Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. --Ed Levine

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565125479/serieats-20">By John T. Edge | Shauna Anderson wants to be your chitlin vendor of choice. "Selling chitlins is all about trust," she tells me when I visit the suburban Cape Cod home she has transformed into a combination restaurant and commissary for chitlin deliveries. "Chitlins are very personal. A good cook knows that clean chitlins are where it all starts," she says of the laborious process of scouring pig intestines, a skill she learned from her grandmother.

Anderson opened her chitlin business in 1995. At the time, she was working as an accountant. Her idea was simple. Cleaned chitlins were hard to come by. And tax season only lasted a few months. She would clean chitlins during her downtime. It was an idea whose time had evidently come, for consumers, wary of the tlow-rent white buckets of chitlins available at traditional groceries, bought every hog intestine that Anderson and her compatriots could clean.

The following ten years were a blur. One week, producers from the Oprah Winfrey Show would call. Next, it's poet Nikki Giovanni on the line, placing her regular order, a ten-pound bucket. By 2003 she's taking the stage at the Smithsonian's Anacostia Museum, talking about the history of African-American entrepreneurship.

Over time, what began as a seat-of-the-pants operation morphed into a delivery service with a kitchen trailer that wends its way through Washington, D.C., dishing chitlins, stewed in her trademark vinegary sauce, as well as potato salad and cake-like cornbread. Internet orders for ten-pound buckets continue to spiral upward.

More recently Anderson has written a memoir, Offal Great. And she has adapted that memoir for the screen, sketching scenes of the days when Anderson, still in her crib, would watch her mother, a performer of some note, sing at Chitlin Circuit clubs. And then, of course, there's her Gourmet Chitlin Seasoning Blend, which, if Anderson has her way, will soon be available nationwide. The side label of this brownish vinaigrette-like stuff says that it can also be used with "pigs feet, hog maws and other uncured pork products." And on the front, beneath a whimsical portrait of Anderson, is her slogan, "It takes good eyes to really clean chitlins."

Chitlin Market (and Trailer)

5711 Ager Road, Hyattsville MD 20782 (with Chitlin Wagon deliveries to metropolitan D.C.; map)
866-436-9381

Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. —Ed Levine

By John T. Edge | The Sheik on North Main Street, in business since the 1970s, is one of the six fast-food shops in a Jacksonville chain. Like the unaffiliated Desert Rider downtown and Desert Sand on Beach Boulevard, they serve sandwiches—club, ham and cheese, bacon and egg, that sort of thing—tucked into pita bread. By my count, a couple dozen or more sandwich shops around town share a similar bill of fare. Come breakfast, pita cheese toast is a favorite. So is the link, egg, and cheese sack. Not to mention the breakfast in a cup, a sundae-like stack of grits, patty sausage, and eggs. At lunch, the steak-in-a-sack and the cold cut-stuffed camel rider are the main events.

Whiteway Deli

1510 King Street, Jacksonville FL 32204 (map); 904-389-0355
Must-Haves: The desert rider sandiches and the tabouli omelet

The term camel rider might play as a pejorative in most cities, but here in Jacksonville—which has among the largest Arab Middle Eastern communities on the East Coast—it's a marker of influence among immigrants and the descendants of immigrants who, fleeing the economic decline and religious persecution of the Ottoman Empire, began settling in the area in the 1890s.

Many Arab immigrants made their way as peddlers. Some opened groceries, which in time evolved into sandwich shops. Assimilation was the watchword. Mohammed became Mo. Saliba became Sal. Men with surnames like Hazouri built houses of worship like Mount Olive Syrian Presbyterian Church. By 1915 the Syrian American Club was thriving. The Ramallah American Club followed in the 1950s.

For reasons that are unclear, pita bread—and sandwiches stuffed into pita bread—function as totems of both assimilation and enduring ethnic identity among Arabs of Jacksonville. Even sandwiches like the Anne Beard (turkey, tabouli, feta, peppers, and Italian dressing), served by Sam Salem, owner of the Whiteway Delicatessen in the Riverside neighborhood, broadcast Middle Eastern origins by means of the customary envelope.

Sam, who took over the 1927 vintage café from his father, Paul, a native of Ramallah, probably serves the best pita sandwiches in town. Though he's proud of his desert rider, I dote on Whiteway's tabouli omelet. Served in a cardboard boat, it's a puff of egg layered with slabs of feta and a cool scoop of parsley, bulgur, and tomato, the whole affair stuffed inside a warm pita pouch.

When I asked Sam whether he considers the term camel rider a pejorative, he changes the subject and directs my attention toward the archive of candid customer photos he has taken over the past 30-odd years. Sam's chronicle of life at Whiteway is exhaustive, filling dozens of scrapbooks, scores of boxes. By way of an answer, he picks a box up at random and begins sifting through what he calls his "collage of people," calling every second subject by name, reciting their life stories, telling me who they are, who they were, and where they are now.

Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. —Ed Levine

"Back in the kitchen, they shuck a dozen, set them topless over a pecan- and oak-fueled fire, swab each with butter and Parmesan cheese, and cook until the shells shade toward black, the oysters lips curl, and the cheese burbles and spits."

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565125479/serieats-20">By John T. Edge | If a team of New Urbanists set out to design the perfect waterside joint according to the tenets of Gulf Coast vernacular architecture, they would be hard-pressed to find a more honest template than Gilhooley's, an end-of-the-road kind of place, perched on a tongue of land that thrusts into Galveston Bay. On the drive down from Houston, I pass ragtag RV parks, house trailers on stilts, a store called Junk and Disorderly, a boat christened The Filthy Whore of San Leon.

Nowadays fishermen—some commercial, others recreational—rule this randy spit. But in the early years of the twentieth century, San Leon was sold as a planned community, a "city of gorgeous flowers and beautiful shrubbery," a "playground for untold thousands." One real estate prospectus promised "cool, delightful breezes in summer" and pledged that San Leon would soon rival Coney Island and Atlantic City. Another, and this one was key, heralded "[e]xtra large and deliciously flavored oysters in almost unlimited quantities."

Exceptional of the oysters, most of the pledges were wishful thinking at best, swindles at worst. Oysters still matter in San Leon. The best place to get a bead on how much they matter is Gilhooley's, owned and operated since 1987 by Phil Duke, and always serving local bivalves, harvested by Croatian oysterman Misho Ivic.

The place is ringed by a shell and dirt lot. There's an old boxcar at center. Inside are a U-shaped bar, low ceilings, and, along one wall, an incongruous collection of African tribal masks. Old license plates cover the truss beams in the accustomed fashion. The menu borders on encyclopedic and features a San Leon BLT, which translates on the plate as a fried bologna sandwich. (They also dish fried boudain balls, employing the preferred Texas spelling for the rice and oddments sausage, known as boudin in Louisiana.)

I order the ur-meal hereabouts, Oysters Gilhooley and a longneck. Back in the kitchen, they shuck a dozen, set them topless over a pecan- and oak-fueled fire, swab each with butter and Parmesan cheese, and cook until the shells shade toward black, the oysters lips curl, and the cheese burbles and spits. They arrive on a metal-lined platter that looks like it was recently liberated from a second-rate steakhouse. You will not taste–I have not tasted–a better roasted oyster. And, yes, I've been to Drago's in suburban New Orleans.

Now for the disclaimer, courtesy of longtime employee Desiree Mack: "Tell anybody who's thinking about coming that we don't allow children. None. Not even outside. I'll catch them before they set their playpen up in the courtyard. No kids, no dogs, no midgets, just like the sign says. Some of us have kids at home and we don't want them in here."

Gilhooley's

221 Ninth Street, San Leon TX 77539
281-339-3813

Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. —Ed Levine

Photograph from Dyobmit on Flickr

By John T. Edge | Southerners have had a long love affair with all things fried. We eat fried chicken by the tub, savor fried oysters drenched in hot sauce, munch fried okra like popcorn, and still relish a mess of fried chitlins now and again. But dill pickles? Fried? Despite the empirical truth of their vinegary and greasy goodness, there are some things that give even a Southerner reason to pause.

