kpurvis

I kinda sympathize, but not much. If this women thought her only choices were moldy grapes or . . . cookies, its no wonder her daughter is overweight, and it sounds like she needs some training on how to shop. Eating healthy doesn't have to be any more expensive than eating unhealthy. Even if the produce is garbage there are plenty of other choices. ← Wow, is that an oversimplified answer! How are you supposed to reach that good, healthful food if you don't have transportation, or you're working two jobs? Just because the woman was in New York City, that doesn't mean the stores in her neighborhood have affordable, healthful food. And have you tried shopping for a family by bus? I have: I did a three-part series for my newspaper several years ago called "Nowhere to Shop." It was about the lack of supermarkets in low-income neighborhoods, and it included a column I wrote in which I parked my car in a housing project and went grocery shopping, using a feeding program list of a week's worth of healthful, affordable food for family of four. It took more than three hours and included a couple of bus changes. I got back to my car with cracked eggs, smashed bread, warm milk and gouges in my forearms from grocery bags. I started working on the story years ago, when I was working in an adult illiteracy program in a housing project. I worked with two single mothers and one day, we started talking about where and how they get food. Neither had cars, and the only market in their neighborhood was a slum store, where the macaroni & cheese that would be 3/$1 in any other neighborhood was $1.79 for a box. Later, I sat down with a map of my city and a list of store addresses from the phone book. What I saw when I matched them up was astounding. In predominantly white neighborhoods, there are supermarkets within blocks of one another, some less than 1/2 mile apart. In predominantly black neighborhoods, there are huge spaces between stores. There are many low-income neighborhoods here in Charlotte where the nearest market is five or six miles away. If you earn less than $30,000 a year in this country, there aren't many statistics on you as a consumer -- the companies that pay for marketing studies don't really care. But here are some numbers I turned up, using Census reports and a study by the UNC Department of Epidemiology: Predominantly white neighborhoods nationally average 1 supermarket for every 3,816 people. Predominantly black neighborhoods nationwide average 1 supermarket for every 23,582 people. Number of white Americans who live in a census tract with at least one supermarket: 31 percent. Number of black Americans who live in a census tract with at least one supermarket: 8 percent. The bright spot in all of this: I turned up good evidence that if reputable supermarket chain makes an effort to market to a low-income neighborhood, it can be rewarded. When you put a good market in a poor neighborhood, people in that neighborhood become very loyal. You have to arrange the store differently and understand that poverty means people shop differently, at different times and in different amounts. But, they will utilize that store in high numbers and the store can turn a profit. I saw several examples of it happening, here in Charlotte and in several other cities.

It's SouthPark. Never "mall." They would be highly offended at the very notion. And Kulman, you posted Charlotte Magazine as a link? Et tu, Brentus?

No, they were whole. Cracked and dropped into the simmering broth just before dropping in the dumpings, so they were poached. She cooked them long enough for the yellows to be solid.

Rather than wade into the dumpling question, can I throw out another question? My mother always made C&D with eggs added to the final mix. She'd make the mixture and the chicken, then while the dumplings were cooking, she'd cracked several eggs into the pot and let them cook until solid. I've asked her where that came from and she isn't sure. It was something her mother and my father's mother both did. She thinks it was a way to stretch the pot to serve more people when chickens could be scrawny and maybe hadn't yielded that much meat.

Good question, and I was about to raise the same issue. However, I would argue (sorry, I'm in an argumentative mood this morning) that in the barbecue business, a pit most certainly can be an above-ground construction. A pit dug in the ground works fine for home-based barbecue, but it isn't efficient for a business. You could still make the distinction between restaurants like Lex 1 and Sweatman's that have large brick pits and those that are using other means of cooking, like Short Sugar's.

Wow, somewhere, someone is scribbling down this idea for a doctoral thesis: "The Movement of Foodways in the 20th Century." (Hmmm, maybe it's time to apply for that post-grad program myself . . . ) I'd agree with you on all points (even the need for that joke to have crutches), except the final sentence. Can you really make a case that Tex-Mex is restaurant-based and soul food isn't? If soul food is an outgrowth of the Great Migration, wasn't it most likely to be found in small restaurants that served workers living in a strange city who hadn't yet established neighborhoods or moved their families to join them? I see the same thing happening here in Charlotte, N.C., with small restaurants that serve the Mexican and Central American communities. Historian Donna Gabbacia, author of the book "We Are What We Eat," an excellent study of immigration and food patterns, pointed out about five years ago that Charlotte was getting more authentic Mexican food than you would find in Chicago. Because the population base was smaller, the restaurants and food stores were there to serve only people within the community -- many of them young men without families here yet. Since the businesses didn't have much competition, they hadn't yet had to change to attract non-Mexican customers. And wouldn't Tex-Mex have been just as likely to be home-based cuisine being made on remote, rural locations like ranches, where people were cooking for themselves using local ingredients and influences from Mexican workers and cooks?

