Cathy Pickens: Food and Friends

In my “howdy” blog [Good Eatin’ republished on November 6, 2007], I mentioned some of my favorite restaurants. If you’ve a mind to, leave a comment with one or more of your local favorite places to eat good Southern cooking. I’m always looking for new contenders in categories such as Top 5 Sources for Macaroni-and-Cheese or Great Fried Chicken or Would Kill for This Coconut Cake. We might not all agree on what’s “the best,” but let’s face it, the real fun is eating our way through all the possible entries.

Last week I visited Charleston, South Carolina for a book signing (Charleston Mysteries, my new mystery walking tour of Charleston, full of ghost stories, unsolved mysteries, and quirky history, but, alas, no food recommendations), during which I arranged a long-overdue visit to one of my favorite restaurants: Jestine’s.

Owner Dana Berlin Strange named her restaurant for the family friend whose recipes grace her menu, which includes crispy fried okra, extra-cheesy macaroni, and a Co’Cola cake that would make me glad to shed this mortal veil as long as the taste of that rich, warm cake was still in my mouth when I went to my eternal reward. (Even foodie Michael Stern sings its praises – complete with cake photo.
http://www.roadfood.com/Reviews/Writeup.aspx?ReviewID=1875&RefID=346

It’s easy to find Jestine’s: as you drive down Meeting Street into the historic district of Charleston, watch for the folks lined up along the sidewalk around lunchtime. Well worth the wait, too.

Jestine’s walls are lined with accolades: framed pieces from The New York Times, a review by Rachel Ray, a book cover and excerpts from the murder mystery Done Gone Wrong by … Cathy Pickens??

Yep, imagine my surprise, seeing the artfully framed, familiar cover! Avery Andrews, the main character in my Southern Fried Mystery series, visited Jestine’s while in Charleston working on a complex trial. Just because I’d had to stay home to write and teach and didn’t have time to visit didn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy myself vicariously.

Spying the cover, I introduce myself to Dana. We told each other how mutually thrilled we were. We exchanged neck hugs, in true Southern fashion. And I proceded to savor every bite, chiding myself for waiting so long to return to one of my favorite restaurants and one of my favorite cities.

As I walked off my rich lunch, I mused on the nature of food and friends and connections. The secret of Jestine’s is not just the food; it’s the warm familiarity with which Dana and her expert staff greet everyone who comes in the door. It’s the smile they leave you with, the sense that you’ve visited with friends, even if you sat alone at your table and read Jane Austen while you ate (which I was doing that day).

Thanksgiving and the eating orgy holidays draw near, a time to be thankful for family, friends, and really good bad-for-you food. To those of you who possess the gift of hospitality, who prepare meals which nourish the soul as well as the body, those of us who partake of your gifts thank you.

I hope you have somewhere warm and welcoming to spend the holidays. If you don’t, invite someone to join you – even if it’s at the Waffle House. [That’s a fine, fun place to enjoy a holiday meal if you’re alone, but that’s another story. I’m partial to pecan waffles.]

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not encouraging you to engage in the sin of gluttony. Oh, no. I am encouraging you to savor, to enjoy, to appreciate, to be thankful. Too often, we forget to be mindful of our food or our friends and family. ‘Tis the season, though.

Even if you don’t have any really good Southern cooking easily at hand – or if our affinity for high-fat, sugar-and-salt-pork-in-your-cooked-until-they’re-limp green beans is an affront to your refined and healthy lifestyle—I hope you find much to savor and the ones you wish for to enjoy it with. After you visit and eat, curl up with a good book (lots of good options on this blog list!), maybe with a football game droning in the background. In short, eat, read, and be merry. Now that’s what I call a holiday.

Have a happy one!

Cathy Pickens
Charleston Mysteries (History Press) and
Hog Wild and the other Southern Fried Mysteries (St. Martins)

New Books by Edie Hand

Hi All,

I hope you enjoy my new books! I know I will all of yours. Please support your favorite charities but if you don’t have one please consider the ones on my www.ediehandfoundation.org site.

I help raise awareness through the books and PR. The reason I am so passionate about these charities is because I have loved and lost with all three of my brothers dying young and I’ve battled cancer three times and still struggling with a rare bacterial disease. I tell you this to encourage others to have hope in hopeless situation. I share a lot of this in my new book The Last Christmas Ride to honor my three brothers and remind others about lessons learned in life through tough times. Acts of kindness are who we are!

Thank you for inviting me into your world of Southern Writers. Stop by my site at www.ediehand.com and visit me on one of my tour stops or hometown speaking gigs. God bless with lots of hugs.

Edie Hand

GOOD EATIN' (first published 9/25/07)

Greetings from Cathy Pickens --

It’s been fun meeting the fellow Southern bloggers as we get started on this adventure, so, by way of “how-do,” I write the Southern Fried mysteries, featuring small-town South Carolina lawyer Avery Andrews. The first in the series, Southern Fried, won the St. Martin’s Malice Domestic Award for Best Traditional Mystery.

