Say you look in your pantry and find a can of RO*TEL diced tomatoes and green chilies that says, “BEST BY JAN 2011.” What does that actually mean?
A. DO NOT OPEN; ENCASE IN LEAD; CALL HAZMAT.
B. THE ODDS ARE GOOD THAT THESE GOODS ARE ODD.
C. PROBABLY STILL NOT ALL THAT BAD.
D. WE HERE AT RO*TEL URGE YOU TO THROW THIS CAN AWAY AND GO BUY A NEW ONE, EVEN THOUGH A CAN OF RO*TEL, UNOPENED AND KEPT OUT OF THE MIDDAY SUN, WILL BE THERE FOR YOU PRETTY MUCH FOREVER, THAT’S WHAT THE CAN’S FOR.
Left to my own devices, I would assume (c) and (d). However, I am married. Recently, my wife went through the pantry and took out everything that had been in there for quite some time. These items, in various containers, included the following:
dried “One-Step Garlic Basil Entree”
Karo syrup
only legible words: “Meat Rub”
cream of coconut
pine nuts, by volume about 30 percent pantry-fly larvae
olive spread
“Stuff’s Chicken Marinade”
hard to tell: “Yamaki Soba” and a word like Tsuyn
sesame seeds
“Inner Beauty West Indies from Hell Spice Rub ‘Go Ahead, Rub It In’”
some kind of gray-green oil
Of these, I voted to keep all except the pine nuts, which I was willing to concede had gone off, and, grudgingly, the gray-green oil, though there might be a way to make your car run on that. But there was something to be said for pouring all that into one bucket to see how nasty the result looked and then heaving it, larvae and all, into the compost heap—where, freed from jars and bottles and boxes, these heretofore unappreciated comestibles could find new life, by contributing right merrily to future homegrown collards and beets. Our cat, Jimmy, functioned mostly as an observer.
But I did hate throwing out that 2011-vintage RO*TEL. The marking was evidence, no doubt, that RO*TEL doesn’t always jump off our shelf, but let me say this: if I ran a hotel, the sign outside would say HO*TEL. And you combine RO*TEL with Velveeta cheese product—what a couple they make: he full of swash and buckle, she a lissome, even slippery blonde. I got a craving for some of that dip.
The first fancy food market I tried had no RO*TEL, and when I asked the man in the cornucopious cheese department (fifteen kinds of gouda—you’d think three or four would be goudanough) for Velveeta, he looked at me the way the father of twelve beautiful daughters might look at you if—well, one night long ago a fellow college boy and I found ourselves for some reason in Tullahoma, Tennessee. We asked a local man where we could “meet some girls.”
At last week’s American Cheese Council convention in Kauai, Hawaii, a resolution was passed deploring “the media’s increasing tendency to use the term ‘cheesy’ to mean of inferior quality. There is no intrinsic connection between cheese and inferiority. On the contrary, ‘cheesy’ should connote ‘flavorsome, rich, nutritious.’” In a spirited discussion leading up to the resolution, a panel of cheese experts proposed various public-information efforts to counteract the current meaning of “cheesy,” including an ad campaign featuring “beautiful, healthy young people snacking on cheese products and using the catchphrase ‘Mmmm. It’s cheesy!’”
He reflected. “You mean loose hangers?” he asked.
Our reply was to the effect of, Well, uh, not necessa—sure.
He said, “We don’t have any loose hangers in Tullahoma.”
The cheese man looked at me the way the father of twelve beautiful daughters might if I had checked out all his daughters and then asked if he had any loose hangers.
Before I did pour out that old RO*TEL, I found online that RO*TEL had a promotional connection with Crazy Sam Higgins, proprietor of the highly rated Chuckwagon Inn Bed and Breakfast in Fredericksburg, Texas, and author of a cookbook, Snake, Rattle & RO*TEL, in which he says of himself, “If old Crazy Sam tells you a chicken can dip snuff, just go ahead and look under his wing, and … there’ll be a can hidden there.” I met Sam many years ago, through my Waxahachie, Texas, in-laws Johnny Pearson and Rusty Marchman. I called him up and put it to him: Can’t you eat RO*TEL that’s two years past its theoretical prime?
