BackwaterBlog

A good many years ago I was invited to a fraternity get together.

This wasn’t the sort of thing involving kegs and young men in stovepipe hats, either.  None of that college-aged kid stuff.  The lads throwing this gig were considered young if their first born was attending college, for heavens sake.  I think the eldest member of the group was pushing 90, and he blended in nicely with a crew given to cigars and a vasting sweating array of cheap beer in a cooler full of ice.

(You can read all about the fraternity itself here, http://www.hoo-hoo.org/, if you’ve the time and inclination.  Don’t look at the pictures.  Don’t look at the pictures regarding the embalming thingy they do every year.  I haven’t been to a meeting in far too long but oh . . . the memories.)

Part and parcel of this club was the food and the place.  The place was a genuine southern Roadhouse, the sort of thing you see very infrequently now.  Not quite a bar, not quite a restuarant.  It was actually suppose to be the kitchen for a far flung catering business but there was always beer on hand and a large room with folding tables and hundreds of grainy pictures on the wall.  Pictures of men in creased slacks and pork-pie hats guzzling drinks in mason jars, mostly.

But the food.

Oysters, fresh from the river nearby and served any way you could imagine.  Virginia ham, thinned sliced, salted and culled from a hog just down the road, Smithfield being but five minutes away.  Boiled peanuts, grits and more.  None of it had ever seen the inside of a grocery store either.  Straight from the field or slaughterhouse and done up right there.  An amazing feat, and probably subject to all sorts of fines by the powers-that-be, if they hadn’t been right there alongside you with a mouthfull of fried oysters and a plate loaded with ham.

Then there was the barbeque.  A high holy grail of barbeque.  Carolina style of course, pulled pork steamed fresh in a vast stainless steel vat and simmered until tender.  Fresh, oh how fresh it was.  There was always a que formed for the barbeque, a line of grizzled men snaking through the kitchen awaiting their turn, and inevitably the shout would ring out.  “The Sauce!  Jed forgot to put out the Sauce again!”

White haired and genial Jed.  I suspect he did it on purpose, for this was his moment of glory.  He would affect a look of surprise, hand to mouth, and scamper to the storeroom with an empty box.  Coming back laden down, thrusting a bottle of something high in the air to the roar of a hundred voices.  “The Sauce!  We must have the Sauce!”, and setting a few dozen bottles of it randomly about.

Now the barbeque itself could stand alone, but with a dash of the sauce?  My God.

Vinegar based, to be sure.  But there was mystery there.  Cayenne, salt, a hint of something . . . no one ever could be sure, and Jed wasn’t telling.  “Family recipe,” he’d beam.  “Been making it that way for a hundred years.”  If pestered (and given $5), he’d even let you take a bottle home.  A clear bottle with no labeling whatsoever.  I got a bottle more than once, and for weeks thereafter I could be found dosing every last thing on my plate with it.  Eggs, beef, broccoli.  Mattered not, the Sauce was the thing.  A gateway to culinary heaven.

Ally would often look on, alternately amused and horrified as I sat to dinner and contemplated hamburgers or steak or fish with the familiar botte at my elbow.  “Getting kind of low on your ambrosia there, aren’t you?”, she would ask.  “Be a shame to run out before you tried it on your Frosted Flakes tomorrow morning.”

I’d give her the look, of course.  The ‘Don’t bother me now with the future, I’m having an affair with a barbeque Sauce’ look.  She tried the stuff once, maybe twice to humor me.  On barbeque.  Once she drank enough sweet tea she was fine afterwards, too.

Now all of this is the precursor to recent events, which I ought to entitle ‘Whence I rekindle My wasted Youth’ or something.  I haven’t been to the Roadhouse in a good while, don’t know if the fraternity is still active in this area.  But I still like a good barbecue once in a while, and here in the Backwater there is a relatively good place to go and get you some.  Ally and I went late of a Saturday evening, too hot to cook sort of day.

She ordered first.  “The pulled pork plate, please.  Fries and slaw on the side.  Sweet tea.”  A Southern sort of thing, the staple of good eating, and it sounded pretty darn good to me.  Make it two, with a longneck if you please.

The waitress brought the drinks and cornbread and a surprise, a basket of plastic sauce bottles (Mild, Hot, Hotter).  “Y’all need sauce for your barbecue, ‘course?”, with a look to me.  Oh indeedy yes, we need some sauce, and I reached for the premium bottle with a crafty look.  “Heh.  Bet they wish they could copy out that Hoo sauce that Jed used to make.  Why, I’d give my eye teeth if could just get one more . . .”

Ally sighed.  “Will this never end?  You’ve been on this crusade for the past ten years.  Just stop at the Roadhouse one day and see if he’s still in there.  Buy a damn case of the stuff if you have to.”

“But he’s all the way up in Virginny, babe.  Awful long way to go.  Just for some sauce, I mean.”

She snorted.  “Yuh.  That’s my line, isn’t it?  You don’t want to go up there ’cause you know if you did, ya might not ever come back, isn’t that it?”

“Suspect you’re right, darlin’”, and I got a little dreamy eyed.  Those boiled peanuts.  And an oyster stew.  All capped off with a steaming plate of . . .

“Here we go folks!”, and the sweet young thang swished to the table with a pair of heavy platters, an impossible amount of pork and a mountain of fries.  “Y’all need anything else now?”

“Elbow room and another longneck, hon”, I said calmly.

To be continued, I swear it.