-tinted beehive, was on the counter and cash register. The parking
lot was jammed, and another string of cars was cruising in an Apache circle
looking for a slot. In the kitchen the grease was so thick we had to salt down
the duckboards to keep from slipping. The heat was 12o and rising. The grill
was full. The broilers were full. There was no more room. There was no more
time. We had lost track of what was going out and what was coming in. Horns
were blowing. Lights were flashing. The curb girls and Betty Jean were pounding on the swinging doors, screaming for hamburgers, barbecue, steak sandwiches, anything. And then suddenly there was another problem. A bigger
problem. The revivalists were tipping with religious tracts and pewter coins
stamped with scriptural quotations. The girls were furious. "One of them gave
me a goddamn apple! Look! Look at it!"