Giacomo's is FANTASTIC and not only are the folks there great, they have a new "branch" on the corner of New Garden and Battleground Ave. I'm not sure which is closer to the coliseum but the Battleground branch may have less of a crowd around ACC tournament time. ← I'm glad to hear Giacomo's is thriving. He's a neat guy with an interesting backstory. As I recall (from a two-year-old memory, so forgive me on all the details), he was from a New York meat market family. He wanted to be a firefighter, but then 9/11 happened and he ended up coming south and going into the family business. He calls it "a pork store" in the way that people in NY and NJ know that term (and with the same accent -- "po-WK sto-wah"). Looking back in my files, I also noticed another one worth checking, the wine store Zeto. The owners were interesting and knew the area. And I had the same reaction others have: You just don't expect G'boro to have much going on in food, Winston-Salem and High Point usually get the attention. But when you dig around, you find an eclectic and intriguing mix. Somebody I interviewed there pointed out that with several universities and colleges, it has a good ethnic mix and enough professors to keep the small places going. Maybe that's a good thread for e-g: The connection between food and academia. You really see it in Chapel Hill/Durham, but I bet it's the same across the country. Wherever you've got professors, you've got good cheap wine, decent espresso and a demand for Euro ingredients!

I ate at a number of places around Greensboro for a food travel story about two years ago. I liked the energy at Liberty Oak, with the open kitchen arrangement, and I enjoyed Undercurrent and Bistro Sophia. But I was really knocked out by the menu selections at Bert's Seafood Grille. It looks like a typical seafood restaurant, and it has all the expected things -- broiled stuff, fried stuff, shrimp. But when you look closer, the menu gets interesting. They had fish that I didn't think was available in North Carolina at all. The owners do a good job of having high-quality seafood flown in. While you're near the coliseum, there's a bizarre food store that's worth checking out. It has tobacco in the name -- Tobacco USA? It used to be a place to buy cartons of cigarettes, but they started adding food. Now it's a gourmet warehouse. And if you really have interest and time to buy good food, Giacomo's, the Italian "pork store," is well worth a stop. And it's not that far from the coliseum either. 4 or 5 miles, maybe?

OK, I'm back in the office, where I have Mariani's "Dictionary of American Food & Drink" handy. According to him, "Chop Suey first appeared in print in 1888 but most be older. Chop suey was a mixture of vegetables and meat concocted by the Chinese cooks who fed the workers on the Pacific railroad lines in the middle the last (meaning 19th) century. Although there is no such dish in China, the Mandarin words for chopped up odds and ends, tsa sui, would approximate the sound of 'chop suey' as spoken by Western Americans." On the fried chicken and waffles, I've heard it was started by musicians who would go out to eat after the clubs closed, when it was too early for breakfast but too late for dinner, but John T. Edge would be the authority, from his fried chicken research.

I'm home for a few days and don't have my food reference books at hand. But chop suey, I believe, long predates the post-war era. I think it dates to the early 20th century. Sorry, we've wandered far afield of your lunch in Harlem!

I've used Cutters Edge a number of times. Since you have to take knives there, usually a group of friends get together and send everything at once. Sur La Table also does knife sharpening,

Wow, young William. Soul food terroir. Recipes get handed down through the generations, one branch of the family moves to another place. They try to make the food they knew with what's available, all the while telling the next generation, "This is what we used to live on." Then that generation starts making something that tastes like home. Just not the original home. Chop suey bares a pretty distant -- almost negligible -- resemblance to real Chinese cooking. But somewhere, in some distant past, some cook probably started out to make something that resembled what he ate in the mother country using these strange, foreign ingredients. Pretty wonderful, I say. Food evolves, which keeps it endlessly interesting.

All of the above (and amazingly, I have almost everything named in my kitchen right now, including the Durkee's and the Steen's), adding: Dixie Lily Grits. The only kind I use when I don't have time to cook the stone-ground kind. Lard from a plastic tub, cut up into blocks and frozen in a big plastic bag. (Any brand but Armor, the stuff in the box.) Lawry's Seasoned Salt. It isn't a Southern brand (I don't think), but you can't make potato salad without it. Texas Pete. Oh yeah, somebody already said that. Tabasco Sweet and Hot. It's only out in test markets, but I got a sample of it recently and I'm already addicted.