Turns out Sam and RO*TEL have parted ways. The current corporate owners “didn’t understand what I did” for them, he said. In fact he maintains that RO*TEL isn’t as strong as it used to be. He now favors a local brand, Hill Country Fare. And he wouldn’t recommend that anybody eat post-best-by cans of either one. He did, however, say, “Context is all. If you’re on a deer lease, you might eat ’em and be okay. But around the house, you might be sick for two weeks.”
I found fresh RO*TEL and Velveeta, and the dip was good. But with a bittersweet overlay: if RO*TEL gets too old, even Velveeta might dump him.
(For Young, Particular Eaters)
My father was a very religious man who believed in the hereafter, that you’re marking time here, that this earth is not the real thing, the real thing was where you’d go after you died. But I didn’t believe that at all because I liked catsup too much.
—George Burns
If every food your parents hatsup
Tastes like something to matsup
With something not even a buzzard would snatsup,
Add catsup.
Catsup will fix up all kinds of yuck.
You’ll find a way to pour it on your turnips, with luck.
And if you can’t—
Since children can’t
Turn turnips down—
Find a way to pour
Your turnips on the floor.
And if your mother sees you, move to another town.
Catsup makes you well.
It’s tangy, gooey, red.
Pour it on your shirt and tell
Your parents you are dead.
Hot and sweet and red and greasy,
I could eat a gallon easy:
Barbecue sauce!
Lay it on, hoss.
Nothing is dross
Under barbecue sauce.
Hear this from Evelyn Billiken Husky,
Formerly Evelyn B. of Sandusky:
“Ever since locating down in the South,
I have had barbecue sauce on my mouth.”
Nothing can gloss
Over barbecue sauce.
I am the first to admit that Brunswick stew, which I think the world of, lacks the mystique of chili. I don’t admit for one minute that the Southwest produces real barbecue (don’t they have any pigs in Texas?), but I will admit freely that those folks out there have generated more mystique around their chili than southeasterners have around Brunswick stew.
You never read about Brunswick stew-offs, where people compete to put the finest, hottest, hairiest (figuratively speaking), and most natural ingredients together into the most definitive bowl of mushy, tangy, reddish-brown-with-yaller-specks goodness.
This is partly because, what kind of hat would you wear to a Brunswick stew-off? And partly because Brunswick Stewoff sounds like the son of an Anglophile movie agent.
“Chili” is a sexier term than “Brunswick stew.” If you doubt this, try saying “chili-chili-chili-chili-hoo-pah!” in a bouncy, finger-popping way, and then try the same thing with “Brunswick-stew-Brunswick-stew-ick…” I don’t think you will get as far as the “hoo-pah.” No one enjoys setting out toward a “hoo-pah” and bogging down.
On the other hand, a long slow rolling “Bruuuuuuuuhn-z-wick stoooo” has resonance. So if the Brunswick stew industry (should there be one) were to hire the right marketing people, and change the name slightly so that someone could throw in a lot of extra hot sauce and put out Third-Degree Burnswick Stew, it would likely become commonplace within the next few years to find out your daughter is rooming with a former stew princess at some fancy college.
But I would hate to see Brunswick stew blown out of proportion. I think that’s what has happened to chili, frankly. Chili to me is like peaches: even out of a can it’s not bad. In fact that’s the only way I ever had it until I was twenty-three years old. That’s why you have to make a mystique of chili, to justify not eating it out of a can.
Whereas Brunswick stew isn’t put out by Hormel; it just crops up, at barbecues and in barbecue places. No one knows what is in it, other than corn and tomatoes and pulled pork and chicken and garlic and maybe, if squirrel is available, squirrel. It may be a by-product of the hickory-smoking process—resulting when a small animal running with an ear of corn in its mouth tumbles into the open pit.