And so it was when I first encountered fried dill pickles. I paused—long enough to ask three questions: Why would anyone do such a thing to a perfectly good pickle? Who was the first brave soul to drop a mess of pickles in hot oil? And, when did this great event first take place? Simple enough questions—or so I thought.

Two restaurants claim to have been the originators of this gastronomic oddity. According to the owners of the Hollywood Café in Robinsonville, Mississippi, fried dill pickles made their debut in 1969 when a desperate cook, confronted by a dining room full of patrons, a vat of bubbling oil, and a scarcity of catfish, reached for an industrial-sized jar of dill pickle chips. The story goes that he rolled them in the batter intended for the catfish, served them to a crowd of incredulous but famished diners, and then sat back to savor the praise.

It's a good story, parroted by many. But, according to Bob Austin of Atkins, Arkansas, "It's a damn lie." Bob claims to have invented the fried dill pickle in 1960 while operating the Duchess Drive In, directly across the street from the pickle plant in Atkins. "I had an inspiration one day and just started working on the batter," he says. "Staring out the window at that pickle plant all day, your mind gets to wandering. So I sliced some pickles and fixed up a batter. My batter beats all. And I'm not telling anybody what's in it. I'll sell it to the right person, but nobody's getting it for free. The rest, they're all imposters. Nobody has been able to duplicate it since."

A few years back the Duchess closed. Bob retired. These days, those "original" pickles are available only during Picklefest, Atkins' annual spring celebration, when the local VFW hall sets up a booth and sells them on the street. "Yep, they're the only ones that I let use my recipe," says Bob. "That's your one chance if you want to try the real thing."

Aktins Picklefest

Occurs in May each year; visit the Arkansas Festival Association for exact dates

"Got some boiled / Got some toasted / Got some stewed / Got some roasted." —Tony Wright, peanut vendor

Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. —Ed Levine

By John T. Edge | Street vendors were once ever present on Southern streets. In Canton, Mississippi, Frank Owens walked the courthouse square, selling pecan, chess, and blackberry pies from a cut-down cardboard box. In Lufin, Texas, a tamale vendor known as Hombre worked high school football games. In the French Quarter of New Orleans, Sam De Kemel peddled four-for-a-nickel waffles while wearing a white chef's tocque and playing a bugle.

Reform movements geared toward improvements in public health introduced onerous regulations and wiped out most of them. The fast-food industry finished off the rest. Or so I thought. Of late, I've begun to spot a few retro renegade operators. I've met a man who vends red velvet cakes from the trunk of his car. I've met a woman who sells pimento cheese sandwiches from a basket bolted to the front of her ten-speed. I've met a passel of hot dog vendors. (For a year I, too, owned a weenie wagon.) But no one has honed a shtick like Tony the Peanut Man, peddling sacks of peanuts since 1991 in Charleston, South Carolina.

He wears a bow tie, fixed tight around the collar of a T-shirt. The front is blazoned with his own smiling mug. The rear boasts his slogan-cum-song, "Got some boiled / Got some toasted / Got some stewed / Got some roasted," which, when he's selling—and he's always selling—wizened Tony sings with the bravado of a pubescent opera star.

On his head is a baseball hat, woven in Gullah-style from sweetgrass. "I do the market," he tells me, referring to the City Market, where local women of African descent have sold their signature baskets to tourists. "I do most anything to make a buck. Gotta move. Gotta sell."

Tony Wright's salt-roasted peanuts are good. And his boiled peanuts are great; they have that telltale dank earth taste. If you can't find him at the market, he's probably working a high school football game. Or a college basketball game. The local Piggly Wiggly sells his canned peanuts. But Tony is worth tracking down. If you don't meet the man, you won't hear the song, a ditty that links him to generations of African American vendors past, people like the late Ben Campbell, the Charlestonian Tony modeled his pitch after, the man all remember as the King of Peanuts.

Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. —Ed Levine

By John T. Edge | In fine-dining circles, tales of temperamental French chefs are rife. Neophytes who fiddle with the foie gras or diddle with the duck confit are sure to stir the ire of the guy in the white coat and pleated tocque outfit. But who would expect such an outburst of temper from a guy in a flour-streaked apron, the proprietor of an unassuming little brick rectangle of a restaurant, set amid a row of old redbrick warehouses?

Meet Jack Arnold, a native of the North Carolina hills, with a dedication to fresh, honest foods that, in just a world, would make him as well known a cook as Julia Child or James Beard.

On my first visit to Arnold's Country Kitchen, I caught Jack in a foul mood. Indeed, he was cussing a blue streak.

More on Arnold's

• On Roadfood.com
• On HollyEats.com
• On MeatandThree.com

"The damn fools I hired to clean my greens broke them!" he told me, as he worked to stock the serving line with the day's specials. "I told them to strip the leaves. But dammit to hell, they snapped them right in half. I had some really nice purple tops and they just ruined them."

Like Hap Townes, who once ran one of the South's best lunchrooms in the shadow of the nearby Nashville ballpark, and the late James Lynn Chandler, whose Sylvan Park Restaurant over in west Nashville still wins praise from locals for its vegetable plates and chocolate pie, Jack has spent a lifetime in the kitchen. And with each meal he serves, Jack Arnold makes a convincing argument that country cooking—collard greens and cabbage, fried chicken and meatloaf—is worthy of the respect normally accorded highfalutin' French and Italian cuisine.

He started out at the age of 12, washing dishes. While studying fine arts at Vanderbilt University, Jack managed the campus cafeteria. Since 1983 he has been at the helm here, frying green tomatoes to a crisp, roasting monstrous rounds of garlic-studded beef to a turn, simmering fat butter beans in a swine-scened pot-likker, baking pan after pan of macaroni and cheese.

It's all good, all simple, all Southern. Indeed, I would go so far as to posit that Arnold's is among the best two or three plate lunch places in Nashville, which makes it among the best in the South. And, Jack's protestations to the contrary, the greens were great, broken stems and all.

ARNOLD'S COUNTRY KITCHEN

Address: 605 Eighth Avenue South, Nashville TN 37203 (map)
Phone: 615-256-4455

Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. —Ed Levine

By John T. Edge | According to the Roman calendar, summer begins in June. Try to tell that to a native of subtropical New Orleans. When it comes to marking the seasons down here, calendars don't count for much. Instead, locals with a sweet tooth will tell you that summer arrives on the Saturday after Easter, when Hansen's Sno Bliz throws open its screen door and serves the first customer on a five-month annual run.

New Orleans is a chockablock with snowball stands, jerry-rigged roadside hus that dispense cones of shaved ice drenched in a saccharine torrent of syrup. But Hansen's–set in a cinder-block rectangle on Tchoupitoulas Street in the city's Uptown neighborhood–is different. The late Ernest and Mary Hansen were the couple who defined that difference, the husband and wife team responsible for making good on the placard behind the counter, the one that reads, "Air-Condition Your Tummy With a Hansen's Snow Bliz."

In 1934 Ernest decided to build a better snowball. At the time, untold vendors worked the streets of the city, rasping ice from oversized Eskimo blocks with the same sort of wood plane your dad might have used to shave down the kitchen door when it stuck. "That never seemed clean to me," he told me. "They always seemed like they got a little dirt in there. I thought I could do it better. Figured I could build a machine to shave the ice." He succeeded. And he earned U.S. Patent 2525923.

Mary developed her own syrups and sold snowballs from a rickety stand in her mother's front yard. She set her price at two cents, when the going rate was a penny. "But we always gave good value," she said. "We always give three squirts of syrup, one for the Father, one for the Son, and one for the Holy Ghost."

Over the years, Hansen's acquired a mystique, an ethic worthy of its status as beloved neighborhood institution. Time and flights of fancy begat a lexicon of confections. What will it be? A baby duper, a duper, or a super-duper size? And then there are the variants on the snowball theme—like the hot dog, a spumoni-like snowball and fruit combo, and the oversized tubs of shaved ice sold to the local frat houses, just ready to be doused with a jolt of Golden Grain.

