The Old Southern Tea Room has returned. For years a bastion of plantation cookery such as fried chicken, country ham, corn pudding and sweet potato pie, the grande dame of Mississippi River restaurants suffered through some hard times, sputtered through the '80s as a ghost of its former self in a motel's dining room, then vanished when the motel had a fire in April of 1987. A tradition that connoisseurs of regional Americana had enjoyed since 1941 was gone.
Then George P. Mayer did the nearly impossible. He made the South rise again, at least gastronomically. He reopened The Old Southern Tea Room last year, this time in the stately two-story dining room of the Hotel Vicksburg, which was itself built in 1928 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Mayer found and rehired many of the old cooks and waitresses, some of whom had worked for Mary McKay, the original owner, for decades; and he got the tried-and-true McKay family recipes for down-home favorites ranging from Creole gumbo by the cup (for starting a meal) to down-in-Dixie bourbon pie (for a grand climax).Today's Old Southern Tea Room offers such all-American modern foodstuffs as soup and salad bar or cheeseburger and french fries (known here as "the Vicksburger"), but adventurous eaters will direct their attention to the majestic regional specialties. This is the place to eat crusty catfish with hush puppies or stuffed baked ham made from a recipe the menu advises is more than 150 years old.
All dinners come with little hot biscuits and corn muffins, and the choice of vegetables includes turnip greens, black-eyed peas and sweet potato pone. It was vegetables that endeared The Old Southern Tea Room to America's original traveling gourmet, Duncan Hines, who once said that the first thing he wanted to do upon returning to America from Europe was go to the Tea Room and eat stuffed eggplant and corn pudding.
When we asked Mayer for an Old Southern Tea room recipe to share with readers of "A Taste of America," he suggested Old Plantation Chicken, also known as "The Governor's Chicken." Serve it with a vegetable casserole, biscuits and/or cornbread, and a tall, cool pitcher of pre-sweetened iced herbal tea.
Now available! Nearly 200 of the most-requested recipes from this column, all in one book, "A Taste of America." It includes Jane and Michael Stern's favorite restaurants, as well as photos from their coast-to-coast eating adventures. Available in paperback, it can be ordered by sending $9.95 plus $1 for postage and handling to Taste of America, in care of the Deseret News, P.O. Box 419150, Kansas City, Mo. 64141.
Recipe listed: Old Plantation Chicken