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<< See list of SFA Member Contributions by Rod Davis EXPRESS-NEWS TRAVEL EDITOR
CLARKSDALE, Miss. - Eugene Hicks not only sells hot tamales here in this fabled hometown of the blues, he sells a lot of them. Sometimes 500 dozen a week: over the counter, from the drive-through window, express delivery in containers holding five dozen each. So many that he often diverts the $8,000 electric press he bought for stuffing homemade Italian sausage into use as a squeezer for his distinctive, slightly sweet mix of ground beef filling. So many that he invented a tray holding dozens of 3-inch cylindrical plastic molds to shape the meat, ready to be flipped over for hand-rolling in white, self-rising cornmeal (with a trace of paprika) and wrapped in cornhusks. So many that this 60-year-old Henry Ford of tamales production, who got his start making bicycle deliveries as a teenager, counts among his diners former President Bill Clinton and an ongoing galaxy of politicians and celebrities. So here's a liner note to the legions of German, British, Japanese, Canadian and American pilgrims who come to this steamy, 250-mile-long stripe of alluvial Mississippi to pay homage to the legends. You can stand at the "crossroads" where Robert Johnson allegedly bartered his soul. You can hear live music by new bands and old hands. You can catch up on history at the Delta Blues Museum and you can wander over to Morgan Freeman's Ground Zero blues club. But if you want to get the true taste of the Mississippi Delta, best also to genuflect at Hicks' Variety Food Shop on South State Street. Just past the tracks. Ditto if you're in Greenville, but make it Doe's Eat Place or Scott's Hot Tamales. Or The White Front Cafe in Rosedale. Or The Big Apple Inn in Jackson, Solly's Hot Tamales in Vicksburg, Fat Mama's Tamales or The Donut Shop in Natchez, Reno's in Greenwood, John's Homestyle Hot Tamales or the Airport Grocery in Cleveland, the Patio Cafe in Benoit, The Onward Store in Onward. And on, and on, and on... Burp. Excuse me. In this beautiful, brutal, bruised land, where cotton fields were carved from primordial forests and post-slavery plantations grew the 12-bar guitar-based style that transformed generations of musicians, another, lesser-known history also forged a path: that of one of the New World's most successful convenience foods.
Cheap, easy to make from local ingredients, tamales also were easily transportable to the field, where their calories could fuel the impossibly harsh labor required to clear the dense forests along the river and convert the land for King Cotton. Almost always called "hot tamales," they became a culinary and push-cart favorite among the lower Delta's overwhelmingly African American population, and took on a regional identity of their own. Yet for the most part, Delta hot tamales are remarkably similar to their Tex-Mex relatives. Lard or shortening provides the binding, with flavor and spice from chile powder, red pepper, cumin, garlic and whatever "secret" ingredients the preparers have added over generations. Beef - ground, chuck, brisket - is the preferred meat rather than pork; cornmeal, rather than masa harina, for the dough. Corn shucks are the wrap of choice, except for a few places that use squares of parchment paper. Often as not, you'll get packets of saltine crackers with your order.
Venison-filled tamales are popular during hunting season, and at the Delta Fast Foods gas station on U.S. 61 in Cleveland the tamales ("shuck lickin' good") are filled with ground turkey. Some places use chicken. Some use blends. I heard talk of deep-fried tamales, which in a land that deep-fries anything, is undoubtedly true. Today, hot tamales are the stuff of parties and appetizers in the homes of blacks, whites, everyone. Food writer John T. Edge of the Southern Foodways Alliance has called them "the most popular snack food in the Delta." It's put another way by Dominick "Little Doe" Signa Jr., whose late father, "Big Doe," started Doe's Eat Place in Greenville in 1941, after his Sicilian-born father moved to town in 1903 to start the business that now houses the restaurant. To Little Doe, " Tamales are to the Delta as barbecue is to Memphis." Although they are also popular in the Delta regions of Louisiana and Arkansas, the epicenter of the migration is Mississippi. All along the "Blues Highway," U.S. 61, and on the nearby Great River Road, Mississippi 1, you can hardly pass a gas station, let alone a town, hamlet or city, without seeing signs of the shuck.
Civil rights leader Medgar Evers, murdered in Jackson, once kept his NAACP field secretary office upstairs. He held freedom rider meetings in the cafe until the fire and health departments suddenly decided the suspiciously activist eatery had developed serious code infractions. Today, the struggling Farish Street neighborhood is at the center of a planned new entertainment district, but businesses like the Big Apple remain iconic anchors of times good and bad. Jackson isn't exactly in the Delta - to Mississippi purists it only stretches from Vicksburg to Memphis, no farther eastward than the smell and sound of the river, and only grudgingly into the other states - but it's close enough to reflect plenty of influence. It also has one of the prototypical connections of cuisine and culture. Nearly a century ago, owner Gene "Geno" Lee's great-grandfather, Juan Mora, moved from Mexico City northward, first into New Mexico, then Mississippi in the early 1930s. He stopped in Jackson, where he met the African American woman their descendants would remember as Maemama Lee. Mora also met an African American man who had been selling tamales on a street corner. Mora bought the recipe, modified it, and starting making his own tamales, meanwhile opening the small store that would evolve into the Big Apple Inn. Three subsequent generations of Lees (they took the matriarchal last name) honed the recipe and the business.
Today, the Lees ship their handmade tamales - spiced ground beef, masa made from scratch, corn shucks from New Mexico, all simmered in big metal pots - all over the country, as far as Seattle. This summer, a second Big Apple Inn opened in North Jackson. "We even supply tamales to some of the Mexican restaurants around here," said Geno, 38. "It's very labor-intensive for someone else to do." "So who makes them for you?" I asked. "Some of your cooks?" "I make them. And my wife, Angie. We make them by hand and roll them up five or six hours a day. Sometimes 100 dozen a week or more."
The plain tables had hot sauce if you wanted, although the tamales were plenty spicy. On the walls were framed newspaper and magazine articles. Some were about owner Jewel Dean McCain, who has run the place for more than two decades and was invited to show her skills in making tamales at the Smithsonian's 1997 Folklife Festival.
But most of the clippings, and a letter from former President George Bush and wife Barbara, celebrate Cuban-born Henry Howard Solly (possibly originally "Solis"), who made his way to Mississippi and started the place in 1939, after selling tamales from a cart. "Poppa," as McCain calls him, died in 1992, just short of his 101st birthday. With the help of her own family, McCain, who inherited the business from her mother, who was given it by "Poppa," still rolls and wraps the tamales by hand. She uses ground chuck, cornmeal and corn shucks, simmering them in water flavored by a grease-paste made from juices from the meat. She also overnights across the country, although, she says, "the shipping costs are a lot more than the tamales," which go for $6 a dozen, the standard price. After polishing off four or five, washed down by unsweet tea, I took off in the noonday heat to continue along the " Tamale Trail" or " Tamale Belt," heading north up U.S. 61 until I could pick up Mississippi 1 out of the hamlet of Onward, adjacent to the Delta National Forest. At the Onward Store, you can get gas, souvenirs, a hot lunch, and of course, hot tamales. It was near here that Teddy Roosevelt, on a 1902 hunt of his own, refused to shoot a captured bear, supposedly generating the "Teddy Bear" nickname. Surrounded by woods that were once thick with bears, panthers, alligators and other dangerous creatures, I thought the story seemed at least as plausible as the migration of tamales. But surprise finds were a constant on the journey. The first had been back in Natchez. I had cut down the hauntingly beautiful Natchez Trace Parkway from Vicksburg on slight digression to check out Fat Mama's Tamales, a log cabin-style cafe mainly known for its 16-oz. "Knock-You-Naked" margarita. It's a homey place, with Cajun and Mexican fare, savvily perched at the top of a road leading down to the riverside casinos below the hill. It also does a lively trade in hot tamales, so lively that now they are made-to-order and shipped in by an out-of-state supplier.
