In this week’s Last Supper, we explore the backwoods Southern goodness of Hillbilly Bento. The name? Ugh. The food? Delicious.
As I point out in the story, there’s a reason I fell for this little hole-in-the-wall on the downtown bus mall: Memories of North Carolina pulled pork. It was quite an unexpected experience to be sitting at the small bar in Hillbilly Bento, suddenly awash in recollections of a busy kitchen in a dilapidated plantation house surrounded by tobacco fields.
In some respects the experience was soothing simply because that food, at that moment in my life, was exactly what I needed. In other ways those memories are sad because that family wasn’t mine, and now they’re gone forever. Still, it’s nice to know there’ s somewhere I can go and connect back to that time and those people in such a big sensory way.
Tell me, Blogtownies, is there a food that looms large in your memories? Have you found a place where you can indulge those memories? Spill it in the comments, below.
Bean and Cheese breakfast tacos are my comfort food.
Tamales are my comfort food…And I don’t go to them…they come to me like magic:
http://milagrosboutique.com/2007/01/25/mmm…
Being Filipino and having lived in Guam, I’d say Pacific Asian food. Lots of pancit, pork based dishes, salty soups, yum. And incredibly difficult to find in PDX outside of occasional Hawaiian food. Any recs?
My grandmama’s biscuits. They were constant at breakfast, lunch, and dinner in her house, with sausage or gravy in the morning, tomatoes at lunch, and just plain butter at dinner. Every summer when I find the first good beefsteak tomatoes, I make up a batch and have tomato-biscuit sandwiches. Hurry up with the tomatoes, farmers!
There are very many indeed, but one that will stay with me forever was a miraculous sausage sandwich that my mother fixed on one of my stints home from college. I’ve tried recreating it and failed, but describing it is easy: it was a spinach and feta sausage that she braised, pan-fried to crisp the casing, and then butterflied, and she served it on toasted Italian bread with mayo, tomatoes, fresh basil (you expected lettuce, right? but why not something a hundred times more flavorful?), and the kicker: an extraordinary artisanal thyme-apple jelly she procured from the farmers’ market. One bite sold me; I’ve never attacked a sandwich with such alacrity. She made me a second one.
Pierogies. My mom made them for me once or twice a year when I was a kid, I try to pick them up once a month from the polish cart downtown