Food Detective: At Big Jones, it’s Southern food with side of history

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The shrimp ’n’ grits at Big Jones, 5347 N. Clark. | Rich Hein~Sun-Times

Updated: February 20, 2012 8:01AM

The enduring contributions of African Americans to Southern cooking constitute “the most important untold story in American food,” says Paul Fehribach of Andersonville’s Big Jones.

The book that opened Fehribach’s eyes was The Taste of Country Cooking by the chef and cookbook author Edna Lewis. She once famously told the New York Times, “As a child in Virginia, I thought all food tasted delicious. After growing up, I didn’t think food tasted the same, so it has been my lifelong effort to try and recapture those good flavors of the past.”

We’re led to believe that in the old days “you were close to starvation your whole life,” Fehribach says. “But that’s not so. In the Carolinas, slaves had their own gardens. When they were done working, they grew and cooked their own food.”

Because they relied upon fresh, locally grown produce, “slaves could eat better than most people eat today,” he says.

At Big Jones, one gains insight into the foodways of those who lived in the old Southern coastal regions of the United States. On Fehribach’s menu are red beans and rice from an 1885 recipe, lush with pickled pork shank and complemented by voodoo greens, and boudin rouge, a spicy Cajun pork blood sausage that exemplifies the traditional need to use the whole animal in cooking.

Of course, Fehribach also serves up shrimp ’n’ grits, a Southern standard we’ve enjoyed all over Chicago, even at stylish restaurants such as Sepia and North Pond.

But this is simple food.

John T. Edge of the Southern Foodways Alliance says Lewis’ recipe for this classic dish, which pays homage to the frugal South, was “just butter and shrimp, but it requires great butter and great shrimp, and a puddle of that over stone-ground grits.”

“People want to hear this story,” says Fehribach, “and this food offers a vision of the past that’s different than what we learned growing up.”

Preparing shrimp ’n’ grits at home, we used bacon from our own pig and greens from our garden (which get tastier as the weather gets colder), trying to stay faithful to the tradition celebrated by Lewis, what Fehribach calls “beautiful, wonderfully clean food.”

David Hammond is an Oak Park writer and contributor to WBEZ (91.5 FM) and LTHForum.com.
E-mail detective@suntimes.com.