I decided to look around some more. I asked folks at the historic Natchez Eola Hotel, at the Bowie Tavern, whose carriage-style doors open onto the wide, winding Mississippi below the city's famous cliffs, and at a very weird downtown bar. Everyone said to check out The Donut Shop. That's just what it is. But 42-year-old former welder George Scott and his partner, Mary Tyson, started selling tamales there, too, about a decade ago. Scott, who had to change careers after a nasty industrial accident involving poison gas, "stayed up 30 or 36 hours without going to sleep" to perfect his recipe. He favors ground yellow cornmeal, which he spreads rather thinly around an unusually large filling of spiced meat. A big, bearded, white guy, not the sort you would expect to brag about having been written up in Southern Living, he has become such an avid maker of tamales that he dreams of ways to enter contests, of buying portable trailers to take around to fairs and other gatherings. And he said there's going to be a name change. Soon, The Donut Shop will also be "The Home of Big Poppa's Hot Tamales." Did that name have any reference to Fat Mama's, I wondered. He gave me the kind of look a welder would if I asked if solder would melt.
I dawdled, never took the shortest way to anywhere. Below Greenville, I left the main highways to get lost in a maze of narrow, unmarked farm roads crisscrossing through catfish ponds, cotton fields and kudzu-draped trees. I glimpsed another universe. Thunderclouds over a riverside lake lined with slap-dash fishing camps. A pond so thick with egrets that their flapping wings speckled the blue sky white. Farms as remote as any plantation in the 19th century. Swamps thick with moss and fallen trees. Lightning hitting forest around dozens of glass-smooth catfish ponds. Also I ate a lot. My original plan to "taste test" tamales at every place I found had to be abandoned in the face of overwhelming numbers. At the end of one particularly overzealous day I realized I had consumed close to three dozen, so many that even the cafe owners wondered, none too delicately, if I might "need some Tums." I don't care much for antacids, but I can say with much authority that a good bottle of red wine is more to the point and much more suitable to listening to R.L. Burnside on a blues radio station. That and the strange, brown water of Greenville, discolored by deterioration of the city's aging pipes, and unlikely to be remedied anytime soon without financial aid. They're a little defensive about it, though, the way people in Denver are about the brown cloud.
But Greenville was on my trail because of Doe's Eat Place, deeply embedded in a historic black part of town where storefront businesses specialize in African books or clothing, next to small community churches, laundries, grocery stores. Over the many years Doe's has evolved into a famous steakhouse with an upscale dinner clientele from all over the area. But the tamales that go back to its inception as a grocery store and honky-tonk are still a big part of the business. "Daddy sold them as a way to make money," said "Little Doe," and apparently it still pays off, with an expansion to Doe's Eat Place in Oxford, run by brother Charles. There are also several restaurants called Doe's Eat Place in Arkansas, and Bill Clinton has been to some of them, too, but they are not family-run and use the name under royalty arrangement. Signa said he can crank out up to 300 dozen tamales a week with the heroic-scale tamales-making machine in the front and the big kitchen in back, next to the best seats in the dining area. He uses chuck roast, white cornmeal, spices them to a degree any Texan can appreciate, and simmers them in a meat-based sauce for about 2 1/2 hours. But at Doe's, there's a difference that takes getting used to. Parchment paper. Signa said that although the restaurant once used corn shucks, they sometimes had trouble getting enough, and tried a thin paper made by a firm in Jackson. It's more efficient for high volume machine-wrapping, he said. I sample a half-dozen on two different visits. Other than a slightly off-putting gothic paleness, I couldn't find any real difference caused by the parchment substitute. But I missed the corn shucks. No problem. The more traditional versions can be found throughout Greenville. The best - maybe the best in the Delta - come from a tiny white and red-trimmed hut in a vacant lot heading north on the Great River Road, known in town as Martin Luther King Boulevard.
Scott's Hot Tamales caters to the evening crowd, with fans far and wide. Started in 1950 by the late Aaron Scott, the business is continued by his family, including Hazel and Eunice, who sold me what was just about a perfect balance of shuck-wrapped ground brisket, spices and cornmeal. The hut, which looks more like a snow-cone stand, is too small for cooking, so the tamales are prepared at the family home in Metcalfe and brought in. Orders are wrapped in tin foil and then covered in white butcher paper, a variation on the newspaper packaging many places use. A dozen cost $6, crackers 25 cents extra. Scott was once stationed in San Antonio, where he got his taste for Mexican food. After returning to Mississippi, he bought a recipe from a local vendor and started to experiment. "The recipe told him what goes in but not how much," recalls his wife, Elizabeth, 81. They worked nights and weekends, she said, "until we got them like they are today." In Cleveland, on U.S. 61, the word-of-mouth goes to John's Homestyle Hot Tamales, sold to-go at the edge of the revitalized downtown district. A "bunch" of three, apparently the smallest unit of tamal (nobody in the Delta ever uses that word - a single is a tamale) you can buy goes for $1.43. Outside Cleveland on Mississippi 8 toward Rosedale, the place to stop is the Airport Grocery Eat Place, which calls itself "Cleveland's home of the blues." A mostly beer-and-burger roadhouse tavern that would easily fit into the Texas Hill Country, it sells about 100 dozen handmade hot tamales a week.