And sometimes it’s not good. Sometimes. I will urge some people who have never had Brunswick stew (no one but a North Korean has never had chili) to try it, and I’ll tell them it’s named for General Lionel Brunswick, who discovered that anything is good that goes with a side of corn bread, and I’ll assure them that boy, howdy, do they have a treat in store for them. And then it will arrive and it won’t be good, sometimes.
Which means I can be authoritative about it. When people complain that this Brunswick stew I have touted them onto is not good, I can roll a bite of it around against my upper palate, gaze off into the middle distance with my eyes closed except for tiny contemplative slits, and observe, with no tinge of defensiveness, “Yeah, this is a little off. Prob’ly used a rabid squirrel.”
Not long ago, The New York Times reported a scientific discovery: that significantly more people who were told not to think about a white bear had more thoughts about a white bear than people who were not told not to think about a white bear. I forget the figures involved, but someday I expect the Times to disclose research establishing that some strikingly low percentage of people know you when you’re down-and-out.
So when the Times runs something that reflects on me as a Southerner, I can’t just dismiss it as off the wall. I have to explain it to the people I live among, which is to say Northerners. One morning, I picked up the Times and saw my work cut out for me. Here was the headline: “Southern Practice of Eating Dirt Shows Signs of Waning.”
“While it is not uncommon these days to find people here who eat dirt,” the story said, many Southerners “are giving up dirt because of the social stigma attached to it.”
Now, I would be willing to argue, in a quasi-agrarian way, that the giving up of dirt is part of the downside of modern life. The giving up of eating dirt, however, is a subject that I frankly resent having to discuss. And not because it hits too close to home. The truth is, I never started eating dirt. The stigma attached to dirt eating is one of a handful of stigmas that I have never even considered feeling. But try telling that to people whose source of information about dirt eating is The New York Times.
The very evening after the dirt-eating story came out, I was in a chic salon, gamely eating arugula. A woman with a crew cut heard my accent.
“Ah, yes,” she said, “Southerners are all natural storytellers. Sitting on the old screen porch, dog under the rocker, flies on the baby, everybody spitting and spinning yarns compounded of biblical cadences and allusions to animals named Br’er.
“One thing I never realized, though,” she went on, “was that you eat dirt.”
At that point, there were two tacks I could take. I could say, “Well, I know there are some folks down south who like to chew on clay, for digestive reasons, but I never ate any myself, and neither did any of my relatives or friends. In point of fact, I never even saw anybody eat dirt.”
The response to that tack would have been a knowing look. “Here is a man who comes from people who eat dirt, and he thinks he is better than they are.” She would be thinking I couldn’t handle stigma. Or that I was inauthentic. Southern and inauthentic: worst of both worlds.
So I took the second tack, which, if you recall the Carter administration, might be called the Billy tack: “Hell yes, we eat dirt. And if you never had any blackened red dirt, you don’t know what’s good. I understand you people up here eat raw fish.”
You know how sushi got started, don’t you? Some Tokyo marketing people were sitting around, thinking how they could create a whole new American market, and one of them said, “Restaurants.”
Another said, “What would these restaurants serve?”
“Oh, fish.”
“How would we cook it? The most cost-efficient way.”
And the eyes of another one lit up, and he said, “You know what we could do…?”
And they got away with it. But of course sushi was over now, I told this Northerner, and people were Cajuned out, and even New Zealand cuisine was about to go the way of Finnish, and now this hot New Guinea place, Yam Yam, was so overpraised, I figured the time was ripe for investing in dirt restaurants.
None of the Northerners I tried this tack on had realized that it was time to be Cajuned out, even. The best way to get a Northerner to believe something is to talk to him as if you assume that he knows it already and that most people don’t. Without half trying, I raised more than three thousand dollars. I figured that when these investors came to me wondering what had happened to their money, I could admit that dirt eating wasn’t quite happening yet, after all—that when they had invested in it, it had been ahead of its time. Which would have consoled them more than you might think.
