My Southern Journey by Rick Bragg Page A

something called Bloody Mary Mix.
    And you can keep your dadgum pretzels.
     
    MAGIC ON THE PLATE
    Louisiana Kitchen : June 2012

    I t may be the magic is real. Here amid marked-down voodoo and dime store gris-gris, between piney-woods preachers and deep-swamp fortunetellers, may swirl real spirits that enrich this place, or at least permeate the food that delights us and drinks that lubricate us. Here, where something as humble as a wooden spoon can seem like a magic wand, where ghosts of ancestors stir a little something extra into recipes passed down 150 years, things routinely taste better than the chemistry of ingredients or the alchemy of preparation should allow. I tasted it for the first time more than a quarter-century ago, swirling up and into and through me, from the bottom of a glass.

    It was on the balcony of the Columns Hotel on St. Charles Avenue. I was sitting in a wicker chair, just decrepit enough to be comfortable, drinking a glass of Jim Beam on the rocks. I am not a big drinker, but there has always been something comforting about brown liquor. After one, I always felt like I was covered in a warm quilt. The secret, across my life and my ancestors’ lives, was not to drink seven more, turn the quilt into a cape or a parachute, and jump off something tall.
    This time I only had the one. I was down to ice and watered-downwhiskey—wasn’t it Sinatra who said you had to let it lay in the ice a little while?—when that special peace slipped over and around me, but in a way I had never felt before. The old streetcar, the color of a WWII surplus jeep, clanked and rattled on the neutral ground below with a rhythm I had never heard. From the bar below, a scent of candied cherries and orange slices and spiced rum and good perfume seemed to reach up and out into the dusk around me. The live oaks creaked. The night flowed through the ancient trees like a river. And I could have slept, if that glass had held just one half-inch more. I sipped the last of the liquor—the same liquor you can buy in almost any bar in this world—and my mind emptied for just a few precious minutes of contention and ambition, and filled with the essence of this place, this street, this city, this state. And all the conjurer behind the bar had to do was unscrew a bottle, and pour.

    Think of the magic that Celestine Dunbar and her family created in their place on Freret Street, before the waters took it—fried seafood platters that came so fast from the fryer that you could scorch your hands and fried chicken that made grown men damn near cry, served with stewed okra, and sweet potato pies, and good cornbread. You could eat all the barbecued chicken and stewed cabbage you could stand on a weekday, give the nice lady at the cash register ten dollars and have enough left to tip like a sultan, ride the streetcar, and buy a grape snowball. The allure of that fried chicken held me so tightly that after the city drowned I traced it to Loyola, where Mrs. Dunbar would make young people the best lunch in the whole academic world—many of whom had no idea from whence the source of that magic came. I have forgotten most of the food I have eaten in this life. I have never forgotten one crumb of hers.
    I know cynics will say it is just cooking. Maybe. I mean, how complicated is this food, really?
    You simmer some beans, roast some fat hog, boil some shrimp or some blue crabs, concoct some gumbo. You have been taught, over generations, not to fear the saltshaker, or the butter, or the garlic, and you do not sprinkle cayenne so much as you ladle it. You give onions, green pepper, and celery a celestial name—trinity—to raise them above the mundane of simple ingredients, but it is still just a seasoning.
    But how do you explain the difference in grabbing lunch elsewhere in this poor ol’ sorry world to sitting down to a plate of creamy red beans and braised ham shank at Betsy’s Pancake House on Canal Street, where the fat from the meat slowly,