I was listening to the Big Mo Blues Show last night on KCCK radio, 88.3 on your FM dial. I didn’t hear him mention his favorite cook, May Ree. She cooks hand-battered catfish; it’s better because it’s battered. Often, he’ll add a little to the legend, like where you can find May Ree’s establishment where you can buy her hand-battered catfish, which is filled with nitrates, cooked to perfection with manic delight, and which you can pair with any one of three flavors of moonshine, including the famous Classic Clear.
I don’t know whether Classic Clear has fruity, nutty, or extraterrestrial notes. You’ll have to try to find her joint, which is somewhere at the intersection of a highway and a street the name of which I can never recall. The story gets a new variation every now and then. May Ree has many facets to her character.
May Ree actually reminds me of the head cook at Huston-Tillotson College (now Huston-Tillotson University) in Austin, Texas. Back in the 1970s, I was a student there for a while. The head cook in the college cafeteria was Miss Mack. I don’t think you could say she cooked anything with manic delight. In fact, some of us were regular visitors who rushed with manic delight to Church’s Chicken because the H-TC cafeteria didn’t always serve what you’d call top of the line fare.
I guess Church’s want to call themselves Church’s Texas Chicken these days, mainly because they got the business started in San Antonio. Back in the day, Church’s Texas Chicken was a five-minute walk from the college. I checked a map recently, and now there isn’t a joint within an hour’s walk.
Anyway, I was a fairly frequent customer to Church’s Texas Chicken. You didn’t have a whole lot of choices about what to select. In fact, I don’t recall that there was a selection, per se. What you saw was what you got.
Sometimes, certain students were pretty frank about what they thought of Miss Mack’s cooking. One day, a guy who was fed up, in a manner of speaking, of course, held up his plate so that it was vertical, and weirdly, none of the food slid off. It just stuck there, like it was sort of a sculpture of a meal.
And then he called out loudly to everyone else in the cafeteria (not that there were many people there) as if he were offering to give to anyone there:
“Plate!” (no takers). “Plate!” (still no takers). “Plate!” (students just ignored him, but started making funny looks at their own plates).
I don’t remember what happened, but I think he just left his plate on the table and departed. I doubt Miss Mack was there. I was ambivalent about the whole deal. I liked Miss Mack, as did a lot of other students. She was kind and always had a bright smile for us.
Maybe he made a run to Church’s Texas Chicken. Funny, I didn’t see him there.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 