Ruth and Jimmie’s Sporting Goods and Café
A place where you could get hunting and fishing supplies, live bait, and licenses – the best damn meal you ever had in your life.
Let me start this tale of nostalgia by noting that I wrote this week about what constituted “home” for me.
As it turns out, one of those things is a certain smell.
To this day, when my wife cooks anything in my grandmother’s cast iron skillet, the smell reminds me of two things – Ruth and Jimmie’s and my maternal grandmother’s kitchen.
Anyone who grew up in the rural South in the 50’s and 60’s will know what I’m talking about.
My Mammy (what we called my grandmother) cooked three meals a day for my grandaddy, and everything she prepared was in her seasoned cast iron cookware. There is nothing else that smells quite like a meal simmering on the stove in that cast iron.
Today, I had another reminder of something that takes me back to my home state of Mississippi, years of duck hunts with lifelong friends from W.P. Daniel High School in New Albany, Mississippi, and my maternal grandmother’s kitchen out on Center Road, east of New Albany.
This trigger was me stumbling across a link to an article a friend sent me in 2015 about a place – some would call it a restaurant or café, some would argue that point, in Abbeville, Mississippi, a little wide spot in old Highway 7, just north of the Ole Miss campus in Oxford and about 10 minutes from Sardis reservoir and the sloughs of the mighty Tallahatchie River.
You see, this little hole in the wall Mecca was a converted gas station from the late 30’s run by a husband-and-wife team (and employing various family members and unrelated cooks), by the name of Ruth and Jimmie. For around 10 of their 25 years in that spot, I and friends of mine had frequented one or more of the 18 or so stools at the counter for breakfast and/or lunch after various duck or deer hunts. I am almost embarrassed to say that I never knew their surname, because the place was known as Ruth and Jimmie’s Sporting Goods and Café and that was all anyone hungry for a good meal needed to know. Every local and hunter knew where it was and what happened there, beginning around four thirty in the morning.
At Ruth and Jimmie’s, you could get hunting and fishing supplies, live bait, and licenses – and the best damn meal you ever had in yo sorry-assed cotton-pickin’ life.
As I recall, they had a black gentleman named William who cooked there, splitting time with Jimmie. Both men were virtuosos at the eight-burner cast iron gas stove with cast iron grates on the top that I’m not sure ever was turned off – the knobs had been in the “on” position for so long, they may not have been able to turn to the “off” position. Nothing on the top or in the oven was made out of any miracle non-stick stuff like you see on TV, it was all cast iron skillets, Dutch ovens, and griddles and as anyone worth their salt knows, you never put a cast iron cooking pot or skillet in soapy water, you just need to wipe it out when it is still on the verge of being hot and there you go, ready for the next meal.
After many years, of cooking, the entire place took on the bouquet of bacon, eggs, sausage, fried ham, home-made biscuits and sausage gravy, the best fried okra I have ever consumed, squash and onions, chicken fried steak, pork chops, slow simmered butterbeans, black-eyed peas, and poke salad (greens), all with a hunk of fatback tossed in for flavoring, and undoubtably some of the best cornbread this side of the planet.
All cooked in seasoned cast iron.
The place just smelled like good food. More than that, it smelled like the heaven of good food to us.
That smell permeated every inch of that place. In the wood floors, the counter, the beaded ceiling, everything – and when you left, your clothes smelled like Ruth and Jimmie’s. For about a half a day, anyone who had ever been there knew you had just been.
I know for some that doesn’t sound appetizing, but to me it does.
Some say that success sometimes is a bad thing, and that smell might just have led to the eventual demise of Ruth and Jimmie’s Sporting Goods and Café because sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s, word of good, home-cooked, reasonably priced food made its way down to Oxford and the college crowd. The place got real popular like, hosting throngs of college kids looking for a good meal after a hard night of partying, and the rumor was that drew the attention of the Lafayette County Health Department.
The last time I was there in maybe ’93 or ’94, before we moved to Utah, the old stove was gone, and everything was cleaned up. Most of the cast iron ware was retired and the new-fangled, modern, non-stick, free of character and flavor cookware was in use.
And nothing tasted the same.
It’s not that it wasn’t good, but it was “good” in a “I can get that at a chain restaurant” sort of way.
I have no idea if the Lafayette County Health Nazi’s shut it down, but that’s the only thing I can imagine that would have caused William, Ruth and Jimmie to give up a good thing that had been good for such a very long time. I can imagine that cramming a crap ton of college kids, many the spawn of wealthy parents, into a tiny café with a thirty-year-old gas stove and decades of potentially inflammable “flavor” everywhere might just be considered a safety issue.
Today that little building has been turned into an “events center” called Downtown Abbe (Get it? A takeoff of Downton Abbey?). All the evidence of the café is gone, but I’ll lay you ten to one it still smells like William cooking breakfast.
I’m pretty sure everybody from the rural South has a similar story about a place like Ruth and Jimmie’s. I hope they still exist because places like that are essential to our history and our life stories.
Anyway, today I am missing Ruth and Jimmie’s.
I spent 5 years in Oxford finally getting a sheepskin after 8 years of college classes. Ruth and Jimmie cooked my lunch at least once a week. Tonight we were talking about their smothered steak. Chunks of meat! Fudge pie! Various vegetables! Damn fine food. Never had an onion and cucumber salad like that since.
My Mom was from a tiny town 1 hour west of Memphis in Arkansas. She grew up picking cotton alongside everybody else. There was the Tiger Den (independent version DQ), a real 5 & Dime store which still made 25 cent real Cherry Cokes when we went down to visit in the summer.
My grandparents had 2-3 huge pecan trees in their front yard. We spent hours cracking them on the wooden porch of their shotgun house to take home freezer bags full of their wondrous products. I had no idea pecans were expensive - we always had bags of them in the freezer. My Grandma had a deep freezer containing treasure like homemade strawberry pies and a years worth of whatever their two lot size gardens produced. They had a lemon tree, a couple of peach trees and lots of really yummy stuff filling the gardens. My Grandpa would always take me to the tomato section and point out some that he told me were mine alone, that he didn't give them to anyone else. He also took a couple of us (we had 5 kids in our family) to a tiny fish shack on a nearby river to let us pick the catfish my Grandma would be cooking that evening. The fisherman would lift the basket out of the water and let us pick from the live fish and we loved to go there. My Grandma had a white enamel stove/oven. She always had Crisco and bacon fat on the top of it and used both liberally when cooking. I LOVED the fried okra, hush puppies, catfish, biscuits and gravy and fried green tomatoes she made. I loved the black eye peas, chicken and dumplings, with the dumplings beings more like thick noodles that she cut over the pot as she was finishing up. 97% of everything was fried. It was all in cast iron pans.
We never went out to eat - I don't believe there was a restaurant of any kind in the small town. We didn't need or want to - we had the GREAT food at Grandma's house. I can still smell and see the food being picked, prepared and eaten. Wonderful memories to this day, even though I haven't been there for probably close to 40 years. The town is mostly gone, even more so since it was directly hit by a tornado in the past 10 years. My grandparents and their home are gone. The memories live on with me.