For the most part, though, the Hansens have kept it simple. Miss Mary and Mr. Ernest have since passed, but their granddaughter, the beatific Ashley Hansen, still peddles shaved, syrup-stoked ice by the cup and bucket to any and all for five precious months.

HANSEN'S SNO BLIZ

Address: 4801 Tchoupitoulas Street, New Orleans LA 70115 (map)
Phone: 504-89-9788

Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. —Ed Levine

By John T. Edge | Jane Barton, whom everyone seems to call the Mayonnaise Queen, has been on her feet since 4:30 this morning. Her gray hair is fashionably coiffed. She wears a paisley smock over Bermuda shorts. Her reading glasses dangle from a gold herringbone necklace. This is her 49th year of service at the Waffle Shop, a Lenten-only canteen set in the basement of Calvary Episcopal Church in downtown Memphis, Tennessee. "I've been making mayonnaise for 45 of those years," she says. "I took over when the lady who was supposed to make it broke her leg."

Service to Calvary by local belles is a long tradition. The ladies tell of the early years, back in the late 1920s, when the shop bordered an alley known as the Whiskey Chute, the water for washing and drinking was drawn from corner hydrants, and cooking was done on coal stoves. They talk of the grande dames of their day who dressed for midday services in couture and heels but descended to the basement kitchen postsermon, donning protective rain slickers, and stirring up waffles and chicken hash, corned beef and cabbage, shrimp mousse, fish pudding, and tomato aspic, the latter three embellished by a niggardly flourish of homemade mayonnaise.

The waffles alone are worth a pilgrimage. Cooked on home kitchen irons by a crew at the rear of the dining room, within sight of inspirational plaques with messages like "Bloom Where You Are Planted," they are vaguely sweet and almost crisp. Drenched with Calvary hash, a brown sauce stew of dark-meat chicken, they earn a place in the pantheon of comfort foods. But the ladies-who-lunch salads are the exemplars. Order a jiggly wedge of tomato aspic topped with a cotton boll of chicken salad and you will taste the best of white-glove cookery. Plus, they seem to be a bit more generous with the luxe mayo when you order that double-decker.

One more thing to keep in mind: In 2004, Thomas Pavlechko, Calvary's choirmaster, premiered his "Ode to the Calvary Waffle Shop." Sung to the tune of "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music, it includes such memorable stanzas as:

Waffles with sausage and hash made with chicken,
Historic foods that we serve from our kitchen;
Creole with shrimp and some giblets with rice,
Gumbo and turnip greens: isn't that nice?

On a recent visit, I was lucky enough to eat aspic as Pavlechko banged out the tune on an upright Kimball and the voices of the congregation rose in tribute.

CALVARY WAFFLE SHOP

Address: 102 North Second Street, Memphis TN 38103 (map)
Phone: 901-525-3036

Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. —Ed Levine

By John T. Edge | Thinly battered, well-salted deep-fried chicken, dumped unceremoniously from cook baskets and served with hushpuppies, coleslaw, a marshmallowy white bread roll, and a jumble of so-called Tater Rounds. That's what you get when you quit the more well-traveled and gentrified precincts of Charlotte's Uptown neighborhood for this South End favorite, in business since 1948 as a chicken market, since 1952 as a kinda-sorta restaurant.

The exterior is a plane of redbrick, fronted by plate glass windows which, when the place is bursting at the seams–and it almost always is–fog with clouds of chicken grease. The white cinder-block interior is utilitarian. There may well be an air-conditioninig unit in use somewhere but, come summer, it's no match for the combo of roiling oil and broiling Carolina sun. And there are no seats. Most meals are eaten in the front sea of cars or vans parked at teh curb or, for those with a bit of lolling-about time, beneath the boughs in nearby Latta Park.

If you desire a meal of chicken parts, you're in the right place. The menu, printed on the top of the white pasteboard boxes in which Price's serves their birds, boasts quarter chickens, chicken livers, and chicken gizzards. (They also dish burgers and barbecue sandwiches, but no one is fool enough to order them.)

