A UNIVERSAL SYMBOL FOR MOONSHINE, DERIVED from its makers’ practice of marking an X on a jug for each distillation of their liquor. By the third distillation, you had a potent hooch indeed. See Moonshine.
AROUND 1900, NEW ORLEANS HAD A BUSTLING Chinatown, all but vanished today. Its legacy lives on in a favorite street food: ya-ka-mein, aka “ya-ka-meat.” A soy-spiked broth brimming with noodles, green onions, meat, and wedges of hard-boiled egg, it’s an effective palliative for hangovers (some refer to it as Old Sober). But it’s more than that for African American cooks like Linda Green, a vendor at Crescent City parades and festivals who calls herself the Ya-Ka-Mein Lady—it’s a family tradition. Green remembers watching her great-grandmother make ya-ka-mein. And among the many families who’ve kept it alive over the years, there’s no one recipe. Creole seasoning, ketchup, and hot sauce are all popular additions.
AMERICANS FROM PARTS OTHER THAN THE South have, like Southerners, universally embraced the slippery lyrical convenience of the word y’all. In the mouths of Northerners or Westerners, however, it brings an ungainly lack of rhythm to the sentence structure, because the South’s complex social architecture has created its deeper tones and shadings. Herewith, four basic templates of Southern use:
Hey y’all! An exclamatory form of motivational address used to encourage larger participation in drudge-like outings: fund-raisers, family reunions, and flower-, golf-, or hunt-club functions. Every Southerner hearing this phrase knows: a bad idea will follow.
We don’t wanna inconvenience y’all. Because the second-person singular pronoun and the second-person plural are identical in English, using the contraction generally avoids confusion. In addition, when the speaker makes a socially delicate request of the addressees, the contraction softens the blow of the hard objects, the you, and scales back whatever unpalatable thing he or she might hope to get from the listeners into a neighborly possibility.
Y’all don’t really wanna do that. The contraction’s presence is rhetorically effective when intentionally used incorrectly, as above, when addressing a single person, a possible bad actor, with the Southern version of the British royal family’s plural. It flatters—as if the addressee had serried knights on horseback at his or her command.
I don’t think that bar is open, y’all. Useful with a large group of Southerners who have been overserved. On a long bar crawl, an SEC-playoff mentality takes hold, and the word is often forcefully attached after a (clearly implied) comma, punching the preceding information through the evening’s haze. Whether it then helps the group rally to the next open watering hole remains up for grabs.
A SLANG TERM FOR CHICKEN, GOING BACK TO antebellum times in the South, which African Americans evidently took with them as they migrated to other parts of the country. During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, some restaurant diners would order “yardbird and strings”—fried chicken and spaghetti. Fellow jazz musicians took to calling the saxophonist Charlie Parker (born in Kansas City) Yardbird, or just Bird, some said because of his fondness for eating fowl. See Fried chicken.
WHAT’S A SOUTHERN YARN? GOOD QUESTION. I wish my uncle Merle were here to tell you, because he could tell a yarn, could he ever, but he died in the salt mines. He was the foreman of one of the biggest salt mines in Birmingham, Alabama, in the early part of the last century, when salt mines dotted the landscape of Birmingham the way steel mills would later. A lot of people don’t know about the Birmingham salt mines, but they rivaled the salt marshes of Venice and the salt mountains of Dubai for a time. The first salt deposit was discovered in Birmingham in 1876 by a stray cow. Birmingham is also where modern saltshakers were invented, not far from the house I would be born in many decades later. Fact: salt from the Birmingham salt mines filled up to fifteen thousand shakers a day, filled mostly by the very young and the very old, preschoolers and retirees. Yes, Birmingham was synonymous with salt. It was called the Salty City. Some say the salt mines were a mile deep, and some thought they went even deeper, that they were the mythical tunnels to China. There are even some who say a Chinese man was found at the bottom of one of the mines, digging up from his home in Beijing, and that when he came out he became principal of the high school. Principal Kwan, his name was. But that’s another story. Uncle Merle wasn’t interested in China. What had happened was he’d just bought a ring for the woman he hoped would become his wife—Lucille Endicott—and he dropped it one day, and it fell deep into the mine at least a mile or so and he went down for it, even though the bottom of the mine was not too far from the earth’s molten core. What he didn’t know is at the bottom of the mine there was a great big salt pool filled with piranhas, salt piranhas—which as everyone knows are the worst kind. They ate him until he was nothing but little bits of whatever he used to be.
And that is what a yarn is.
