Here are two wide-eyed articles, by New York reporters, about enigmatic Delta dishes: the Kool-Aid Dill by John T. Edge of the New York Times and the Red-Hot, Pork-Stuffed, Corn-Wrapped, Blues-Flavored Enigma by Colby Buzzell of Esquire. To their credit, both writers go beyond food review to tackle Delta-relevant subjects, such as race. When Buzzell asks two black men sitting outside Bud's Snack Bar in Tunica, enjoying "a lunchtime Busch tall can," about the origin of tamales in Mississippi, one passionately refutes the author's research that Mexicans had introduced the dish to Mississippians: "Our people! Black people! They did, and did it with a shook, a corn shuck. That's the way we did and my mama used to did it," he says. Edge, ironically, takes a less edgy, but somehow awkwardly professorial, approach to the demographics of Kool-Aid pickle consumers: "The pickles have been spotted as far afield as Dallas and St. Louis, but their cult is thickest in the Delta region, among the black majority population. In the Delta, where they fetch between 50 cents and a dollar, Kool-Aid pickles have earned valued space next to such beloved snacks as pickled eggs and pigs' feet at community fairs, convenience stores and filling stations," he writes.
Both culinary phenomena are surely familiar to Mississippians--black, white, Delta-bred or otherwise (though in my four months in Jackson, including two brief trips to Greenville, I have never heard of the tradition of dipping pickles in Kool-Aid)-- and the articles are clearly intended to introduce them to Northerners (read: Yankees). So, for me, they worked. (Though, I did experience that reassuring feeling of the tourist becoming the local, by laughing at the newer tourists, when Buzzell expressed difficulty in accepting that Mexicans not only live in Mississippi but also have contributed a major food tradition here: "When I think of Mississippi, I think Southern accents and how the hell do you spell that? I don't think tamales. When I think tamales, I think Mexico and Mexicans. I have yet to meet a Mexican with a Southern accent," he writes. "Si, como no," I thought, even though I'm half-Mexican and had no idea tamales were served in Mississippi when I moved here.)
Anyways, I'm interested to see what native Mississippians (not fleeting locals or Yankee transports) think of the articles. Offensive? Enlightening? Have you, feeling inspired, busted out the Kool-Aid reserves and sour cream packets already? (By the way, any thoughts on sour cream tamale protocol? Sour cream is omnipresent on tamale plates in Mexico, but nearly absent on the plates I served at Hal & Mal's. I would know, because I scooped the damn sour cream into plastic soufflés and put them on the plates myself. We don't do "waiter backs" at Hal & Mal's. And, currently, I don't work there, so this isn't a "conflict of interest.") Read up, enjoy, and salivate. Also, don't miss the cool illustrated map of Mississippi in the Esquire piece or the giant, phallic pickle in the Times one.
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