If you’re from New Orleans, you might feel immediately at home coming inside the Roadhouse and ordering a really great po’boy sandwich. If you’re not from that fabled city than you might not even be familiar with this Louisiana favorite at all. The po’boy has a history as rich and multi-cultural as jazz music, and after eating one you’ll feel as content as if Mr. Louis Armstrong himself was crooning in your ear.

It reportedly all began in 1929 during the transit strike in New Orleans. Many people that lived in the city were sympathetic to the union workers who were striking. These workers couldn’t leave the picket lines in order to eat, and since they were currently unemployed, they also had no money. Bennie and Clovis Martin, the owners of the Martin Brother’s Coffee Stand and Restaurant, were former streetcar operators and members of the employee’s union and were among those who sided with the union members. They got a local Italian baker to make 40-inch long, evenly rectangular loaves for them so there would be less bread waste. Then they filled these with fried potatoes and brought them to the men on the picket lines. They fed these sandwiches to the “poor boys” on the picket lines at no charge until the strike was over. The strike may have ended, but the sandwich, and its name, stuck.

Here at the Roadhouse, we take a great loaf of soft french bread from our Bakehouse, load it full of crispy fried shrimp or catfish and pile it high with shredded lettuce and absolutely delicious tomato relish. We know you’ll enjoy it whether you’re from New Orleans or just around the corner!

I would be crazily remiss to talk about life in Ann Arbor without mentioning Zingerman’s Deli. These folks opened in 1982–yep, that is 30 years ago, meaning not that far off from the time period when Perrier was considered to be a human being (as I previously mentioned) and if you asked for a “knish” you might very well have been responded to with a “Gesundheit.”

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” — Gandhi

On Saturday, March 10, director (and Ann Arbor native) Graham Meriwether brings his film “American Meat” to town for its Michigan debut. Co-sponsored by Slow Food Huron Valley (of which I am a board member), Real Time Farms and Zingerman’s Roadhouse, the film “looks at our agriculture from the perspective of the farmers, and provides real, everyday solutions for how we can shape our food system,” says Meriwether.

Read the full article.

If I’d been writing this piece a little over a year ago, I’d have said that few Americans knew much about Tunisia. While a fair few had probably heard the name, only tiny percentage could have correctly and quickly pointed it out on a map. In the last year though Tunisia has emerged from the political shadows—the “Arab Spring” that started in Tunis a little over a year ago put Tunisia into the headlines. Still, few Americans know much about Tunisia’s history, and even fewer still have had any experience with its food. We at Zingerman’s have been working hard to change that—we love Tunisian food and culture and have been studying it, serving it and selling it, with ever greater frequency over the last few years.

We continue our campaign for Tunisian cuisine this coming spring when we feature the foods of the Tunisian Jewish community for a special dinner at Zingerman’s Roadhouse on the evening of Wednesday, April 4.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Tunisia sits pretty much in the center of North Africa, squeezed up against the Mediterranean Sea, between the far larger lands of Libya (to the east) and Algeria (to its west). Having been to visit twice in the last three years, I will say that it far exceeded my expectations on almost every level. Both culturally and culinarily, I found it one of the most intriguing places that I’ve ever been to. It’s is small (population, roughly 10,000.000) with a relatively high standard of living for a Third World country, impressively high levels of education and health care, and a much freer environment for women than I expected to find. It’s a country with a history that dates back to ancient Carthage, one whose citizens include both Hannibal and St Augustine.

The main thing for me though was that I fell in love with the food. While it has elements common to what you might imagine in North Africa (couscous, harissa, preserved lemons, etc.) it’s also has a great deal in common with the food of Sicily (just to the North) and ancient Greece (to the east). Tunisian food is deliciously flavorful, exotic yet accessible, totally foreign, and yet still oddly familiar. Olive oil, olives, a great deal of seafood, spices, vegetables, lamb, and fruit all show up in force in Tunisian cooking. The most prominent flavor in Tunisia though is probably its harissa, the spicy chile pepper tapenade that’s served with and in most everything.