Linda Lewis, the cook, said her hot tamales are made with white cornmeal and spiced beef, hand-rolled. She simmers, rather than steams them - a common technique in the Delta - to retain moisture: "I just strike a boil, turn it off, and let them sit there for awhile." As I was tucking into a half-dozen, I noticed they were served with ketchup on the side. Manager Sandra Bolden said some people like them with sour cream or ranch dressing. Actually, I think most people like them with beer.
I was especially eager to visit Rosedale, not only because it was referenced in Robert Johnson's lyrics and Eric Clapton's matchless interpretation of "Crossroads," and not only because it and Cleveland are, inexplicably, both the seats of Bolivar County. Mostly because it is home to the White Front Cafe, also known as Joe's Hot Tamale Place. Rosedale calls itself "The Delta City of Brotherly Love," which may or may not be catchier than nearby Beulah's motto, "A Great Place for Fishing." But the tiny town certainly has tamales that have mesmerized patrons since 80-year-old Joe Pope, originally from Selma, Ala., started serving them more than 30 years ago. I walked in half-blinded by the sun to the cool, shady dining room. Pretty much the only room. A few well-worn tabletops filled the floor. At the one in the far corner, Joe Pope's sister, too shy to give her name, was working quietly and efficiently behind two giant mounds: one of cornmeal dough and the other of finely mushed beef. A pile of shucks to the side. She said she and the other family members who operate the cafe churn about 75-100 dozen hot tamales a week.
Pope, thin, weathered and sharp as an old blues man, had dropped by, his new black sedan parked out front. He said his recipe came down from a tamales-cart vendor who in turn got it from a Mexican worker who had been in the area in the 1930s, but that it has been modified over time. Like "Big Doe" Signa and Delta makers of hot tamales for over a hundred years, Pope got into the business because it looked like a good way to make money. He's aware that people have favorite joints throughout the Delta, and he knows about most of them, but he doesn't like to get competitive about who's on top: "I say, let the people tell me who's the best."
I had traveled a little beyond the Delta, east to Greenwood to visit Reno's Cafe, where Pearl Johnson has been making hot tamales for years, but got there too late. Nor had I had much luck in Tunica, the recently casino-infested suburb of Memphis. I had crossed over the bridge into Helena, Ark., where a disturbingly poor downtown has pinned its future - like its neighbors in Mississippi - on blues tourism. It's also home to Joe St. Columbia, whose Sicilian grandfather, Pasquale, saw a good business in tamales. But St. Columbia now mostly sells his goods up the road in West Helena. So I turned back down the Great River Road for Jackson. En route, I passed through Rosedale, and thought about picking up a half-dozen again at the White Front Cafe, but let's just say I needed to expand my diet. Instead, I turned off at the southern edge of the town for the Great River Road State Park. I wanted to get a parting view of the Ol' Man from the park's 75-foot wooden observation tower.
An entry road leads up over the levee and down again through bottomland and fishing ponds. When I finally got to the tower, I climbed up to the viewing platform, an eagle's perch in this flat terrain. The air was hazy, thick with jungle-like moisture, the sun close to setting. The rain-swollen Mississippi churned on in the distance, past the dense tree line, beyond a wide, shifting sand bank. A load of barges pushed upriver, just as the tamales had done.
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PHOTO: GENO LEE COURTESY
BIG APPLE INN ; ALL OTHER PHOTOS: ROD DAVIS/STAFF • NICA ID:
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If you go Getting there: Most major airlines fly to Jackson, where rental cars are available. For the best Delta driving route, take Mississippi 1 (Great River Road) where possible, U.S. 61 (Blues Highway) otherwise.
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