More Food, Foolishness and Filosophy

I found out today that there is a Dunkin’ Donut place going up near the Food Lion. Now that’s great and I can’t cast aspersions on Dunkin’. They make as fine a cake doughnut as anyone on earth. There is only one word that kicks the legs out from under that last sentence. Doughnuts should not be made of cake. They should be made of fat and air and sugar and then glazed with more sugar and come in a green and white box filled under the “Hot and Ready” sign. Shoot if you must this old gray head but save our Krispy Kremes, even though they are neither Krispy nor Kremey.

Who can blame me for increasing my span of inches as I expand my years? Pop culture uses terms like gourmet or gourmand or foodie. I don’t hang my belt on any of those terms. I just like to eat and Southern culture lends me every opportunity.

I grew up in the land of “looks like it’s gonna be a hot one” and I am older than air conditioning. Way back in the 1950’s, when the boys on my block were dripping with sweat in July and August, there was a sound that would promise a few minutes of welcome cool. On the hottest summer days, my generation dropped everything when we heard the aa-oo-gah horn of what we called the snowball truck. In those pre-regulated days, some enterprising local would stop by Culp’s ice house and load a 100 pound block of ice in the back of a pick-up. Armed with a specialized scraper plus a rack of flavored syrups, he was in the snowball business.

I would gladly pay my nickel and the man would drag the hand scraper across the ice and pack a paper cone with the shavings. The hard part for me came in selecting the artificial syrup flavor from the colorful bottles. Cherry and grape were my favorites but sometimes I would venture into the more exotic colors. Because the flavored syrup drained down into the paper cone, and I am an impatient soul, I would often knock off some of the almost flavorless ice ball to get to the real taste. When most of the ice was gone, those of us who were snowball veterans would bite the bottom off the paper cone and let the last of the syrup drain into our mouths. I was not a tidy child and my aim was not always great. Mom would take one look at my shirt and shake her head. Once Dad met me at the door, took one look at me after a cherry snow cone and said, “Son, you look like you’ve been in a fight.”

I am grown now and my shirts aren’t snowball stained anymore…they are stained with barbecue sauce. We grown folks in this intemperate region love pork any style, from real country ham with its salt meets bacon meets cardboard goodness to pig-picking pork loin rich with dripped fat and tender as a teenage love note. Southerners will shame you if you call something a barbecue just because it’s cooked on the grill and fight you over which sauce is best. Carolinians love a rich, sweet, ketchup-based sauce…No, wait, make that a spicy vinegar-brown-sugar sauce. Hold on, ladle on some of that famed South Carolina Mustard Sauce with its tangy, sweet, low-country bite and I’m taking some home for a friend.

And slaw…on the barbecue sandwich or on the side, made mostly with white cabbage, although a little of that purple is okay just for looks. Throw in a little sugar, some apple cider vinegar and some Dukes Mayonnaise and it’s “Honey, Hush!” as my old Daddy used to say.

We like our vegetables too…we just like them flavored up a bit. Okra is basically an inedible woody seed pod, but batter it with corn meal, deep fry it and salt it up good and it’s the devil’s own popcorn. When there’s a mess of collard greens boiling on the stove, it’s time to sit on the porch. It was a brave soul who thought, “Well, Maybe they will taste better than they smell.” Thanks to cooking them with a big chunk of fatback and serving them beside the Texas Pete pepper sauce vinegar, I have learned to endure them. The best thing about collard greens is that they are usually accompanied by black-eyed peas and cornbread. Put a little of my Momma’s chow-chow on the peas and a big glob of butter on the cast iron-baked (not sweet) cornbread and it is New Year’s Day all over and the future looks bright.

Maybe I need to back away a little so I don’t gain five pounds thinking about that. So. let’s have a drink. Now I know outsiders think we love our sweet tea and they’re right, we do, but we are open to other drinks. We don’t have a “soda” or a “pop”. If we want a carbonated beverage we might say, “Let’s have a Co-colar and a Co-colar might be a Cheerwine or a Dr. Pepper.

We are also partial to our beer…I’m not talking about those RPG’s or whatever they’re called, but beer in a can pulled from the depths of a cooler so icy it burns your hand. Put a cold Miller or Pabst Blue Ribbon or even Budweiser in a koozie and we’ll poke the fire and tell you stories about Big Bob and the cooler-moccasin. Good story, but it does need some beer, and a fire.

Boiled peanuts used to be a delicacy found only at roadside stands on the way to the beach. Now, it seems, they are sold from slow cookers in every southern convenience store. They are not bad but will never match those cooked in a big cast iron pot suspended over a fire. Atmosphere is everything. Folks passing through from “up there” turn up their sophisticated noses at soggy, salty peanuts but they are mostly the same people who think shrimp are white headless creatures who live on top of shaved ice.

Now you might think from my writings that I just like old things. That’s not entirely true. I like some new things. Why just Saturday morning I went by the Fort Mill Farmers’ Market and bought some heirloom tomatoes. That’s sort of new old stuff but it’s a start.

And, what if I do recall the times I found joy in great food or swimming pools or playground baseball? If you’d rather suffer old wounds and re-live the bad times, there are plenty to go around and I invite you to write about them.

Over near Kershaw, there’s a gold mine. There is gold in them thar hills but mostly there’s dirt and rock…tons and tons of dirt and rock. It takes considerable work to coax the grains of gold out of the tons of not gold.

Let’s do a little mental experiment. There are two choices in front of you. On the right is a mound of dirt thirty feet high and on the left are two one-ounce gold coins. You can choose. Remember, there is a lot more dirt and those coins are tiny in comparison.

I won’t extend a metaphor that is already at the breaking point so here’s the thing. Our lives are often dreary or sad or dangerous. There are disasters both personal and global and there are days and days of just days and days. Squeezed between the mundane and the tragic are the magic bits…the seconds or minutes or hours of joy and laughter.

All of those harsh days, all those monumental losses are always going to be there. Time may erode away some of the heartache but it is always with us. It is my job to find those bits of joy and laughter, the tiny flecks of gold we all have and to refine them into a few valuable memories.

For those who choose the gristle of life and want to see the bleeding edge, there is the nightly news broadcast. There you will find twenty-seven minutes of man’s inhumanity to man and three minutes of “Isn’t that nice”.

For those who want stories of hope and times of humor, come with me. Grab your pick and shovel, put on that helmet with the light on top and let’s dig up the shiny parts.