Regular customers of the Memphis-based Home Folks chain of cafeterias noted with some bemusement this week that one of the most popular items on the menu, the Redneck Blue Plate Special (a different entrée every day with choice of sides), is now known as the Meat du Jour and Three. Explained Home Folks International’s CEO, Jackson Wheat, “My daughter Shana came back from college and Europe and wanted me to know that ‘redneck’ was an ethnic slur I shouldn’t perpetuate. And I wouldn’t hear anything about it, and she said, ‘See? People would say you’re being typical, when all you’re being is hardheaded like you always are.’ Or something. And her mother agreed with her, so I gave up.”
Then the Times came out with another headline: “Quiet Clay Revealed as Vibrant and Primal.” According to some scientists, the first forms of life might have begun in clay. This was too close to what I had learned as a boy back in Sunday school for comfort. And I didn’t want to be explaining why Southerners eat life at its very source. But then I thought, what the heck. “Yep,” I told Northerners. “In fact, if there had been a Southerner around at the time when the first forms of life were getting under way, we’d have been nipped in the bud.” People who weren’t put off by raw fish were certainly not dismayed to learn that dirt was, in a sense, their mother.
The third dirt-related Times headline was the one that made my position difficult.
“Clay Eating Proves Widespread but Reason Is Uncertain,” it said.
“Uh-oh,” I thought, and I was right.
“The practice of eating dirt, usually fine clays, is so common in so many societies,” the story began, “that it must be regarded as a normal human behavior rather than an oddity, according to scientists who are studying it.”
Dirt eating, the Times had now decided, was known by experts as geophagy and was no more peculiarly Southern—or, for that matter, peculiar—than rabbits. “Historical records of earth-eating in Europe go back to 300 B.C., when Aristotle described it,” said the newspaper of record.
Now, Northerners had no reason to believe that I knew any more about how to get rich off dirt than they did. They wanted to know what I had done with their money.
I had sunk it all into development. That is to say, I had sent it to my uncle Mullet, who did eat dirt. When I said I never had any relative who ate dirt, I wasn’t counting my uncle Mullet, who is not my blood uncle, and I never felt responsible for him, because he did everything, up to and including teaching his dogs to dance. He wasn’t typical of anybody’s family. He kept armadillos and lived with a woman named Valvoline. He always did just exactly what nobody wanted him to. So no wonder I feel entitled to say I have never had any relatives who ate dirt.
Why did I send that money to Uncle Mullet? It just seemed right. I didn’t want to be taking advantage of Northerners for mercenary reasons. It was more of a cultural thing with me. Sure enough, Uncle Mullet spent all that Northern money on snakes.
But one afternoon he went over to his favorite clay hole to dig some up, and a man dressed all in just-ordered-looking L.L.Bean clothing came out from behind a tree to wave a “Posted” sign at him.
“Stranger,” the man said in a Northern accent, “you are eating my land.”
“What do you mean, stranger?” my uncle Mullet said. “I been coming here for generations.”
The Northerner looked at him in a certain way.
“What do you mean, your land?” my uncle Mullet said. “This spot has been free for folks to come to for clay ever since I don’t know when.”
The Northerner looked at him in a certain way.
“And what do you mean, eating?” Uncle Mullet said. “I wouldn’t…”
And that’s what broke his spirit. After a lifetime of doing every awful thing he felt like, proudly, Uncle Mullet had denied to a Northerner that he did something that he always had done, because the Northerner had looked at him in a certain way enough times to make him feel looked at in a certain way.
And Uncle Mullet was shamed to the point that he stopped trying to shift for himself, and everybody in the family had to start sending my aunt Rayanne money to keep him up. (Valvoline dropped him.)
And of course the reason the man in the unbroken-in L.L.Bean outfit was protecting the old clay hole was that he had just bought up all that area in through there so he could get in on the ground floor of the chain of fine dirt restaurants that I had led him to believe, late one night in that chic salon, was about to happen.
We reap what we sow.
* * *
(Update, Amy Fleming in The Guardian, July 29, 2014: “Japanese chef Yoshihiro Narisawa … was surprised to find he liked the soup he had made with distilled soil which, cooked properly, tastes great. As well as the earthiness, it is rich in umami. The Girona [Spain] restaurant Celler de Can Roca … has also successfully dabbled with soil. It is only a matter of time before the trend reaches critical mass and Heinz baked beans bring out a limited-edition soil flavour.”)