The first cover featured a picnic basket with some appetizing fried chicken any Southerner would have been pleased and proud to carry off on a tailgate or a hike in the woods. Frankly, though, all things Southern ended at that point. Instead of potato salad, the basket had some lovely – fruit? Oddest of all, instead of a flaky, golden cat’s head biscuit (translation for the uninitiated: “big as a cat’s head”), it had a baguette.

With all due deference to the benefits of bunches of servings of fruit in your daily diet, to the crunchy softness of a fresh baguette, and to the artistic enterprise of cover artists everywhere, that ain’t no Southern picnic. But it was a fun cover.

So fun, the next two books had food on the covers, too, even though the pictures had nothing to do with the book, the title, or even what Southerners would actually eat.

I love the internet age, and I love emails from readers, even when they want to know why there are no &*(!@ recipes in the books. “There’s food on the cover, I expect recipes, you hear?”

I’m not really much of a cook. True, I’ve had recipes appear in regional cookbooks, but I stole them. From my mother. I sent them in because I like to eat them and thought other people might, too. I can cook them in a pinch, but my real talent is knowing where to head when I’m hungry – and it’s rarely my own kitchen.

That’s when I hit on an idea: I’ll tell you some of the places I like to eat. Then maybe you’ll tell me (and whoever else is reading) your favorite places to eat good Southern cooking.

A note on terminology: Some people call it Soul Food. Good name, of course, because it feeds your soul – along with your cholesterol and sugar levels. But down here, black folks and white folks pretty much eat the same food, and we just call it “good.” Not good for you because we like all four of our basic food groups fried. But definitely good.

I live in Charlotte, North Carolina now, and top of my list in town is La’wan’s Soul Food Restaurant, in a strip shopping center on South Tryon at Arrowood Road, just a bit north of I-485. THE BEST macaroni and cheese anywhere, cornbread that’ll melt in your mouth, and the nicest people ever. La’Wan’s is a finalist in the Steve Harvey Hoodie Awards, to be announced in Las Vegas in October 2007. Wish I could’ve told you to vote for them. I’ll just tell you to visit them instead. Address: 7705 S Tryon St., Charlotte, NC 28217 Phone: (704)665-7225

The essential of any Southern cook’s repertoire is fried chicken, and the pinnacle is Price’s Chicken Coop in Charlotte. Don’t come expecting to sit and eat, ‘cuz you have to take it with you. And don’t be discouraged by the line out the door, ‘cuz those folks know how to move chickens and people out the door. I don’t know what makes it so good – maybe it’s because it doesn’t have time to sit around after they fry it, in huge fryers right in front of you. Take it to the park, to your hotel, to a friend’s house (with a greasy cardboard box that says “Price’s,” trust me, you’ll have friends), add some fixings (maybe from La’Wan’s?), and prepare to be addicted. Located a block off Tryon Street (which, incidentally, would be Charlotte’s Main Street, if Charlotte was down-home enough to have a Main Street). Address: 1614 Camden Rd., Charlotte, NC 28203 Phone: (704)333-9866

Speaking of fried chicken, another must-stop is in Walhalla, South Carolina, my hometown (and a place that looks amazingly like imaginary Dacus, Avery Andrews’ hometown – but that’s only so I can keep the streets straight). Legions of Clemson University alums, dating back to the days when it was an all-male military school, know The Steak House.

Back in the day, that’s what they served: steak. Now, they’re even better known for their fried chicken. That’s what happens when a fellow from Saudi Arabia marries a local Oconee County girl and they start selling Arabian Rooster Fried Chicken. The cafeteria lines wrap around the restaurant on busy days, which is most days, but it’s worth the short wait. They’ll have somewhere to sit by the time you get your tray so full you can’t carry it. Address: 316 E. Main St., Walhalla, SC 29691 Phone: (864) 638-3311

Need some other ideas? Try my new friend Fred W. Sauceman’s books The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South (Mercer Univ. Press: 2006) and The Place Setting: Second Serving (2007). He knows where the good stuff is and doesn’t mind telling you.

Older books (so you’ll have to hunt up a copy and call ahead since some of the good places are no more) include:

Backroad Buffets and Country Cafes: A Southern Guide to Meat-and-Threes & Downhome Dining by Don O’Briant (John F. Blair: 1998, 1999)

Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South by John T. Edge (Hill Street Press, Athens, GA: 2000)

A Local’s Guide to South Carolina’s Best Kept Dining Secrets by Brian Katonak with Lynne Katonak (Sandlapper: 1999).

If it’s still in business, you know it’s probably good.

Let me know where your favorite Southern homecooking places are. After all, you have to eat to read, don’t you?

I really got to go now. I’m starvin’.