When optimism is in short supply, try liver
Your mid-week dose of Southern food news
If you haven’t yet caught up with Monday’s edition of The Food Section, my conversation with Joseph Ewoodzie Jr. awaits you. In today’s issue, you’ll find oyster experimentation (Huntsville, Ala.); a Jewish recipe for pineapple ham (Pine Bluff, Ark.) and enigmatic gizzards (Broxton, Ga.)
“Do you know how to make biscuits?”
Tired of answering the same question from disappointed would-be patrons of Guy’s Biscuit Barn, Mike Heath of Spot Road Fruit Stand, which shares a parking lot with the Cumming, Georgia restaurant, has started asking one of his own.
According to Heath, I was the third person on a recent Saturday morning to inquire whether Guy’s was still in business.
“I’m sorry, but it ain’t my deal,” Heath said. “I can’t give you optimism.”
Heath and I have both tried calling the phone number posted on the barn’s front door, but an outgoing message says the voice mailbox is full. A message sent to the Facebook account which Guy’s in late 2020 used to post its menu, an amenity not always available to customers on site, didn’t yield a reply.
While Guy’s Biscuit Barn operated its drive-thru window throughout the pandemic, the cash-only crossroads institution appears to have been felled by staffing troubles, compounded by the head biscuit baker’s poor health.
Before Guy’s went dark a few weeks back, Heath reports, the baker missed 35 out of 72 workdays.
Since opening in 2008, Guy’s Biscuit Barn’s ramshackle floors and dense cathead biscuits have charmed some breakfasters and appalled others. A few tourists have emerged from the notoriously long drive-thru line mystified by the kitchen’s enthusiasm for country ham and grape jelly: “Very unlike a Northeastern breakfast café,” one Yelper from New Jersey concluded.
A downtown Huntsville, Alabama address which has been creeping toward a ‘cursed’ designation is now home to its third new restaurant in four years.
Restaurateurs Stephanie and Matt Mell, who previously operated a self-serve taproom in the same Clinton Avenue East space, recently opened Sea Salt Urban Oyster Bar. As Stephanie Mell admitted to AL.com, “People told us, ‘I don’t want to pour my own beer.’”
Sea Salt serves a variety of oysters on the half shell, along with chilled crab legs, lobster cocktail and smoked fish dip. According to AL.com, it’s the city’s only dedicated raw bar.
“This was my first time in life having oysters,” wrote one of the first diners to review Sea Salt online. “They were surprisingly really good.”
Five months after selling their Bentonville, Arkansas restaurant, the Williams family has returned to the fried chicken business.
“It’s live; it’s back,” Marty Williams Jr. announced. “It’s a brand new truck; we got it going.”
Celebrated for its lemon pepper wings, purple hull peas and sweet potato pie, Williams Famous Fried Chicken & Soul Food has operated out of various locations since opening in 2012. The new truck is parked most days at a Centerton shopping center, but the Williamses haven’t ruled out travel to special events.
What’s this bowl for, chopped liver?
Yes, precisely. The wooden bowl, newly acquired by the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience in New Orleans, belonged to Henrietta Rustin Levine of Jefferson County, Arkansas. According to museum curator Anna E. Tucker, Levine reserved it for mixing up chicken livers, eggs, onions, and Wesson oil.
“One of the reasons it’s so exciting is this is an important opportunity to display women’s stories,” Levine says of the kitchen object. “(With our) collection, we’re showing off underrepresented Jews: Jews of color; Jewish women and low-income Jewish communities.”
Established in 1986 at a Jewish summer camp in Utica, Mississippi, the museum shut down its exhibit space in 2012 “in part due to its inaccessibility to the general public.” The museum was relaunched this May in a $5.5 million facility; its three galleries, devoted to 350 years of history across 13 states, probe the universal theme of belonging and not belonging.
“It’s a way for people interested in Southern history to have a perspective they might not have had before,” Tucker says.
As for Henrietta Levine, who died in 2001, she was a member of Anshe Emeth in Pine Bluff. The synagogue’s sisterhood in 1932 published Snappy Eats: From Soup to Nuts, a cookbook which included recipes for hot tamale loaf and Ham Hawaiian with sweet potatoes.
In her definitive study of Southern Jewish foodways, Matzoh Ball Gumbo, the Arkansas-born scholar Marcie Cohen Ferris touched on the frequent appearances of treyf in the region’s historical record.
“This book wouldn't present an accurate picture of the Jewish South if I chose to leave out non-kosher foods, cooks, and eaters,” she told an interviewer, adding that communities carved out their own interpretations of dietary laws based on perceived significance and available ingredients.
“That’s what’s so exciting about Southern Jewish cuisine,” Tucker says. “Maybe they didn’t express it as a struggle, but as a hybridity cooked up in kitchen.”
For more information, visit msje.org.
Many former mayors of Broxton, Georgia would no doubt like to be forgotten.
In 2010, eleven years before Broxton’s most recently elected mayor stepped down from the post for personal reasons, Mayor Bobby Reynolds was removed from office by executive order. He’d been indicted following an investigation into where $575,000 in missing city funds went.
But the mayor who organizers of the Broxton Chicken Liver & Gizzards Festival claim they flat can’t remember is the mayor who picked their event’s theme.
“It’s a small-town festival, like a snake roundup or whatever, for the community,” says Broxton businessman John Dockery, who maintains its topic is tangential to the fun. “The administration several years back chose that name: I don’t know why, but a lot of folks worked for a chicken factory in Douglas.”
Broxton’s city clerk speculates that municipal leaders chose to celebrate poultry offal because “there was a lot of people raising little bitty chickens around the area at that time.”
In fact, the festival was created about a decade ago by Mayor Darquitta Riley, the first mayor of Broxton who was neither white nor a man. Riley settled on “Chicken Liver & Gizzards” because she wanted an unusual name which would stand out in the region’s annual festival lineup.
Dockery guarantees that both liver and gizzards will be available at the Nov. 6 festival, which starts with a 10 a.m. parade.
“They’ll mostly all be fried: Some may have some rice, but 90 percent will be fried,” he says, adding, “There’s pretty good interest in it.”
For more information, visit facebook.com/BroxtonLiverAndGizzards.
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OMG, that is my mother’s bowl and chopper!