Jews have been living in Tunisia for thousands of years, at least since the destruction of the first temple in Jerusalem and well before there were Christians or Moslems. As they have everywhere, the Tunisian Jews adapted the local foods to Jewish tradition and the laws of kashrut. At its peak before 1948 the Jewish population was over 100,000. After independence in 1956, the majority of Tunisian Jews emigrated, mostly to France and to Israel. But, of course, they carried their cooking traditions with them and this special dinner will be a tribute to that cooking.

Today there are only about 1200 Jews left in Tunisia. Most of Jewish life today—and in its heyday—was centered around the island of Djerba and the Tunis suburb of La Goulette. At one time the latter was home to over a dozen different synagogues. The beautiful jewel box of a synagogue at Djerba remains open to this day and the Grand Synagogue of Tunisia is also still open in central Tunis.

One of the best known of Tunisian Jews is the writer, Albert Memmi. Author of the semi-autobiographical Pillar of Salt (one of my favorite works of fiction) and the non-fiction mid-20th century class, “The Colonizer and the Colonized,” Memmi, like so many Jews left Tunisia for France in 1956. Memmi’s fictional works are insightful, thought provoking, challenging and intellectually engaging; they also include some wonderful food references and this dinner will draw on his work. The dinner will be led by two Roadhouse staffers—Amos Arinda and Sarah Mays—who have been studying the food and history of Tunisia for over two years now. They’ll be cooking along with Roadhouse chef and managing partner Alex Young. To reserve a seat call the Roadhouse at 734-663-3663.

Reserve a seat to this special dinner here.

Hola, seekers of all things culinarily magnificent! Today’s review is one that’s close to my heart, because it resides in what I consider to be my hometown, Ann Arbor, Michigan (the hospital I was born in is there, so that counts, right? ).

For those who fancy themselves a hardcore foodie, the name Zingerman’s should already be on your short list when it comes to places to eat or order food from.

Click for the full review

I first met Audrey Petty at the Southern Foodways Symposium in Oxford, Mississippi. We got on well from the get go. I LOVED the essay she wrote on “Chitlins”—I actually read it to the audience at our first annual African American foodways dinner back in 2005. I’m really excited to have her hear to speak to us this year at our 7th annual dinner!

Ari: I’m thinking it’s about eight years now since we first met at Southern Foodways. I know that you and I both grew up in Chicago, we’re both fascinated with food, culture and history and we both like to write. But maybe you could give folks a sense of your background?

Audrey: Well, I’m a writer. I’m a Southsider by birth. Born in Chicago and, after living all over for most of my adult life, I’m back living there again. I grew up in Chatham, on the far South Side, off 83rd and Cottage Grove on a little street called Langley. When I was 7 we moved up to Hyde Park. My mom was a career music teacher. We all made music as kids. My dad was a chemist. My dad grew up in a coal mining town Alabama. My mom grew up in southern Arkansas. They met in college in Alabama, got married in Texarkana, and then they moved here.

I went to Knox College and that’s where I gave myself permission to really write more seriously. They had (and still have) a great creative writing program and I tried out writing stories and kept going. Decided I wanted to go to France. So I spent a year in Besancon in the Franche-Comte, and that cemented my interest in writing. Living in France made me a lot more conscious of language and what it took to come to a different fluency by living in that culture.

I came back to Knox and waited tables and worked as a teaching assistant. I already knew that I wanted to teach. My mom came from a long line of teachers. Teaching was always in the air as a great way to live and to connect. I knew it was for me. I knew I wanted to teach. So I did go on to grad school at U Mass where I worked with John Wideman. He’s an African American writer from Pittsburgh who writes a lot about place, a lot about memory of place. He grew up in a neighborhood in Pittsburgh called Homewood. His writing and his mentorship really inspired me.

From grad school, I went back to Knox and taught a creative writing classes, literature classes, and an interdisciplinary seminar on slavery in America that took me to the slave coast and got me very interested in studying how the West African folkways were carried into African American traditions. At Knox I taught with (poet) Beth Ann Fennelly and that’s how I learned about the Southern Foodways Alliance. It was like no other community I’d been part of before. All these connections became really electric. It got me thinking about things I’d never really thought about it and it made me look at my personal history really differently. It got me to taste food really differently. (SFA director) John T. Edge asked me if I wanted to do something at the Symposium the year that the topic was “Race and Food.”

