August 2021 • Page 3 of 4 • Deep Fried Kudzu

August 12, 2021August 13, 2021

Storage.

Silos
Minter City MS, 2018.

August 12, 2021August 13, 2021

Pink Velvet Salad And An Ode To Covered Dish and Cafeteria Salads

Thinking about dishes that aren’t very often found on menus, and remembered the Pink Velvet Salad at the Crystal Grill in Greenwood, Mississippi. There’s an asterisk by it, that it’s only available in season, and I’m not certain the exact recipe (there’s not even a description of what it’s made of on the menu), though it’s likely some combination of whipped cream, cherry, pineapple, and sweetened condensed milk. Oftentimes, pink velvet includes chopped pecans, too. At the Crystal Grill, it’s served alongside fresh fruit and chicken salad sandwich over lettuce leaf.

I have some great stories about this place. Once, we went after High Holiday services at Ahavath Rayim here for lunch with Joe Erber, the subject of this terrific Bill Aron photograph (that’s Joe, on the left, in his USPS cap). I sat separate in services from Av because it’s traditionally an Orthodox synagogue, but was told very sweetly that I totally didn’t have to do that. Can’t even say all the wonderful things about Greenwood; we’re among those who have been invited to the “holy garage”, hung out with Murray Kornfeld at his shop there, got to know the Greenbergs and matriarch Ilse who escaped after Kristallnacht to Shanghai.

Ahavath Rayim — I took this pic in 2016

I’ll say we’ve been to towns where the people were more reserved and to towns where everybody wanted to take us home, and Greenwood is one of those places where we’ve felt just roundly loved.

The placemats at Crystal Grill include the Jewish blessing for food in English along with Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christianity:

The last time we were at the Crystal Grill, we heard someone speaking Hebrew and made all sorts of connections. I mean it’s just the craziest, most wonderful thing.

Anyway, switching back to food for a sec, the boys love their pies — that’s what they’re famous for…chocolate meringue, coconut meringue…

Those great little salads like the pink velvet make me think of all these other little salads — granny salads! — just presh. When I was little, we’d go to Morrison’s where it seemed there was just a world of little cube-shaped gelatin jewels in low-slung bowls, creamy cold concoctions…sweet domes of Cool Whip-based salads cradled in lettuce leaf. If Morrison’s had been Jewish, I know there would have been gefilte fish on lettuce leaf with carrot coin atop right there at the beginning of the line. It would have been placed right next to those half pears stuffed with cottage cheese and the sweet maraschino cherry.

how they do the pear salad at Matthew’s Cafeteria in Tucker, Georgia

Carrot salad (you know they love you if it’s golden raisins!)! Seven layer salad (can you even have a family reunion without someone bringing their prized gigantic glass bowl of 7-layer?)! Glorious pasta salads with olives…maybe giardiniera! English pea salad! Those stalwarts: coleslaw and potato salad! Shrimp salad with the tiniest shrimp ever! Marinated mushroom salad! Waldorf! Ambrosia! Cornbread salad! Deviled eggs! Curried chicken salad, or the plain one with almonds! Macaroni salad! Grape salad! Egg salad! Broccoli salad! Pimento cheese with crackers! Peach salad with cottage cheese! Pineapple cheese salad! The queen of all congealed salads, tomato aspic with side of mayonnaise!

Honey from the Rock Cafe in Augusta, Georgia

At this point I’m either Bubba from Forrest Gump or Rain Man about sweet little salads. I can do this all day.

Aspic at The Colonnade in Atlanta

And then how can you go through a line of these and then say to yourself, ah, I’ll have the little garden salad with the two little teardrop tomatoes on the side and the three thin rings of purple onion? No, you literally need to go back to the start of the line and get something that started with gelatin or whipped cream, or both. haha! xoxo!

Peach salad at Pell City Steakhouse, Pell City AL (sidenote: the person who did their website did not capture the absolute perfection of the ’70s vibe that is Pell City Steakhouse, but you know, stock images, sooooo. Saying this so you’ll know it is not steak-on-plank, it is glorious Fred Flintstone-colored melamine plates and a rack by the register that still has a CERTS and Clorets sign on it. )

Beloved Pell City Steakhouse

BTW, there’s still one Morrison’s in the world, the one in Mobile. They’re actually owned by Piccadilly but I think in deference, they’ve let this one location stay with the old name. I remember in the ’90s when a friend and I decided we were going to go to USA (the University of South Alabama) and I was going to be a teacher (haaaa — changed my major maybe ten times (and colleges) after that) we actually comforted each other that no matter what, we wouldn’t starve because after all, Mobile had a Morrison’s.

