Delta Cuisine: Catfish, Barbecue, Soul Food, and Hot Tamales

What are the foods that define Delta Cuisine?

Delta cuisine is its own category in the realm of Southern food. The food of the Mississippi River Delta is like an epicurean time capsule created by crops born of the nutrient-rich soil, diverse cultural influences, and overwhelming poverty. As they have always done, locals prepare dishes that stretch ingredients and waste no part of a plant or animal. Last month, I set off on a road trip to Helena, Arkansas in the Delta region of eastern Arkansas to experience the Delta blues at the annual King Biscuit Blues Festival and savor Delta cuisine along the way.

Fried Catfish – Arkansas Food of the Year

Earlier this year, the Arkansas Food Hall of Fame proclaimed catfish as the 2019 Arkansas Food of the Year. During the Food Hall of Fame’s induction banquet, Arkansas writer and historian Cindy Grisham noted: “A true food of the people, catfish is consumed with relish by everyone regardless of race or class. It can be found on the finest menus in the most exclusive restaurants as well as in just about every small-town diner and roadside convenience store. … Crispy, onion-tinged hushpuppies are a staple across the state, although many folks prefer a simple slab of crusty cornbread. But the rest of the plate is a bit more of a problem. Coleslaw is a popular side item whether its dressing is creamy or the more tangy vinegar-based kind. Beans are always a hit with soupy pintos fighting for the right to sit on the plate with sweet, sticky baked beans. A relish of some sort is needed, and that can range from cabbage-based chow-chow to sweet-and-spicy green tomato relish.” {Arkansas Gazette}

Long a part of Arkansas culture, Arkansas Gazette senior editor Rex Nelson’s toast to King Catfish at the Arkansas Foodways Dinner, “Catfish Tales in Four Courses”, went like this: “Here’s to the noble catfish, the king of the Arkansas waterways. Thanks for providing us sustenance and good times. Long live King Cat.”

While I’ve lived in Southern California for 30 years and been spoiled by the abundance of fresh-caught fish, growing up in Arkansas I ate a fair amount of cornmeal-dredged fried catfish and, hands down, the best catfish I’ve ever eaten was at Eddie Evans’ Downtown Bar & Grill in Helena. Hand coated with a cornmeal mixture and quickly fried, the catfish plate comes with a generous portion of 3 large fillets with hush puppies (love!), fries, and coleslaw.

Eddie’s love of cooking started at home with his mother Ramona. He began his career as the head chef at Isle of Capri Casino before starting his own food truck business. After seven years, he decided to make the leap to a brick and mortar and bring some good vittles to the downtown area where Downtown Bar & Grill is one of only two restaurants. Besides outstanding catfish, his hand-formed burgers and BBQ pulled pork sandwiches are wildly popular. More chunky than pulled, Downtown Bar & Grill’s barbecue pork sandwich stands out for the burnt ends that he chops up and mixes in with the rest of the meat rather than selling separately as many restaurants do.

James Beard Award-Winning Barbecue

Not only is Jones Bar-B-Q Diner the first and only winner of a coveted James Beard culinary award in the state of Arkansas but it also believed to be the oldest Black-owned business in Arkansas, selling barbecue pork since around 1910. After winning the James Beard American Classics award in 2012, barbecue lovers from near and far have trekked along Highway 1, the Great River Road, to the beleaguered town of Marianna seeking the award-winning pork sandwich that put the town on the map.

Owner/pitmaster James Jones proudly carries on the family business, believed by food historians to be one of the nation’s oldest restaurants owned by an African-American family. The menu is simple—chopped barbecue pork. Buy it by the pound for $7.00 or in a sandwich for $3.50, with or without homemade coleslaw. The secret is showing up before Jones runs out of meat for the day. Driving to Helena, Arkansas past frost-dusted cotton fields along Highway 1, the Great River Road, I arrived at Jones Barb-B-Q Diner at 10:30 a.m. to get a taste.

Jones, 64, began working at 14 and follows the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” belief—he only smokes pork butt and shoulder, burns hickory or oak to flavor the meat, and serves sandwiches on Wonder bread and wrapped in tin foil as his granddaddy did. The secret is in the slow roasting (10 hours) and the vinegar-based, cayenne-spiked barbecue sauce which is added as the meat simmers in crockpots at-the-ready for customers that begin arriving at 7:00 a.m. Jones chuckles when he says that his granddaddy threatened to “come back from the dead if the family’s secret recipe was ever disclosed.”

What Jones sells represents more than good taste. A 2010 Oxford American article by John T. Edge of the Southern Foodways Alliance argues that barbecue joints were among the first spots of racial integration. Edge, an academic at the University of Mississippi, helped nudge the Beard Foundation about this little diner, with big flavor—and impact. {Chicago Tribune}

Hot Tamales

Hot tamales were at the top of my list of Arkansas Delta cuisine to try while in Helena. I had two burning questions: first, what is a hot tamale and how is it different from the Mexican tamales we know and love? And, secondly, how did a third-generation Sicilian-American living in Helena, Arkansas become known for his hot tamales?

