Facing a day of rain, I went to Starbucks Sunday, a week ago, and bought a New York Times. Regardless your politics, the Sunday Times can be a cornucopia of delights and — assuming you have two hours or so to devote to it — the best argument I can think of for hold-in-your-hands newspaper reading.
By that I mean you inevitably stumble upon and read stories about subjects you’ve never considered, simply because they’re interesting and so well written.
Take, for example, a restaurant review in Sunday’s Travel Section for Marjie’s Grill, a New Orleans restaurant, which begins, “People in New Orleans won’t bat an eyelash if you put a pig’s tail or feet on a plate in front of them …”
The reviewer tells of the restaurant’s owners traveling in Southeast Asia where “people are not afraid to eat weird pieces of pork.” In that context, one of the owners mentions similarities between cuisine of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam and the Mississippi Delta.
Ahem … excuse me. What about us Mississippians here in the hills?
At Helen’s Kitchen, the venerable Northside gathering place and soul food restaurant, you’ll find pig’s feet on the menu every Wednesday. That’s been the case for years.
And, if once a week doesn’t satisfy your appetite for pig’s trotters, there’s Inez Harris and Myisha Shelton’s recently opened Our Place, a soul food kitchen next door to Wells Cleaners on 14th Avenue North. Pig’s feet are one of the plate-lunch meat options on Monday, Wednesday and Thursdays in this homey neighborhood-cafe. And, as did their predecessors at that location — Blevins Smile-A-While — Inez and Myisha serve up chittlin’s on Fridays.
These ‘weird’ cuts of meat are called “off alls.” So says Michelle Poole, wrapper, merchandiser and self-appointed customer-relations specialist of the butcher department at the Sunflower store on Military Road.
Poole tries to maintain order in the coolers along the back wall of the store that contain a bewildering array of meats, “off alls” and otherwise. To peruse the options is a lesson in porcine anatomy. There are hog maws (jowl) $2.29/lb.; pork snouts $1.89/lb.; pig ears $3.79/lb.; neck bones $1.59/lb.; and pork fries (testicles) $2.29/lb. Pig’s feet come whole or split — the split cost $.10 more per pound. Ox tail, my favorite, is at the high end of the “off alls” at $6.99/lb. Best buy is turkey with necks and wings going for $.79/lb.
As Myisha Shelton’s dad, Eddie Shelton, used to say, they’ve got “everything from the rooter to the tooter.”
A friend grazing through a yellowed copy of “The 1982 Commercial Dispatch Cookbook” last week — a story unto itself — happened upon a recipe simply called “Pig Stew.”
The dish calls for five pounds of mixed pig’s feet, tails, backbone, salt, pepper, red peppers, salt pork, new potatoes and, if that’s not soulful enough, five pounds of collard greens.
Wednesday afternoon I phoned the recipe’s originator wondering if she remembered a concoction she submitted to her hometown newspaper 35 years earlier.
“I did a lot more of that cooking back then,” she said. “She” is uber-realtor Doris Hardy. “I could plow down a lot more than I can now.”
Even so, Doris said she and an associate, their interest piqued by an ad in this newspaper, got plate lunches with pig’s feet from Our Place a couple weeks ago.
“Andrew Zimmern says when you get into those exotic parts of the pig, it’s more gelatinous than fat,” Doris said.
We talked a while longer, mainly about our shared enthusiasm for ethnic food, long enough to dislodge a memory.
“You know,” said Doris, “I submitted that recipe to the Heritage Cookbook.”
I laughed out loud at the thought, hoping she felt likewise.
“It didn’t make it,” she said, stating the obvious.
“You know, they said every recipe they tested. I bet you dollars to donuts that one didn’t get tested.”
More laughter.
“Thanks for bringing up that memory,” Doris said. “I was trying to suppress it.”
Doris, savvy marketer that she is, would not have made the same mistake today. That “pig stew” would have been “ragout de porc.”
Everything sounds better in French.
Even so, I’m not sure her story would have had a different ending.
Birney Imes is the publisher of The Dispatch. Email him at [email protected].
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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