Ari: I remember that year really vividly. It was hugely powerful for me. There were great speakers—Bernard Lafayette (who’d worked with Dr. King) spoke about the Civil Rights movement and food. Jazz musician Olu Dara and the Reverend Will Campbell both came back to Mississippi for that conference and it was the first either had been back for decades since leaving under duress during the Civil Rights Movement. There was also a panel called “Mammy and Ole Miss: Domestic Relations”—and that was long before the book, “The Help” came out.

Audrey: That’s where I read my piece on chitlins. When John T. was telling me about the symposium, I thought to myself, “I gotta write about chitlins.” I felt drawn to it because it was such an important food in my household but also because it was something you weren’t supposed to talk about. Writing that piece… it was really a pleasure to write. It became an opportunity to have a different relationship with my parents and the work received a really great response. That essay which led to all these great conversations. I figured there was more memory to revisit, and that I needed to follow the plate and follow what my parents had brought with them when they came up from the South. It got me to reframe some old questions and raised some new ones. I try to follow the questions. My mom passed last February and… it’s kind of like a whole new life without her here, but the things that I want to capture and record are a way of rediscovering her.

Ari: What are the questions that you’ve followed?

Audrey: I’ve been thinking about my dad… I wanted to know and sit with him and learn more about his boyhood and his coming of age. He’s a very modest man. Very soft spoken and a good listener. My mom was the singer and the performer and larger than life. And my dad was mostly in the background, observing. But the piece I wrote that ended up in Southern Review—”In Search of My Father’s Kitchen” was a lot about that. I wanted to ask him about where he came from. I wanted to know what it felt like for him when he first experienced the North after he moved up to Chicago from Alabama. And what it felt like to be serving people (in diners, restaurants and country clubs) during Jim Crow in his hometown and in the South-at-large. Having traveled to my parents’ hometowns and also to Oxford (so many times for Southern Foodways), I’ve realized that I eventually want to live in the South. And I tried to figure out what it was that was drawing me there; I think that in coming to closer term with my parents’ mortality, I know there’s something nourishing me about being back down there. I finally became clearer that this was a way for me to be with them even when the time comes that I can’t be with them physically. And also to give that tradition to my daughter. Writing about place and where we grew up, has made me think a lot more about what I want to pass on.

My mom dying made me rethink Chicago. She lived here for nearly fifty years. Except for returning for her father’s funeral (shortly after she’d graduated college), sShe never went back to Arkansas to the town of Eldorado where she grew up until we told her we wanted to go back there with her a few years ago (and we made the arrangements to make the trip as a family) I think there’s some part of me that still feels some sense of appreciation of Chicago as her chosen home, but there’s still this mystery about that small town in Arkansas, El Dorado, and I want to be able to spend time in the places that she mentioned to me.

Ari: What about the African American migrations from the South?

Audrey: My parents always presented the move to the North as matter of fact. My dad had a brother who’d relocated to Chicago to the west side and he ventured up a summer before he finished at Talladega College (founded in central Alabama in 1867, it’s the oldest black liberal arts college in the state). When he came up here he worked at a factory where they made cabinets. Eventually he’d work in the dining hall at Kraft Foods. He always described the decision to move as about his brother being in Chicago. He skipped over some about the part about being suddenly in this place where the all “codes” were different. It was certainly a segregated city back then but there were still a lot of freedoms he and my mother would have experienced that were significant and novel.

Traveling South with him over the past ten years or so has been a trip. Really, wonderful and emotional. We went to his hometown in Alabama and while we were there I could see him struggling with piecing it all together. Having this muscle memory of what it was like to be a boy in that place. There was a lot of stuff that they just swallowed. My mom would occasionally say more than my dad. She said “Mississippi was the worst of ‘em all.” As for relations with white people in the South, they were close with several teachers there who’d immigrated to the States having fled the Nazis. So they had in their history they had a real affection for a few folks who weren’t black. But Chicago was still a big leap for them in their deepening friendships with whites. They joined a multiracial Unitarian Church on the South Side and they had a white minister there whom they adored. Martin Luther King came to speak at Soldier Field and the congregation joined in the audience. They had this opportunity that they seized. Later on when pressed, my mom would tell me about ways that her dad was mistreated routinely while walking down the street in Eldorado. He was the school principal but he would be insulted by random white people as he ran errands around town. She talked about her sadness and her anger about that. But they didn’t really talk about it. I can count on one hand the times they talked about the brutalities of that system. The Jim Crow that they and thousands and thousands of other black folks fled.