While hot tamales are rooted in Mexican cuisine, they are simmered, not steamed as traditional Mexican tamales are. Plus, I learned they are almost always eaten as a snack or appetizer. In California (where I’ve lived and fed my love for Mexican food over three decades) and other states that have large Mexican populations, the tamale is a Christmas ritual. They are usually prepared by the women in the family: mothers, daughters, and tías (aunties), who visit while spreading the masa dough on softened corn husks, lining them with meat, and folding the mixture into corn husk jackets, repeating the process until the tamales are placed into the steamer. The tamales are eaten on Christmas Eve and given as gifts during the holiday season.

There are conflicting stories about how hot tamales became part of the African-American culinary landscape but the most popular belief is that they were brought to the Delta region by Mexican migrant farmworkers. It is thought that tamales were introduced to African-American sharecroppers in the early 1900s by Mexicans who brought them in their lunches to the cotton fields. The corn husk wrapping kept the tamales moist and warm throughout the morning.

I spent the afternoon with Joe St. Columbia who recounted the enduring family history of Pasquale’s Tamales in West Helena, Arkansas. The family’s long history begins with Pasquale St. Columbia who came to Helena from Sicily in the late 1800s. Pasquale visited the cotton fields and sawmills along the levee, delivering foods as a merchant from 1892 to 1912. He was a peddler marketing this wares to the immigrant farmworkers, many of whom were Mexican, that worked along the river.

Like his grandson Joe, Pasquale was a friendly and talkative man who never met a stranger and made friends easily. Similarities between Italian and Spanish languages made it possible for Pasquale to communicate with the Mexican workers he met and befriended. He was intrigued by the hearty portable food called tamales that they brought to work in the fields day after day. Eventually, they swapped recipes— Pasquale shared his recipe for Italian spaghetti and they taught him how to prepare the traditional Mexican hot tamales. Migrant workers shared their hot tamales in other cotton towns and the tradition of Delta hot tamales took hold.

Pasquale adopted “Sam” as his American name and prospered as a taxi driver in Helena. During the Depression, he built a commercial building and, in the early 1940s, he rented space to Maggie and Eugene Brown for the Elm Street Tamale Shop and gave them his tamale recipe. The couple ran a successful tamale business for twenty years. In those days, one tamale sold for a nickel and three tamales for ten cents. The business went dormant in the 1960s when the Brown family line died out.

About thirty years later, Joe St. Columbia and his wife Joyce, who had always dreamed of owning a restaurant, revived the business and renamed it Pasquale’s Tamales. Joyce fiddled with the family recipe until she came up with a blend of seasonings she called “middle-of-the-road-hot” and used high-quality sirloin beef for the filling AND there are no fillers or preservatives in their tamales.

It took Joyce three days to produce the 200 to 300 dozen tamales that they made every week. The first day, Joyce simmered the beef, ground it, and then seasoned it. The second day, the meat and cornmeal dough was placed in an extruding machine that turned the two into perfectly formed tamales. The machine could also wrap tamales in parchment paper, but Joyce and Joe preferred to hand-wrap the filling in corn husks imported from Mexico for a more authentic tamale. Next, the tamales were slowly simmered for six hours in their secret ingredient spicy sauce before being flash-frozen. Residents of Helena could get the tamales from the factory, but most of the tamales were shipped overnight to customers.

After watching their customers slurp up the cooking liquid and chew on the wrappers, the couple penned their slogan- “tastes so good you’ll suck the shuck.”

Today, Pasquale’s Tamales is owned by Joe St. Columbia, Jr. who is as gregarious and talkative as his father and grandfather. The tamale recipe remains unchanged and the thriving tamale business ships thousands of the spicy, all-beef hot tamales made from Pasquale’s heirloom recipe all over the country. St. Columbia, Jr. lines corn shucks with masa he makes from freshly ground yellow cornmeal imported from Mexico and uses only the finest quality beef and spices in the filling. Then, simmers the hand-rolled tamales in a spicy broth for six hours versus steaming them. 

The smaller shape and the simmering technique is a regional creation that is all Delta and was immortalized by legendary bluesman Robert Johnson in his 1936 song “They’re Red Hot”— “Hot tamales and they’re red hot/yes she got ’em for sale.”

Soul Food and Sweet Potato Pie

Finally, no culinary journey to the Delta, or the South, is complete without enjoying a meal of “Soul Food“. But what exactly is soul food? I visited with Rosie and her granddaughter Trina after lunch at Downtown Bar & Grill and, while I was too full to enjoy their Soul Food buffet, I couldn’t resist having a piece of her Sweet Potato Pie, especially after hearing that Sweet Potato Pie was her specialty and she would be making and selling 75-100 pies at King Biscuit Blues Festival.

What is Soul Food?

