Most of our neighbors belong to a floating population, largely northerners, who turn up in town with job offers, rent then buy places in need of fix-up, stay for the most part a year or three or five, then decamp — often suddenly to be closer to family or the next job.

They are of every trade—nurses, landscapers, building tradesmen, students, hair dressers, hospitality industry workers and so on. Save for the students none of them are fantastically poor. Even then, in one of the upstairs apartments, there was a student who was on the cusp of breaking into the major oil painting art market. She left when her warren’s leaky roof led to little plants sprouting from her ceiling’s crannies and crevices.

These are eccentric characters who live along our Victorian era neighborhood streets. Savannah’s still not completely gentrified boulevards are gathering places for the colorful, the unconventional and the free spirited — people who have fallen into half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to hew to expected norms. Crazy frees one from standards, just as money frees people from work.

Some live lives that are curious beyond words. For example, there are those who by hard work and strict economy manage to bring home thousands of dollars a week in take home pay, yet mysteriously appear to be always half starved and half drunk.

Or there is Mike, who works at the water treatment plant — my euphemism for what he calls the “shit plant.” He is a 30-ish, tall, muscular, ex-Navy man with tattoos and a scary looking, taxi driver, mohawk haircut whose romantic-looking eyes have a catnip effect on women of all ages passing by on the sidewalk when we drink on his front porch.

Mike’s peculiarity is that he does not talk much, except for the purposes of talking about his work or when his bounding English bulldog is present. She elicits his most endearing words and tales and provokes subsequent dissertations about Mike’s past failed loves. Nearly all of them failed him on the fidelity front.

Only a year before his Savannah arrival, he had been a key operator at a Pittsburgh electric power plant and was saving money for the day he would marry the love of his life. After cuckolding Mike, the girl fell even more desperately in love with him, and for a two week period they moved in together and spent thousands upon thousands of dollars of Mike’s money. Then the girl was unfaithful again. After a month spent in wanton and depressed inebriation, Mike was surprised one morning upon exiting his dwelling to find the girl on the sidewalk professing she was evermore in love with him. This lead to another cohabitation of several weeks along with even wilder spending.

But, as all but Mike expected, the girl was unfaithful again and became pregnant. Instead of looting his savings account for another epic drinking bout that might have ended in his DUI imprisonment, he left the north and landed in the Hostess City to work in the sewage business. Nothing induces Mike to talk about why he chose to work in the business end of this city’s sewers. He simply crosses his wrists to signify perhaps either bondage or handcuffs, and jerks his head towards the treatment plant.

Then, there is R, a gentle soul from north Georgia, who has lived in the hood since the mid 90s dating back to the times when the street was infested by casual arsonists, wild-eyed, red bandanna’d gang bangers, drug dealers and business focused prostitutes. Since at least his arrival in Savannah’s eastside, he drinks bottle upon bottle of red wine each day, and an extra bottle on Sundays. He also regularly travels as far north as Charleston SC, because the wine there is cheaper than anywhere in Georgia’s Coastal Empire. He is a gentle, domesticated creature, never rowdy or quarrelsome, and never sober after 6 PM. He is not a lay-about since he rises each day at 6 AM to toil ten plus hours a day, six days a week until he quietly, methodically and joyfully begins his evening soaking. Actually it is more like a marinating, since he talks in a refined, soft but high pitched voice, about his upbringing, family, Savannah, the neighborhood’s evolution, and ongoing local gossip that is beyond juicy.

There is literally a parade of other people who live lives just as eccentric as these two: Mr. X, who daily walks by our front porch who has a lousy fake leg yet who defiantly will not admit it in order to get himself one of the modern less painful ones, the miser who lives down the street, and an older distinguished man who has amassed a real estate portfolio that billionaire real estate developers weekly supplicate him to part with.

They are marked with a hunger almost a loneliness that life teaches us over many years is not a rare or curious
circumstance. We feel it as a central and inevitable part of life, whether in bars, automobiles, diners, movie houses, stores, parks, sidewalks and in 21st century emails, texts and tweets. Contrary to some beliefs, there is an escape if not a cure. We share it around the dinner table.

Just like its residents, this former slum, with its renovated and falling down houses cheek by jowl and their residents’ queer lives, is an object lesson in hunger. Someday it could be fun to pen some of their biographies, but my purpose here is to describe in some small way their unseen hunger and our desire to treat fellow sufferers with our offerings of a table, food and end-of-the-day companionship.