To every magazine writer, if he or she is lucky, comes one beautiful idea, both topical and evergreen, that will forever establish writer and subject, together, in the firmament of great stories. Gay Talese on DiMaggio, A. J. Liebling on Earl Long, me on worms.
It was 1977, when I—who shouldn’t be the one to say so, but who else remembers?—was hot. Magazines were hot, and I was freelancing for the best ones. Even my home state was hot, because Jimmy Carter, a Georgian, had just become president. And worms were hot.
Worms as in red wigglers, night crawlers, and so on. The trendiness of worms owed something to the fact that President Carter’s first cousin Hugh operated a big-time worm farm back home in Plains, Georgia. Hugh’s son, Hugh junior, told The New York Times that his father “started out with a wooden coffin … full of gray crickets and a washtub full of worms. He probably sells 30 million worms a year now.” At that point, Hugh junior, whose master’s thesis at the University of Pennsylvania had been on the worm-raising business, was in charge of organizing the White House. As I recall, the can-of-worms angle was fully exploited by media.
But worms—which Aristotle called “the intestines of the earth”—transcended the presidency. “You would not be here and I would not be here today if it weren’t for the worms,” said an architect and worm fancier in Atlanta. “The only reason we’re alive is because of that eight inches of topsoil the worms created.” It was said that worms would eat anything even remotely organic—cardboard, baby diapers—and excrete it as four-hundred-proof loam. It was said that the sportfishing market required some eighty million dollars’ worth of worms annually, and that there was an inexhaustible demand for worms as garbage disposers, as companions to large potted plants in industrial offices, and as food. The 1976 earthworm recipe contest staged by North American Bait Farms in Ontario had been won by an Applesauce Surprise Cake that edged out earthworm patties and earthworm curry. Worms were said to be 70 percent protein, high in vitamin D, and—this had the ring of truth—free of bones and gristle.
“It’s a billion-dollar-a-year business,” according to a man who claimed worms had made him a millionaire. “And probably growing faster than any other business today.” On the other hand, said a headline in The Atlanta Constitution, “Worms a Slippery Business.” The story quoted the Georgia Office of Consumer Affairs: “Questionable sellers may misrepresent potential profits, the skill and time required to care for the worms and the commercial demand.”
I suspected the worm boom was, in effect, a Ponzi scheme. People were selling worm-farm starter kits on the promise of an ever-expanding market for worms, when the truth might just be that there was a so-far-expanding market for worm-farm starter kits.
One way or another, there was a lot of worm stuff going on. According to a story out of Casper, Wyoming, “A deputy investigating the theft of eleven million worms hopes a reward offered in the case won’t produce any more tips like the one suggesting he question the nearest 500-pound sparrow.”
I had already been interviewing people in bait shops. “I was using a gob of worms in my speckled perch hole, when I got a big bite, and I yanked, and nothing. Yanked again, and nothing. Yanked again, felt something, and there was an eyeball on the hook the size of your thumb. Just what it was, I do not know.”
There was a place in Albany, Georgia, whose sign said, “Wormy’s Bait and Tackle. Wormy Sez: Wiggle On In.” The best way to get the worms Wormy specialized in—sold as Louisiana Pinks—was to “grunt them up.” Drive a stake in the ground and rub it with something that caused “viber-ation,” and the worms would rise to the surface. “First time in seventeen years, I found one with two tails. Both of ’em was alive and well.”
So you had politics, economics, natural science, and Americana. I figured it for a three-parter in The New Yorker. When I sent a proposal to my editor there, Roger Angell, he liked it. He sent it on to William Shawn, the magazine’s legendary editor.
Mr. Shawn’s reaction, more or less, was “Eww.” He couldn’t stand the thought of worms.
Grandma, she had only scorn
For syrup took from trees or corn.
For ninety years, what got her up,
Up and at ’em every morn,
Was biscuit soaked in good cane syrup.