Rosie has cooked all her life—besides raising her own children, she has been a foster parent for 25 years. At one time she had 16 kids in her house and she did a LOT of cooking. She opened Rosie’s Diner three years ago and she and her granddaughters are still doing a LOT of cooking. That afternoon we watched Trina cutting “hog maws” while Rosie told the story of a man from England who had never had neck bones and asked, “what kind of meat was it that had all those bones? It has the best flavor.” When she told him neck bones, he replied, “You just don’t know, you all are rich over here with all those neck bones.”

The term “soul food” didn’t become common until the 1960s. With the rise of the civil rights and black nationalist movements during the 1960s, many African Americans sought to reclaim their part of the American cultural legacy. As terms like “soul brother,” “soul sister,” and “soul music” were taking hold, it was only natural that the term “soul food” would be used to describe the recipes that African Americans had been cooking for generations.

Soul food is basic, down-home cooking with its roots in the rural South. The staples of soul food cooking are beans, greens, cornmeal (used in cornbread, hush puppies, and johnnycakes and as a coating for fried fish), and pork. Pork has an almost limitless number of uses in soul food. Many parts of the pig are used, like pigs’ feet, ham hocks, pig ears, hog jowl, and chitlins. Pork fat is used for frying and as an ingredient in slowly cooked greens. {The Spruce Eats}

What is the difference between Soul Food and Southern food? In his “Soul Food Cookbook” (1969), Bob Jeffries summed it up this way: “While all soul food is Southern food, not all Southern food is soul. Soul food cooking is an example of how really good Southern [African American] cooks cooked with what they had available to them.”

Dishes or ingredients commonly found in soul food include:

Biscuits (a shortbread similar to scones, commonly served with butter, jam, jelly, sorghum or cane syrup, or gravy; used to wipe up, or “sop,” liquids from a dish).
Black-eyed peas (cooked separately or with rice, as Hoppin’ John).
Butter beans (immature lima beans, usually cooked in butter).
Catfish (dredged in seasoned cornbread and fried).
Chicken (often fried with cornmeal breading or seasoned flour).
Chicken livers.
Chitterlings or chitlins: (the cleaned and prepared intestines of hogs, slow-cooked and often eaten with vinegar and hot sauce; sometimes parboiled, then battered and fried).
Chow-chow (a spicy, homemade pickle relish sometimes made with okra, corn, cabbage, green tomatoes, and other vegetables; commonly used to top black-eyed peas and otherwise as a condiment and side dish).
Collard greens (usually cooked with ham hocks, often combined with other greens).
Cornbread (often baked in an iron skillet, sometimes seasoned with bacon fat).
Chicken fried steak (beef deep fried in flour or batter, usually served with gravy).
Cracklins: (commonly known as pork rinds and sometimes added to cornbread batter).
Fatback (fatty, cured, salted pork used to season meats and vegetables).
Fried fish: (any of several varieties of fish: whiting, catfish, porgies, bluegills dredged in seasoned cornmeal and deep-fried).
Grits (often served with fish).
Ham hocks (smoked, used to flavor vegetables and legumes).
Hog maws (or hog jowls, sliced and usually cooked with chitterlings).
Hoghead cheese.
Hot sauce (a condiment of cayenne peppers, vinegar, salt, garlic and other spices often used on chitterlings, fried chicken and fish not the same as “Tabasco sauce”, which has heat, but little flavor).
Lima beans (see butter beans).
Macaroni and cheese.
Mashed potatoes (usually with butter and condensed milk). Meatloaf (typically with brown gravy).
Milk and bread (a “po’ folks’ dessert-in-a-glass” of slightly crumbled cornbread, buttermilk, and sugar). Mustard greens (usually cooked with ham hocks, often combined with other greens).
Neckbones (beef neck bones seasoned and slow-cooked).
Okra: (African vegetable eaten fried in cornmeal or stewed, often with tomatoes, corn, onion, and hot peppers).
Pigs’ feet: (slow-cooked like chitterlings, sometimes pickled and, like chitterlings, often eaten with vinegar and hot sauce).
Red beans.
Ribs (usually pork, but can also be beef ribs).
Rice (usually served with red beans).
Sorghum syrup (from sorghum, or “Guinea corn,” a sweet grain indigenous to Africa introduced into the U.S. by African slaves in the early 17th century; see biscuits).
Succotash (originally, a Native American dish of yellow corn and butter beans, usually cooked in butter).
Sweet potatoes (often parboiled, sliced and then baked, using sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and butter or margarine, commonly called “candied yams”; also boiled, then pureed and baked into pies).
Turnip greens (usually cooked with ham hocks, often combined with other greens).
Yams: (not actually yams, but sweet potatoes).  {Source: African American Registry}

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Arkansas Delta restaurants featured in this post:

Downtown Bar & Grill

520B Walnut Street, Helena, Arkansas 72342

870-714-2940

Jones Bar-B-Q Diner

219 W. Louisiana Street, Marianna, Arkansas 72360

Pasquale’s Hot Tamales

West Helena, Arkansas

877-572-0500

Rosie’s Diner

303 Valley Drive, Helena, Arkansas 72342

870-228-5115