——

Cooking and eating good food have been principal activities for most of my 70 years of life. During my sophomore year abroad at a French university, I learned all about the deliciousness of animal blood and organs, aged meats, rotted aroma cheeses, and multiple ways of using fresh and rendered animal fats I learned to salivate at the aroma of a rare cooked slice of pork and the mysterious scents of fat, salt and herb infused parts-is-parts charcuterie. I also learned to delight at the ocean air tanginess of un plateau de fruits de mer.

I also learned that to over-consume even minutely too large a quantity of these gifts from the gods could and would introduce me to un monde de merde. Yes, I had my first of many attacks of gout at the tender age of 19. Slowly did I apprentice myself to detect the faint differences in scents that ranged between the desired decay of ecstasy and those that brought gastric distress, sweats, shakes, volcanic nausea and colonic explosiveness.

I learned to avoid the dark dangers of bad bacteria in my search for food nirvana. It was mostly trial and error and not science, hence my learning experiences were numerous and sometimes repetitive.

As an amateur cook, I learned to be secretive about my shortcuts and special ingredients, preferring to say that the specialness was all in the method and not some odd southeast Asian herb or a southern French forest fungi.

Along the way, I would become fanatic about details, while suffering the public humiliation of having to trash epic-failed attempts and ordering a delivery pizza for a friends or family dinners.

Long ago I shared with you that W and I essay to have a weekly recipe night where we attempt some new main course, sides and dessert plate. With both of us bringing to this union our own ancient family and life cooking rituals. we agreed to not impose our own ways on the other but to find a third, middle or new way. We also avoided the trap of becoming hostage to kitchen mania by drinking wine while we did our pre-meal recipe selection, food prep, saucing, cooking, searing, plating and serving.

Each would be the chef de cuisine for a specific plate while the other was the sous chef or prep drone. We thus became a well greased, floured and sauced team whose loyalty was to no flag but to that night’s meal.

A good deal has changed since we both embarked on our separate cooking and eating journeys decades ago — palates sharpened, techniques honed, equipment upgraded and fond memories collected of monster meal good times. We are not in search of rock star acclaim of cable TV show chefs. We are just free range roamers in search of a good meal and fellowship.

We’ve been doing this home chef-pair thing in Key West and Savannah for the past six years.

Here are some of our favorite ingredients — butter, creams, olive oil, fresh from the garden herbs, duck and goose fat that we render ourselves, odd flours, local produce, cheeses, meats and seafood and recently vinegars.

What do we like to eat after these meals? A few strange but mostly normal things — Italian herb digestifs, white dessert wine, homemade shortbread and brownie cookies, and maybe a classic American cocktail from the 1950s.

Our love for the occasional weirdness (e.g., Chinese soup dumplings made with rendered pig foot gelatin) of what we choose to cook in our kitchen says we are dreamers, if not crackpots (so we fit right in with our Coastal Empire neighbors). Should any of our guests fear our latent madness, it is overcome by our kitchen’s ever-present, layered aromas of roasting bone in meats, searing seafood, and simmering shiny liquids. We make little noise and clatter while we work on meals. Admittedly, some day we won’t be able to engage the exacting demands of this grind. So we shall crazy on until we can’t, since we culinary under-grounders have embraced our dysfunction.

soup dumplings

In Savannah, our kitchen is a refuge and launch pad for us Conch Republic refugees. It’s a place for our refugee guests with diverse pasts and paths to the Coastal Empire where we now create good eats and make new friends and family.

Despite the occasional close quarters when our meal kitchen activity is fast and furious with many blunt and sharp objects in hand, no one (yet) has been killed or injured. Our cooking, when we are doing it well, is a high speed, two-step boogie chorus line.

We and our guests eat meats that are rare (vegetarians are scarce but accommodated, but pinched faced vegans are prohibited). We thicken our sauces with butter and duck or pork fat. As we join at the table to relish our new concoctions, our gazes fix upon the plates heaped with herbed meats, roasted carmelized root vegetables, boats of various sauces, our faces are those of communicants at the church altar of the days’ religious pilgrimage.

Bon appetit and amen y’all!

un plateau de fruits de mer

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