LEAVE IT TO CAJUN COUNTRY TO INVENT chips this wild, wonderful, and worthy of their obsessive fans. When his equipment business failed in the oil bust of the 1980s, Ron Zappe did the only logical thing—he started making kettle-style potato chips in a defunct Chevy dealership in Gramercy, Louisiana. The early days were lean, with Zappe sometimes standing in the middle of busy intersections to hand out samples to passing motorists. Soon his Spicy Cajun Crawtator flavor caught on with locals who didn’t mind if a potato chip lit a swamp fire in their mouths. The chip cult swelled exponentially with other smashup flavors such as Hotter ’N Hot Jalapeño, Cajun Dill Gator-tators, and Voodoo Gumbo, all fried in delicious peanut oil (instead of the industry-standard vegetable oil). Alas, Zappe ascended to snack-food heaven in 2010. So when Utz Foods bought Zapp’s the following year, loyalists fretted if a Pennsylvania company could leave well enough alone. Well, Zapp’s are still proudly produced in Gramercy, and if the latest special-edition flavor—Sweet Pimento Cream Cheese—is any indication, their Cajun soul has been saved.
EMILE ZATARAIN DIDN’T ENVISION AN EMPIRE when in 1886 he opened an Uptown New Orleans grocery store and prepared to ring up purchases on the state’s first cash register. For Zatarain, buying a horse and buggy for deliveries counted as success. But then he came up with Zat-So Root Beer for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition and realized his future might lie with fine-tuning flavors. People went nuts for Zatarain’s root beer extract, and his Creole mustard after that. Eventually, Zatarain created a seafood boil that perfectly crystallized how the Crescent City liked to season its food; during crawfish season, it still tops the company’s list of best-sellers. But Zatarain’s, which the family sold off back in 1963, keeps eaters in mustard seeds and red pepper all year long: its white boxes of jambalaya, dirty rice, gumbo base, and shrimp Creole mix sit on supermarket shelves across the country, wooing shoppers with the promise of a vicarious visit to New Orleans. “Every city had a manufacturer that was probably packing spices, extracts, and pickles, because those are hard to ship,” the company’s Dudley Passman told the Times-Picayune. “The difference was, we were based here in New Orleans, where our food tasted better than everyone else’s.”
THE ZOMBIE RANKS AMONG THE MOST FAMOUS and fearsome of tiki drinks. It was invented by Don the Beachcomber, a Louisiana native who single-handedly launched the original tiki trend when he opened his bar in Los Angeles in 1934. The oft-repeated origin tale says that Don himself mixed the first zombie for a woefully hungover customer who lamented that he felt like “the living dead.” (A less common variant involves Don serving a customer en route to the airport; the customer was later discovered sitting on a pier along San Francisco Bay, uncertain of how he arrived and unable to feel anything.) The epicurean writer Lucius Beebe noted that at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the zombie was a hit, costing a dollar each, and that customers were limited to one “by a management at once thrifty and mindful of municipal ordinances.”
The tiki historian Jeff Berry, owner of the New Orleans restaurant and bar Latitude 29, spent a decade tracking down what went into a zombie. In his book Sippin’ Safari, he published three versions of the recipe—dated to 1934, 1950, and 1956—with the 1934 zombie punch by general consensus coming closest to the original. The punch consists of three rums (light, dark, and overproof), lime juice, falernum, grenadine, Pernod, Angostura bitters, grapefruit juice, and cinnamon-infused sugar syrup. When consuming, be mindful of municipal ordinances.
THE WORD ZYDECO, THE STORY GOES, ORIGINATES from the French saying “Les haricots ne sont pas salés,” meaning “The green beans are not salty.” (This sounds a lot more like it contains “zydeco” when spoken in Creole French.) Consider that if you had more money, you might be able to afford some ham to add flavor to your beans, and you start to figure out what zydeco is: a rowdy, French-infused kind of blues that Creole African Americans developed in western Louisiana. It’s dance music raucous and loud, closely related to Cajun music but marked by African singing and rhythms. Expect to hear accordion, expect to hear washboard, expect to dance. Zydeco’s history is intermingled with that of the black experience in Louisiana, going back centuries, but it found itself an excellent match once rock and roll arrived, quickly adopting electric guitars and basses, drum kits, and other tricks. Pioneers such as Clifton Chenier brought zydeco to the rest of the country and the world, starting in the mid-1950s; the persistence of zydeco festivals in Germany and other far-flung places gives some indication of their success. Next time you hear a pop song with that in-and-out accordion driving in the background, take note: that’s a bit of zydeco in there.