Ari: Do you know some of the statistics on the migrations?

Audrey: Over 500,000 African Americans migrated to Chicago along between approximately 1916 and 1970. In 1910, Chicago’s black population was at 2 percent. By 1970, the population had increased to 33 percent of the city’s residents. The first big wave of the great migration hit in the 1940s and 1950s. My parents were definitely part of the second wave.

When I was first working on my novel I went and talked to my dad’s younger brother in Montgomery. He was able to trace my great, great-great-grandfather who was a slave in Virginia. After Emancipation, he made enough money to buy a parcel of land in Mississippi. That place is still in our family. My Uncle Andrew told me about a great uncle who was lynched. He carries a lot of our story.

Ari: What things would you want people to understand about African American experience of that era?

Audrey: From my own experience, looking at my parents, one thing I know more than ever is that it really matters to show interest and to ask people to talk about things that are difficult and important. It’s really worth it. It’s worth going back there to the South to experience the place (as it is now) in person. I think that another thing that I’m constantly interested in are the fingerprints of the migrations. The way the South is in Chicago. Hybridized, for sure, but the South was present in Chicago as I was coming up, whether it was what was on the table in my parents’ house, or in being able to sneak into blues clubs to hear music that my parents probably had ambivalent relationships to because it came from the place (and experience) that they wanted to make some distance with. I remember going to the Checkerboard Lounge (on Chicago’s Southside) and my parents being kind of bemused and bewildered about why I would seek out that sort of music in “that sort of place..” But I knew in some deep way that I was finding something there. I think I had a hunger for a deeper knowledge and understanding of where they had come from. So I’d say that there was a way that this Northern city informed me about where my parents had come from.

Ours came frozen solid in a red plastic bucket. Butchered and packaged by Armour. Ten pounds in all. Cleaned, they’d reduce to much less, not even filling my mother’s cast-iron pot.

We usually shared them in the wintertime, Momma and I. Negotiations regarding their appearance began weeks in advance, around the dinner table. My mother would tell my father she was considering fixing chitlins for the holidays. My father would groan, twist his mouth, and protest in vain.

“Why you got to be cooking them?”

My two sisters backed him up with exaggerated whimpers, calls for gas masks, threats to run away from home.

“I’ll cook them next Saturday,” Momma would say, suddenly matter-of-fact. Daddy would plan that next Saturday accordingly: out of the house for hours, in protest, then coming back with the Sunday papers, opening the living room windows wide before heading upstairs to read and watch football in his La-Z-Boy, behind a closed door.

My mother turned to me, smiling and winking. “You’ll help me eat them, won’t you?”

I nodded in time to my sisters’ gagging noises. I stuck my tongue out at anyone who cared.

I was actually a pleaser, plagued by the classic middle-child complex. With the exception of fierce bickering and the occasional smack-down match with my sisters, dissent tended to make me nervous. Maybe my love of chitlins all began with me feeling sorry for my mother. In terms of labor and attention, cooking proper chitlins is as involved as cooking paella or fufu or risotto Milanese. Cleaning them took hours. Hours. So I’d keep Momma company while she rinsed the tangles of pig intestines in the basement sink. And I’d sit with her in the kitchen once they’d simmered down to something that needed watching. By that time, the house was filled with their sharp scent. “Potatoes will absorb the odor,” Momma would insist during the negotiation phase. Everyone knew that absorb was too optimistic a word. The smell was pervasive—vinegary and slightly farmy. When one of my sisters would storm in, holding her nose, proclaiming her disgust, I’d puff out my bony chest and call her stupid.

I’d stay up late with Momma, and we’d eat the chitlins off of small saucers as a bedtime snack. For all their potent smell, their flavor was calm and subtle. They had a distinct taste; they didn’t remind me of anything. Their texture was pleasing, tender but not soft. My mother’s were never greasy, though I marveled at how the leftovers emerged from the fridge, congealed in a murky gelatin. Momma would warm up a few in a frying pan, and we’d douse them with hot sauce and put some cornbread on the side. They never failed to build a craving after the first bite. Precious, strange and furtive food, I longed for them even as I consumed them.