S&S Cafeteria, Knoxville TN

There are a couple of salads that are my go-to for a covered dish event if I’ve needed to bring something cold. Not everyone makes these. I think if you talk with someone from certain areas of the Midwest, they’ll tell you that strawberry pretzel salad is their invention. No idea. But the weird thing is, my hometown of Cullman and this area of north/central Alabama has such a fondness for this dish that it can be found in grocery deli cases made by the store kitchen, and some restaurants have it too.

Ah yes, the 9×13 glass pan: strawberry pretzel salad

hi, gorgeous.

Truly, it can go either way. Is it a salad? Yes. Is it a dessert? Also yes.

Now pineapple delight, I had to go through a relationship to get this recipe. I dated a boy whose mother made this and the relationship was not worth it on its own but this pineapple delight is the weirdest kind of consolation gift that kinda makes up for it.

The boy wasn’t bad, he just wasn’t marriage material. I was in college and we worked at the same place, so potential for awkward was set at 100%. I felt like maybe our conversations could have started with what we read in The New Yorker or Harpers or The Atlantic at little more and Bassmaster Magazine a little less. That new Humminbird Fish Finder is sweeeeeet but did you hear about…

having a boyfriend in college who had his own boat was pretty cool; my photography was bad but I just passed it off to myself as artsy.

I’m sure I’ve told this story here before somewhere, but for our first date, he took me to a restaurant at a stockyard and I thought: this boy either REALLY gets me (because I love experiences and this was a cool surprise) or did he not know that first-date boilerplate in north Alabama at the time was trying to get into either Red Lobster or Olive Garden?

How can you start a relationship in Decatur, Alabama circa mid-90s without experiencing the sacrifice of only eating *one* Cheddar Bay biscuit so you don’t look like you have no self-control?

…If it goes well, maybe we’ll still be a couple when Lobsterfest comes back around…

The pineapple delight recipe was worth it, though.

xoxo!

August 11, 2021July 6, 2026

The Alluvian & Looking forward to Greenwood

We’ve been talking about another trip to the Delta soon, especially to make certain we get to experience Lusco’s again before they close, and that’s got me thinking of hotels and what we might want to do — especially around Greenwood.

Our fave place to stay there is The Alluvian Hotel. We’ve likely stayed there at least a half-dozen times since it opened, and though it’s time for a refresh of the rooms in terms of furnishings/textiles, for the most part, it’s still very, very nice. The common areas have a clean look, and it’s by far the nicest hotel in the area. Here are pics from our last visit a couple of years ago:

That’s Bill Dunlap’s ‘Delta Dog Trot’ above — really good article at Hotty Toddy from several years ago about Bill, his wife Linda Burgess, and their daughter, Maggie Dunlap.

“Talk is cheap in the art world and there’s way too much of it as there is,” Dunlap said. “As far as advice is concerned, the best and most profound I ever received was from a high school football coach, Jack Taylor, who often implored me to, “keep your head down and your feet moving.” He certainly had one thing in mind and I another. Maggie knows intuitively that connections, good fortune, family name, degrees and talent are worth very little if one does not do the work. That’s why we discus Caravaggio, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Rubens, Mr. Faulkner and Miss Welty today; they did the work.”

William Dunlap has pieces currently at Art Cellar Gallery in Banner Elk NC and Spillman | Blackwell in New Orleans on Camp Street. Actually, he and Linda Burgess have their work at Southside Gallery in Oxford and it always gives me pause what other great art they have there on the Square: Maude Schuyler Clay, Coulter Fussell, Glennray Tutor…

Most of the Alluvian’s issues were just standard upkeep (wall scrapes, dirty/dislodged shutters, even – whoops – mislabeled art). We’ll probably stay again in the next few months, but I’m also going to give a look to Tallahatchie Flats which is a different kind of experience. I think that place along with, say, the Shack Up Inn in Clarksdale is about the accommodations but even moreso the communal outside time with the people also staying there. That’s not so common, and just the kind of thing we like.

Now, the perfect time to go to the Delta is when the cotton is harvested and the sides of the road are littered with what looks like the fluffiest tiny clouds ever. That’s generally late September and October.

We’re trying to get to Greenwood before beloved Lusco’s closes. It’s supposed to be later this year, but I don’t know that they’ve announced a date.

I mean…you go there for the pompano and the onion rings and the crabmeat dishes but I just like the environment better than anything. Pull the curtain to close off the table and it feels a little magic. And the buzzer is there on the wall — need something? Push that very mechanical-looking button.

I’ve never taken a good picture of anything we’ve eaten here — there’s an odd green cast from the walls, and it’s dark — I mean the place is an old store.

Besides Lusco’s, we love Crystal Grill for the pies especially, and we really like Giardina’s which also has the little closed-off rooms for guests (supposedly a throw-back to Prohibition days) and really terrific food: