Dishing up the Deep South
You cannot discover America’s Deep South without unbuckling the belt and sampling its hearty fare.
No one ever accused the Deep South of sending a visitor home hungry. Even among seasoned cruisers, familiar with the standard post-voyage weight gain, a Mississippi river cruise has the potential to do some serious belt-straining. You’ll be cruising through states where food isn’t ever merely fuel, but speaks of culture, history and home. Where recipes pass down through generations, cooking methods are subject to intense discussion and almost tribal loyalty, and where hospitality is a matter of enormous civic pride.
Whatever line you sail with, you’ll be served Southern delicacies on board, and be plied with iced tea and mint juleps as you watch the Mississippi’s banks slide by. There’s no escape on shore, with grab-and-go temptations from po’ boys to mud pie at every turn. So simply pack something elasticated and prepare your tastebuds for iconic Southern flavours from barbecue to beignets.
Po’ boys
The filling of this traditionally overstuffed Louisiana sandwich can vary greatly. It could be roast beef, fried seafood or even alligator. The bread, however, is non-negotiable, and must be crispy of crust and fluffy in the centre, like a baguette. Order yours dressed, and it’ll come with lettuce, tomato, pickles and mayonnaise. Ask around in New Orleans and every resident will have a favourite po’ boy spot. One of the most famous is the Parkway Bakery & Tavern, open since 1911. If you can’t decide between its two classics, slow-cooked beef and gulf shrimp, get them combined — the Parkway Surf and Turf.
Gooey butter cake
This sweet, rich, firm cake has many origin stories, non-verified, but they all begin in St Louis. The general gist is that gooey butter cake was a happy accident, perhaps the result of a baker reversing the proportions of butter and flour when trying to make a traditional cake. With a brownie-like texture and vanilla flavour, a slice feels simple but indulgent, and they’re wonderfully portable, making a great gift if you can avoid eating them first. Pick up some from Gooey Louie, a family-run baker in St Louis that makes nothing else.
Gumbo
This steaming, gutsy stew is the official state dish of Louisiana, and its variants reflect the melting-pot nature of the area’s cooking and culture. Gumbo can be thickened with okra (the dish’s name derives from the West African word for these glutinous green pods); roux, of French origin; or ground sassafras leaves, a contribution of the Choctaw people. All gumbos contain a vegetable base of onion, celery and capsicum, and the most popular combinations are seafood and chicken with sausage. Try either at The Gumbo Shop, a French Quarter institution that has been voted best gumbo in New Orleans every year since 1999. Vegetarians needn’t miss out; order the green Gumbo Z’Herbes, which includes turnips, mustard greens and spinach.
Beignets
Doughnuts for breakfast? Only in New Orleans. When made fresh and eaten piping hot with a cloud of icing sugar on top, you’ll want to swear off Weet-Bix forever. And though you’ll probably need to queue up with every other tourist in the city, there’s no denying the very best come from Cafe Du Monde in the French Market. Wash the light and pillowy beignets down with chicory coffee, served either black or au lait, and don’t ask for an oatmilk latte. If you don’t have a sweet tooth, try the delicate blue crab beignets at Le Petite Grocery, which literally melt in your mouth.
Barbecue
If you’ve got a gas barbecue, then keep that to yourself. The “low and slow” grilling of meat over wood is less a cooking method than a religion here, and each state has its own way of doing things. In Memphis, tradition dictates that pork ribs dry-rubbed with a mixture of garlic, paprika, cumin and other spices are smoked over hickory as slowly as possible, and sometimes served with a tomato and vinegar sauce. Locals’ standards are so high you’ll struggle to find bad barbecue in Memphis, but if you want to stay close to the sights, Pig On Beale serves bold flavours with the city’s best blues joints (See In the Know).
Pies
Whether it’s Mississippi mud pie, the eponymous and gloopy dessert of the river, a chilled lemon or peach icebox pie, a caramelised pecan pie or a creamy, spiced sweet potato pie, you’re unlikely to escape the South without a slice tightening your waistband. King’s Tavern, the oldest standing building in Natchez and now a restaurant run by Mississippi chef Regina Charboneau, serves another river-inspired pudding: the black bottom pie, whose dark base is said to represent the swampy lowlands of the Mississippi. But if your answer to “which pie do you want?” is “all”, head to The Crown in Indianola, where a one-off fee to visit the Dessert Table allows you to sample any or all of six pies.