I am a first-generation Northerner. My mother was reared in a middle-class family in El Dorado, a boomtown in Southern Arkansas; my father, in a coal-mining camp in Alabama. The two met and fell in love in the late ‘50s, while students at Talladega (a historically black college in Alabama), married and then moved to Chicago. My sisters and I came of age in Hyde Park, at the time one of the city’s few intentionally racially integrated neighborhoods. My dearest friend was Jewish (and white). We shared Sassoon jeans, watermelon Now and Laters, Judy Blume books, a mania for Shawn Cassidy, and plenty of secrets. My mother grew to love Karyn, but in the first days of our acquaintance, her anxieties about our closeness showed itself. She had lots of questions about how I was treated by the Levins. Were they kind? Had they made me eat the matzo ball soup? Did Karyn have other black friends? What about her parents? Gradually it emerged: she was trying to prepare me for the prospect of rejection, once recalling to me how little white girls in El Dorado customarily grew out of their friendships with little black girls. At the time, my only response was confused irritation. Karyn was my best friend.

As my sisters and I reached adolescence, my parents became more visibly concerned about our assimilated ways. While the Jackson 5’s ABC had been our very first album and we still crowded around the television on Saturday afternoons to watch Soul Train, we also knew the entire content of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I even played air guitar. None of us showed much interest in attending a Talladega or a Howard or a Spelman. And, at seventeen I fell for a boy with blonde hair and blue eyes. He also fell for me. On more than one occasion, my sisters and I were summoned to a dialogue that began with my father’s question: “Do you all know that you’re black?” As adults, my sisters and I laugh about it now. My parents do, too. But their uneasiness was real and deadly serious, and I’d sensed it for years. Maybe I ate chitlins to please Momma and Daddy.

My grandfathers died before I was born; my grandmothers, when I was quite young. I have missed their embraces, their indulgence, and seeing my face in theirs. I have especially missed their stories. The down-South tales my parents passed on to me and my sisters were rather limited. We’d hear about my Uncle Booker T. setting the mean goat after my father or how my mother’s nickname came to stick. We learned that my father, his siblings and his cousins worked the family farm in Columbus, Mississippi and how the sections of the farm had names. The Five Acre. The Melon Patch. The Prayer Cut. We learned that my mother’s father was a high school principal and an avid fisherman, and that my mother’s mother taught piano and Latin. My parents gave us their South as best they could: in their politesse and their hymns and verses. In their ways with words. They gave us only what they hoped would be nourishing: a sip of pot liquor for our growing bodies and black-eyed peas for good luck at New Year’s dinner.

I never saw anyone’s chitlins but my family’s when I was coming up. At least a few of my classmates must have eaten chitlins at home, but I, for one, never raised the subject. Chicago was a Great Migration city, where a wave black folks had begun arriving in the early 1900s and had been redlined to black belts on the South and West Sides. That was my story and the story of so many of my childhood friends. We all had roots and people down South. And we ate like it, too. I remember red beans and rice at Kim Odoms’s house, fried gizzards at LaTonya Mott’s, and my junior-high business teacher eating take-out rib tips from Ribs n’ Bibs during our fourth period typing class. I remember hot sauce on everything. But chitlins were their own category of soul food. Chitlins were straight-up country. If you called someone country, you were calling that someone out. Country meant backwoods, backwards, barefoot, ‘Bama-fied. K-U-N-T-R-E-E.
I once believed that my father didn’t like chitlins because of how they smelled. That was his core complaint, but as I got older, I began to contemplate my father’s childhood and I formulated a more complex theory. My father had eight brothers and sisters; his father was a miner and a preacher and his mother was a domestic worker (a fact I discovered only this year). I assumed that Daddy rejected chitlins as suffering food—a struggling people’s inheritance. It wasn’t until just this year that I finally learned the truth. “He had a bad plate of chitlins as a boy,” my mother told me. “He never got over it.”