The list of "best restaurants" would be very personal. If you look around on this thread, you'll find this question addressed several times. In the meantime, what's a "NYC-style restaurant"? I'm in New York frequently and I'd be hard pressed to pick a "New York style." Does that mean Katz's Deli, the Red Flame Coffee Shop or Jean-George?

Could be worse. They could be Sweet Potato Queens wearing fake tiaras. Nobody can shriek quite like a gaggle of Sweet Potato Queens in tiaras. Then again, as happened to me at a Cracker Barrel in Ronda, N.C., last spring: You could be surrounded by a meeting of the Red Hat Society. There aren't many dinner choices in Ronda. The red hat ladies were just the icing on my joyful serving of country-fried cake.

Duck fat vinaigrette. Suggested by someone whose name escapes me, when I started a post on making crayons from frozen duck fat. The very best way to dress a salad you're going to top with a comfitted duck leg.

For Halloween this year, I did a story on finding the lost candies of our youths. Most of the references were local (if you're in the Carolinas, you should know that fish camps, for some odd reason, are motherlodes of vanished candies). But I also turned up these web sites, if they're helpful: www.candyfavorites.com. This is the El Dorado of vanished candy. They only sell in bulk, but if you've got a major jones for something strange, you can probably find it here. Definitely troll the "hard to find" section. www.hometownfavorites. Of course. Everybody knows this one. www.mastgeneralstore.com. If you've been to the N.C. mountains, you know the Mast. All the root beer barrels and the rest, including Walnettos, are online. www.bigtipscandy.com. If you read "Candy Freak" and can't rest until you're have a Twin Bing, you can order the gift pack. I have the Big Tops Box on my desk and I'm doling it out, bar by bar. (The Idaho Spud really didn't ring my bell, but I'm looking forward to the Salted Nut Roll.)

That would be Brigitte Shaw. The bakery was named for her mother.

I turned the table on the marketers by using their own commercials to teach my son to spot the fibs in what the commercials claimed. ("See the string? It doesn't really fly. See all the stuff they have to add to make it 'part of a complete' breakfast? If you took the bowl of Cheesy Poofs away, wouldn't it still be a complete breakfast?") Today at 13, he's a wonderfully skeptical consumer, and he hates McDonald's. (But he definitely wants that hooker.)

Boiled-peanut suspicion always puzzles me. Peanuts are legumes, so why would it be weird to eat boiled peanuts when it isn't weird to eat boiled kidney beans or pintos? On the other hand, a good many Southerners are suspicious of boiled peanuts, too. In my experience, you only find them in South Carolina, Georgia, North Florida and Alabama. I was raised by Georgia natives in North Carolinas and our neighbors thought our boiled peanuts were downright disgusting. We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion of grits, already in progress . . .

I subscribe to the Cream of Wheat theory: Northerners see grits and think it's hot cereal, so they try to eat them plain. They don't know to mix their egg into them, or red-eye gravy, or fried ham. It couldn't be that they don't have red-eye gravy or fried ham, right? Of course, I also speak as a reformed nongritist. I wouldn't touch them when I was a kid. Had to meet up with cheese grits in Tallahassee and shrimp & grits in the Carolinas before I began to learn the errors of my age.

There's a really great hot dog vendor in my town who has Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein illustrations all over his bod. If you're really nice (OK, if you just show even minor interest), he'll show you the "Green Eggs and Ham" picture on his arm.

Sadly, not this year. Budgets and schedules are both tight. Sorry I won't be there to tell you in person how much your posts after the storm moved me. Give yourself a virtual hug around the neck from me.

I have no objections to Southern food writing by the regionally challenged (they get flustered when we call them "the Y word"), as long as it contains no variation on the phrase "in the land of chicken-fried steak and macaroni as a vegetable, who would except to find (fill in the blank with something sophisticated or ethnic)." Here in MY land of chicken fried steak, etc., I find you can find whatever you expect to find -- and a good deal you don't expect if you'd just open your eyes. Much as I love my boiled peanuts, I'll lob a bucket of them the next time I read another article about the South in a mainstream food publication that uses that approach. And I'd make it two buckets for Colman, Jane/Michael and Ruth.

Did anybody mention Martha Lou's? Or a pimento cheese sammie at Burbage's? Also, if you have even a little money, that wine store near the Ashley is really, really worth a stop.