One of the things you must do in Kansas City is eat a feed of BBQ, ribs or brisket or both, served with toast, sliced dill pickle, and the house’s bbq sauces of course, and most places have a choice of several flavours ranging from smokey mild to very spicy and smokey. To go with that you can choose sides of fries, corn, mac’n’cheese, beans, coleslaw, or corn (kernels or on the cob) There’s almost no salad in view, and the only hope of a green veg is the cabbage in the slaw which is prolly white, anyway. All across the ‘South’ from Chicago to DC, Charlotte to New Orleans, places specialising in BBQ are usually referred to ‘joints’, often cafes, and only sometimes ‘restaurants’. The wonderful joint we went to was not ‘fine dining’! Whatever its style, though, each place serves variations of this meal with their own BBQ sauce recipes, carefully guarded and handed down from one generation to the next. KC has a long tradition of fine BBQ cuisine.
You could drink wine with this, but generally BBQ ribs are washed down with either a beer or cold tea (erk) … Cold tea is pretty popular in the States, especially all across the South when it’s really hot and muggy like the night we went with Ivan to this one on the edge of KC. I’m sorry, I don’t remember the name of it, but if you’re visiting that area you’ll have fun trying to find your favourite among the many the locals will recommend to you.
There is divided opinion on whether the ribs should be parboiled before being baked or grilled and I can only say that Mike does lovely ribs, and his are parboiled before baking. Whenever and wherever we have them, I always think of Fanny Flagg’s 1987 book – Fried Green Tomatoes at The Whistle Stop Cafe. In the movie of the book there is a great scene in which at one point the guy in charge of making the legendary BBQ served at the cafe (it’s always man’s work – notice?) is clearly boiling up bone and tissue body parts of a hated male character who met a violent end and, was thus never found. The detectives looking for him arrive at lunch time, and finding him not there, sit down and treat themselves to a meal of the cafe’s bbq before leaving to continue the search. Do watch the movie if you don’t know it. You don’t actually see the violence, it’s all cleverly implied.
Now when settling to write this post, I made an online search for the fried green tomatoes recipe given in the book, as my copy is, naturally, in storage. Googling for it I didn’t even get as far as the recipe before my eye was yanked by this entry on the googler page – a Classic Lesbian Movie? Now that I think of it, and the time in which it was written, yes, it was. Though the strong bonds of affection were plain, I just didn’t think further to what that might really mean. Then. I think we have the movie DVD somewhere – but there’s always Netflix, anyway. I feel a viewing coming up – maybe tomorrow if it rains as forecast.
Back to the fried green tomatoes: I made them in Denver a few times, but context being everything, I sort of forgot them in the 25 years since we left there. And though we visit USA regularly, neither of our kids nor any of our friends serve them, and they’re not on the menus of places we typically go when visiting there (we love Mexican …) However, if you are keen to have some, as I now find I am after this afternoon’s writing, I found the original recipe, including tips, here: and I really like this food website, so thanks Tori Avey.