When I was a boy, in the family car, on a Southern highway, we would fairly often drive past a mule going in circles. That mule, my father would point out, was working—turning a mill that ground stalks of sugarcane. The people in the yard were working too—cooking the juice in that open kettle.
Even while my father was in that expansive frame of mind, I never asked him to explain Eelbeck.
At home, we sweetened our waffles with Log Cabin, which was translucent and tasted more or less maple. At my grandparents’ house in Jacksonville, Florida, we had Eelbeck cane syrup, which looked like motor oil overdue to be changed. Eelbeck tasted sweet but also murky. On biscuits with butter, Eelbeck was the strongest thing I had ever put in my mouth. It evoked that unh … unh noise King Kong made when he was running around with Fay Wray. I liked it.
But why “Eelbeck”? The image on the bottle wasn’t bland and reassuring like the log cabin on Log Cabin. As I recall, it was a hillbilly-looking man sitting on a creek bank fishing with a cane pole and at that moment getting an eel on his hook. The eel was labeled “eel,” and the creek was labeled “beck.” The man might have had exclamation points leaping from his head; at any rate, he looked as if he’d been struck by a lot more than he’d angled for. Maybe the eel was not meant to evoke the power and darkness of the syrup and vice versa, but it worked that way for me. I had not yet heard any song about a blacksnake moan, but I had been in a skiff with a fresh-boated eel lashing and thrashing and twining upon itself, and I had been glad that Daddy, not I, had to deal with it. And what was a beck? I had heard my mother complain of being at someone’s “beck and call.” The call of the eel?
I was never one to pipe up with possibly embarrassing questions. If there was something sufficiently work related for my father to explain, he would bring it up. That’s the way things still stood between us when he suddenly died. Eelbeck remains one of a number of things I can’t imagine being cleared up in a fatherly voice.
Today, there is the Internet. Online I have learned that beck is an old English word for brook or stream. Eelbeck is a settlement in south Georgia (now part of the Fort Benning reservation) named for Henry J. Eelbeck, who was associated with a mill, built mostly by slave labor, that produced grits and cornmeal as well as syrup. Google provides a faint image for Eelbeck grits; a man is fishing, but that is all you can tell. It can’t be the same drawing that preyed on my imagination. The mill no longer produces; the Eelbeck brand is dead.
Honeybees, alas, are a threatened species. So maybe it’s a good thing they no longer have a monopoly on making honey. This week the Food and Drug Administration announced approval of a new form of honey induced from rabbits. Put Peter Cottontail in a cubicle with room only for him and a conveyer belt carrying a mixture of carrots and nasturtiums, and the rabbit will continue to chew long after he is sated and ceases to swallow. The resultant overflow is conveyed to special vats where it steeps along with organic enzymes and natural sweeteners, and voilà: bunny honey.
The ick factor too much for you? How do you think bees make honey?
Cane syrup lives, though. On the Internet, it even shines, at least in comparison to the high-fructose corn syrup that gets a lot of blame for American obesity. Too much of any sweetener is bad for you, I gather, but cane syrup is too pricey, in bulk, and too bold, in any amount, to be slipped into the processed foods that seduce the contemporary palate. Pure cane syrup—nothing but sugarcane juice boiled down until it’s deep and dark—lacks the bitter taste of molasses, because molasses is what’s left after sugar is crystallized away. Pure cane syrup retains the sugar plus some of the iron and other nutrients for which people have traditionally taken molasses.
And the big name in pure cane syrup is Steen’s—a staple of Louisiana culture, like crawfish or Fats Domino. The C. S. Steen mill, founded in 1910, still thrives, in Abbeville, Louisiana. Charley Steen III, who runs the mill, is the founder’s great-grandson.
This was the man, surely, who would talk to me of cane syrup in familial terms. I telephoned the mill and chirped, “Hey, I want to write about your syrup.” Whoever answered said, “No. No. He doesn’t do any of that. And I know he’s not going to talk to you now, because his father died last night.”
A couple of days later, an obituary of Albert Steen, father of Charley III, was online. “He loved to work,” his widow was quoted as saying. “I figured he would die because he worked so hard.” My dad, the same.