I once believed that in the cookery of fried chicken a cast-iron skillet was elemental. I claimed a seat in the skillet-fried pew alongside Calvin Trillin, who once observed that a "fried chicken cook with a deep fryer is a sculptor working with mittens."

But after a decade of traveling the South, eating at the likes of Price's—not to mention the fabled Willie Mae's Scotch House in New Orleans—I've tasted my share of wonderful deep-fried bird and have, in the process, come to see the error of my ways. I now believe that skillet-fried chicken is not inherently superior to deep-fried chicken. Nor is the inverse true. (The two are, however, different. So keep this in mind: If you like a crust that clings to the meat and offers a bit of chew, you're in the skillet camp. If you like a brittle crust that shatters upon first bite, you're a deep-fried fan.)

One more thing: When you step to the counter at Price's, have purse or wallet in hand and your order settled, for the white-jacketed employees brook no fulminating and fumbling. There is, however, a payoff in the harried exchange of cash and drumstick. Standing amid the rugby scrum of hungry supplicants, waiting for your box, you will recognize a place that matters deeply to this ever-evolving New South Metropolis.

Price's Chicken Coop

Address: 1614 Camden Road, Charlotte NC 28203 (map)
Phone: 704-333-9866

Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read. Yes, you can use it like the discerning guide to eating in the South it most assuredly is. But Southern Belly is also a book filled with so much heart, soul, and good writing that it demands to be read cover to cover like some John Grisham page-turner. Edge blessedly doesn't shy away from discussions of race and class, and the result is a narrative that's compellingly thoughtful and real. That's why I'm pleased that John T. has allowed us to excerpt selected items from Southern Belly in our Eating Out section here Serious Eats. They'll appear every other week. So without further ado, here's the first of them. —Ed Levine

By John T. Edge | BILL BAYLEY was a big man. Big size. Big ideas. Said he was the inventor of West Indies salad, a layered assemblage of onions and crabmeat, cooled in an ice-water bath, beloved by coastal folk. Said he was the first man to batter and fry crab claws, too. During Bayley's lifetime, few people took issue with his claims to fame. I'm not inclined to argue, either, for if you go looking for good eats near the Alabama shore, you will find yourself on his trail.

Before he became a restaurateur, Bayley worked first as a steward, later as a chef for a shipping company. In 1947, along with his wife, Ethyl, he opened a restaurant south of Mobile on what is now Dauphin Island Parkway. They started out small. He worked the kitchen; she worked the front. But talent bears fruit. What began as a one-room grocery was soon a grand dining hall.

Bayley was Falstaffian, a cigar-chomping man of great appetites. He was a showman who, in a bid to lure families with children, rented projectors from the local library and showed Westerns and cartoon shorts. At his core, however, he was a cook, expert at frying chicken and all manner of fish.

Family and friends tell a number of stories about how he came to assemble West Indies salad, his trademark dish. Bayley often told reporters that he dreamed it up when he bought a tow sack of lobsters, while sailing the West Indies. But his son, Bill Jr., opts for a more direct, less romantic explanation. "He loved cucumbers and onions in vinegar and oil, and he always put ice water in it," Bill Jr. told a newspaper reporter. "I guess that's how he came up with it."

Fried crab claws came later, say the early 1960s. After years of busting open crabs, pulling the sweet meat from the shell and claws for West Indies salads, the elder Bayley devised a better way to crack a claw. The result was a drumstick-shaped edible, with a thin crab pincer (the handle) at one end and a fat ball of crab (the treat) at the other. Rolled in meal or cracker crumbs and fried, the meaty end of the drumstick proved the ideal appetizer, especially when dipped in a lemony cocktail sauce.

Bill Bayley died a while back. In succeeding years, fried crab claws, like West Indies salad, have spread far and wide. But south of Mobile, at what locals still call Bayley's Corner, it's possible to taste these dishes—along with stuffed shrimp and crab omelets and homemade onion rings—in situ, in what was once a catering kitchen for the elder Bayley's restaurant and is now a porcelain block–bedecked roadhouse, under the direction of his son.

Baley's

Address: 10805 Dauphin Island Parkway, Theodore AL 36582 (map)
Phone: 251-973-1572