When my mother cleaned our chitlins, she never failed to stress how important it was to clean them well. This meant washing them, one intestine at a time, with a mild saltwater solution. “You don’t just eat any old body’s chitlins.” I knew this rule by heart. I’ve eaten chitlins at the hands of my mother and my aunts Mary and Annie Bell (my father’s sisters, who would occasionally make a pot when we’d all gather for Christmas). When a cafeteria called Soul by the Pound opened and quickly closed down on State Street, my mother was not at all surprised. “Black people don’t live that way. Risk-taking for no reason at all. Flying from bungee cords or buying all you can eat chitlins made by God knows who.”

My mother has not cooked a pot of chitlins in fifteen years. Perhaps the ritual ended the year I lived in France and sorely missed Christmas with my family. My mother and I shared a good laugh when I told her about chitlins in France, how they called them andouillette de Lyon and topped them with dijon mustard. I smelled them before I saw them, in a Left Bank bistro. Et voila!—there they were, on a nearby plate, wrapped tightly as sausage. I trusted the chef at Les Fontaines, but I couldn’t imagine eating his chitlins. Not without my mother’s company. And not without Louisiana-style hot sauce as generous seasoning.
As my mother has gotten used to the idea of me going public with our chitlin habit, she’s reminded me that she cooked hers with onion and a green bell pepper or two, and she also splashed in cider vinegar to taste. I’ve learned how some people add white bread instead of potatoes for the odor. And I’ve shared Momma’s excitement about the new technology in chitlin processing. “They really clean them now. More expensive, but you don’t have to do all that work.”
She doesn’t have to ask me twice; we have a date for chitlins this coming December.

“My dream is to get all processed food out of our school lunches,” says Alex. “There are lots ways we can improve our kids’ diets in schools.” Alex first saw the impact he could have on kids’ diets when he joined his son for “bring your parent to lunch” day at school. “I thought we could do more to get fresh, seasonal food on the menu,” he remembers. “As someone who grows food and raises livestock, the key for me is building relationships with the people in my community to help get the word out that there’s a better way to do this and then to help make that happen.” Getting the kids to try different foods can be a challenge too. Often they will walk right past the healthier choices in the cafeteria and choose something that their parents would rather they didn’t. “It’s all about educating the kids to stop and think about what they are putting into their bodies,” says Alex.

Timing can be a problem too. Schools often schedule lunch right before a recess. Rather than take the time to relax over nourishing food, kids rush through their meals so they can go play. “Perfectly natural reaction,” notes Alex. “But, let’s work on altering schedules so lunch doesn’t have to be rushed.”

In recent years, Alex has embarked on an ambitious plan to make a change in his community. He works with the Farm to School program in Ann Arbor giving talks on the health and environmental benefits of fresh vegetables; the importance of organic and non-genetically-modified foods; and the effect of “food miles” and the impact of time from harvest to consumption on nutrition.

He also works in the kitchens at the Chelsea and Dexter schools with the cafeteria staff preparing lunches for the students and bringing traditional but new (to the students) flavors for them to try. “Taste,” Alex points out, “is the most important thing to change kids’ habits. They really do enjoy preparing the food and learning its history, but getting them to experience the fuller flavor of truly grass-fed beef or the huge taste in a just-picked tomato—that’s when the light bulb goes off and you know there’s some progress in changing the way they approach food.”

Alex uses his Roadhouse restaurant as well to get the message out. He hosts dinners there and at local schools to raise money to build gardening programs in the Dexter/Chelsea schools, and his annual fundraiser dinner for the Ann Arbor Public Schools Educational Foundation raises money for farm field trips in local schools. Alex hosts many such field trips himself at his own Cornman Farms in Dexter.

Currently Alex sits on the board of the Wellness Committee for the Dexter/Chelsea public schools. “This is where I can really develop the partnerships necessary to change our approach to eating in our community.”

Though he’s devoted to his family, farm, and restaurant, Alex doesn’t have any plans to slow down his education mission. “Right now the calendar has 10 school or library events through December. And, I’m sure it’ll pick right up after the school break.”

It has been said while President Kennedy was in the White House he was a small eater and often had to be reminded it was time for dinner, politics always took preference over food. On New Year’s Eve we will let the food take preference and serve a meal featuring President Kennedy’s favorites as a child and as a President. Chef Alex has crafted a menu full of East Coast favorites in honor of President Kennedy’s summer home in Cape Cod, his time spent at Harvard and from his life in the White House.