Good Eatin':
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 a place is 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’.

The Southern Writer: Who Is S/he?

After writing twenty southern mysteries and two southern novels, I am still surprised to find myself on a blog for southern authors. You see, I started my career determined not to become one.

At Vassar College I took a class on southern literature. The prof started us out with Sherwood Anderson (from Ohio), progressed to Mark Twain (southern?), and finally got to the only three real southern writers she felt deserved the title: Faulkner, Welty, and O’Connor.

I wonder how other students found the class? As far as I could tell, our professor regarded the South as a place of hollow, stereotypical people drearily yearning for past glories. When I tried to argue that not all of us were poor, regressive, fundamentalist, foul mouthed, illiterate, or deranged, I was accused of not knowing the “real” South. Me, who had lived here all my life and had four generations of family lying in the same North Carolina cemetery!

I left the class vowing that whatever kind of writer I became, I would never be a southern writer. I could not and would not depict the South that kind of reader wanted to hear about.

I still struggle with that. On one hand there is the South we who live here know and love; on the other, there is the South that the rest of the country believes exists. Sometimes they overlap, but they are not the same.

How can we get past their stereotypes without creating stereotypes of our own?

How can we write about what we love without denigrating parts of the country other people love?

How can we depict not “the South” but the contradictions and varied conditions that exist here?

One December my mother-in-law visited me in Mobile. We spent the morning at the home of a welfare mother whom I was helping to get her GED. We lunched at a local bar-be-cue, sitting among men who wore farmer’s caps and drove pickup trucks from need, not for status. That afternoon we took tea with a friend who was staying at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear. As we left that elegant hotel, Frances said, “You certainly get around.”

Yet all of those are the South I know and love. All of those are who I am. I have cousins who are classical musicians and one who was the North Carolina banjo picking champion. How can I convey all of that without pandering to stereotypes other people have about the South?

The best I can figure, I have to write not just what I know, but what I am.

Years ago, before a move to Chicago, my husband purchased a book entitled THE NINE NATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA. It broke down the continent into nine geographic regions as distinguishable as individual nations of Europe, and discussed the mannerisms, values, language, and traditions that set each of them apart. It was a valuable aid to us as we moved among mid-westerners and had to learn a new culture, even a new language. Who knew that some folks called fatback “salt pork”?

Our first Sunday there, two little sisters wanted to know, “What is Barnabas?”

“He’s a boy,” I replied, thinking my toddler's blond curls confused them.

“No!” They propped small fists on skinny hips. “We’re half Norwegian and half Italian. What is Barnabas?”

Stymied by generations of Southern mongrel breeding, I stammered, “He’s half Alabamian and half North Carolinian.” They accepted that as exotic enough.

And so it is.

Bio: Patricia Sprinkle is the author of two Family Tree mysteries, nine Thoroughly Southern mysteries, and seven Sheila Travis mysteries. Her new release is SINS OF THE FATHERS, which explores how decisions one generation makes can drastically affect its descendents.