the South

How to talk Southern

November 22, 2013 by Lesley Tellez

I just spent a week in the South visiting friends and Crayton’s family. We had fun, but the trip made me realize that despite being a Southerner by marriage for eight years, I still don’t know how to conduct a proper conversation.

Strangers — the waitress at Waffle House, the lady at the gas station on the way to Charleston, a woman planting flowers in front of her home — would ask me, “Hi, how are you?” I’d answer “fine” and then think… wait. Did they really want to know how I am? Did I answer correctly? Does not coming up with some sort of Southern witticism make me sound like a Yankee? (Or, what I truly am, a Southern California girl?) Crayton would answer as if he was born knowing the answer: “Hi, how are you doing?”

In Greenville, SC, it took him less than five minutes to ascertain that the guy behind the rental car counter was a Clemson fan. At a restaurant in Charleston, a guy in the men’s bathroom commented to him about the weird angle of the sinks, and Crayton replied, “Well, whatever gets the job done.” He’s full of these little sayings. So is his family.

While visiting his grandparents outside Greenville, I listened a lot. They did most of the talking, and it hit me that with a small arsenal of pleasant replies, you can propel a conversation forward in a genteel way. These replies include:

Well, how about that.
I’ll be.
Isn’t that something?
I know you had fun/enjoyed that (or any sentence that politely repackages what the talker has just said to you).

I have not attempted to use these with my own family, because I think they’d laugh at me and hang up the phone. But I’m keeping them handy for the next trip South. And I’ll continue to observe and take notes, because if a Southern woman approaches me in a restaurant bathroom — example: “Wasn’t that just the biggest meal?” — I want to know what to say.

On Tuesday, once I was home in New York, I was about to enter the elevator of our building when I saw my neighbor, a woman with young children who lives across the hallway. She was near the staircase and called out, “Hello!” through the lobby.

I called back: “Hi, how are you?”

She said, “Just fine, thanks!”

I couldn’t resist continuing the conversation, so I called out, “Okay, bye!”

She may be a Southerner by marriage, but she’s getting there.

My week of gluttony, Southern-style

September 21, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

I’m back from the South, and I feel like a stuffed penguin.

A few pounds is worth it, though. (Half of me just cringed. It is?) Yes. It is. Sometimes you have to ignore pesky little “calories” and submit to the lure of bacon, cheese and mayonnaise. Just for a few days.

Sometimes you gotta just order a pimento cheese sandwich for lunch, bulging with grated cheddar and mayo.

And then go home and make a buttermilk pie for dinner.

Sometimes you have to buy honey-roasted pecans from a small-town Georgia gift shop, because, well, it’s a small-town Georgia gift shop. And they serve the nuts in paper cones!

But all that doesn’t even come close to my most gluttonous of gluttony acts, committed while we were in Atlanta. My friend is a restaurant critic there, and last Friday, he took us out for a fabulous meal at Cakes & Ale, a “farm-to-table” style restaurant (in the parlance of our times) where most of the food is made with locally grown produce.

While we stuffed our face with fried okra with homemade ranch, smoked salmon with beets, rabbit terrine, trout, bean salad with bacon, and the most heavenly pork chop ever, covered in crunchy breadcrumbs and fried in clarified butter (somewhere, I just heard my mom gasp) — we happened to bring up hamburgers. My friend mentioned that a restaurant nearby had one of the best burgers in Atlanta. Would we be interested in dining there, after this meal?

Only someone as loony about food as I am would suggest eating dinner at two restaurants in one night. But I loved my friend for it. With stars in my eyes, and a burger-inspired flush in my cheeks, we headed to Holeman & Finch Public House in Buckhead.

The H&F burgers are kind of a cult thing in the city right now — they’re not on the menu, and the kitchen just rolls ’em out at 10 p.m. You get them while they’re hot.

At about 10:30 p.m. — even though I’d already eaten a three-course dinner — I had the juiciest, moistest burger I’ve ever had in my life.

The next day, I nursed my food hangover with salad and water. But Sunday, there was more.

For brunch, we dined at Greenwoods on Green Street, a home-cooking restaurant in Roswell, Georgia, just north of Atlanta. Our plates filled the entire table. You could seriously barely see the wood.

We had fried green tomatoes….

And corn muffins… made with white corn, not that blasphemous yellow stuff.

We had fried chicken, with a sheen of oil still clinging to its crunchy, hot flesh.

I ordered a truly insane slab of meatloaf, topped with a few curls of onion.

And then came the pie.

Apple. Buttermilk. And dark chocolate, topped with messy tufts of whipped cream.

When we got to the airport a few hours later, I could barely keep my eyes open. “Just let us win!” the pie whispered to me. “Just go to sleep!” But I stubbornly stayed awake. The pie and its sugar-coma powers would not take me down.

So, now, finally back home in Mexico City, I am wearing my elastic-waistband pajama pants and wincing at the thought of putting on jeans to go to the grocery store. But I need detox food — veggies, fruit, tofu. Crayton rolls his eyes when I crow, “I’m going on a detox!” because I never stick to it, but this time I swear it’s true. It’s soups and salads for me, for the next few days. And I don’t want to see red meat again for two months.

Exploring my Southern side in Anderson, South Carolina

September 17, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

Every time we visit South Carolina, I marvel at how Crayton and I, two people with such different backgrounds, ended up together.

To get to my grandmother’s house in Pico Rivera, outside Los Angeles, we take the 10 to the 57 to the 60 to the 605.

This is the road to Crayton’s grandmother’s house. It’s outside Anderson, South Carolina, which is about 40 minutes from Greenville.

We call her Oma. In the South, grandmothers generally have nicknames.

At Oma’s house, which she shares with Crayton’s grandfather, Bpa, they usually eat poached eggs on toast in the morning. Today I hovered over her shoulder and watched. She cracked them into a small skillet half-filled with water, and then spooned the water over the top when they got runny. She served them on warmed plates, kept in the oven until serving time.

My own grandmother has been known to buy pan dulce from the local bakery, if her certain favorite granddaughter is visiting around breakfast time.

I just love coming here though. We talk slower, move slower. We’re more polite. Crayton develops a cute little twang in his voice, and tells me things like, “Mash that light.” (That means turn the light off.)

On Oma and Bpa’s sunporch, you can look out over their wide, green backyard, and listen to the breeze flutter the leaves on the trees. (I’m doing that right now.) Just noticed a spider sunning himself on the screen.

When we visit South Carolina, I’m reminded all over again how lucky I am to have married into a family that doesn’t know me entirely yet, but loves me anyway. That warmth is what I want to pass on to my own kids someday. (And they’ll be doubly lucky because they’ll have their Mexican-American side, too.)

“Your great-grandmother used to call me ‘dah’lin,’ ” I’ll tell them. “She had an accent that you could listen to all day.”