Soul food
Soul food has African and Native American influences, and was shaped by slavery, resulting in delicious if calorific dishes made using inexpensive ingredients. Think fried chicken, ham hock, collard greens, cornbread, grits and black-eyed peas. If you like your soul food with a side of celebrity, head to Sweetie Pies in St Louis, where Robbie Montgomery, former backing singer to Ike and Tina Turner turned reality television star and restaurant owner, cooks the recipes her mother taught her. She has her own cookbook, so you can try to reprise your favourite dishes back home.
Telegraph Media Group
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More to the Story
The mighty Mississippi has been a source of inspiration across many art forms and genres. Here are seven top reads for downtime on deck or in your cabin.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
This controversial classic is more readable than you might expect and its tales of the riverbank are never less than colourful. Skipping around several states, it uses the river as a source and symbol of escape and adventure, and also as nature’s way out of social injustice. “The river looked miles and miles across,” Twain writes. “The moon was so bright I could a counted the drift logs that went a-slipping along, black and still, hundreds of yards out from shore. Everything was dead quiet, and it looked late, and smelt late.”
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Faulkner’s fourth novel, set in Jefferson, Mississippi, was not successful when first published in 1929, owing to its experimental style; the stream-of-consciousness opening, narrated by the mentally afflicted Benjamin “Benjy” Compson, reflects the wandering way his mind works. Persevere though, as The Sound and the Fury captures life in the US at a time of great flux and explores themes that make it a seminal read for American literature students — race, faith, the Southern aristocracy, gender and the collective memory of the American Civil War.
Old Glory by Jonathan Raban
In 1979, Jonathan Raban journeyed down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to New Orleans in a specially equipped 16ft motorboat. “The book and the journey would be all of a piece,” he writes. “The plot would be written by the current of the river itself.
It would carry one into long deep pools of solitude, and into brushes with society on the shore.” Doing it alone, he has plenty of time to reflect on his childhood fascination with the great river, but also mingles engagingly with those who live on its banks.
Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke
The New Orleans novels of James Lee Burke bring the Delta story right up to date. Tin Roof Blowdown, published in 2007, features two main characters: one is Burke’s regular hard-boiled antihero, detective Dave Robicheaux. The other is Hurricane Katrina, which has swept in over the Gulf of Mexico and left in its destructive wake a society on the brink of collapse. Summoned to investigate the shooting of two black looters, Robicheaux takes the lid, or tin roof, off a nest of local vipers, some of whom happen to belong to the highest echelons of Louisiana’s political class. Fast-paced, coolly written and dark in places, this is a top read.
A Time to Kill by John Grisham
Set in the fictional town of Clanton, Mississippi in the 1980s, when racism was causing strife across the US, this mega-selling page-turner of a legal thriller name checks all the classic contemporary villains, from bent judges to the Klan to the media circus that descends on the community to report, and misconstrue, the facts. Young lawyer Jake Brigance is our only hope. The 1996 film, starring Sandra Bullock and Samuel L Jackson, is an option if you prefer your dramas on the small screen.
Delta Blues by Ted Gioia
Subtitled “The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music”, this 2012 volume steers music fans through the storeyed history of Southern music, from antebellum work songs and the pioneering individuals, prisoners and outcasts who were there at the origins to the likes of Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker. If you’re cruising with your headphones on, this is a very useful, meticulously researched book. Load up your MP3 player with one of the Rough Guide Blues compilations and Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited for a soundtrack to your voyage.
Fevre Dream by George RR Martin
Before he became Lord of the Thrones, Martin wrote numerous novels, novellas and short stories in the fantasy and sci-fi genres. Fevre Dream (1982) is a vampire novel set in antebellum Mississippi; the oddly spelled title is taken from the name of a paddle steamer used by vampire hunters who — guess what — seem never to come out of their cabins during daylight. This is not a derivative Stoker-esque yarn but a full-on fantasy story about alchemy, “bloodmasters” and curing the “red thirst”. All in all, fang-ful fun and ideal as a late-night cabin bedfellow on those stormy nights.
Chris Moss
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In the Know
An eight-day culinary-themed Lower Mississippi cruise on America from New Orleans to Memphis with onboard cooking demonstrations and a behind-the-scenes tour of the Louisiana Culinary Institute departs on November 2 this year and April 4, 2020. From $US4270 ($6300) a person, twin-share.
The American Queen Steamboat Company is conducting five barbecue-themed cruises along the Upper Mississippi in 2020. The eight or nine-day itineraries (depending on direction) run between Alton (St Louis) and Red Wing (Minneapolis) on American Duchess. From $US2099 a person, twin-share. The line also has an eight or nine-day Mark Twain cruise; from $US2299 a person, twin-share.