The Edible Museum

Photos by Donna Campbell

When I was a child in the early 1960s, my Aunt Doris took me and my grandmother—who never learned to drive—to the grocery store every Thursday afternoon. We’d set out in Doris’s 1960 Ford Falcon. Mama would fish out a stick of Doublemint Gum from the bottom of her purse, tear it in half, and give me a piece. Then she’d offer her daughter the other half. Doris would shake her head and pull out her favorite, Juicy Fruit, from the glove box. She’d unwrap a whole piece for herself, and off we’d go.

Doris, my father’s sister, was always impatient with her mother and insisted on shopping at the Colonial Store because they traded in S&H Green Stamps. The Colonial Store was neither close by nor fancy. It was tucked away on a side street in the Buckhead section of Atlanta.

In summers, when we’d get to the store, I made a ritual of standing on my tip toes and leaning over the pre-packaged cuts of meat to catch cool air on my face as it rose from the long refrigerator case up front. I’d stay beside my grandmother well into the produce section, which smelled of ripe peaches and cantaloupe in season. While Mama expertly fingered ears of unshucked corn, I’d get bored and take off to find Aunt Doris. She had already moved ahead, her metal cart loaded with paper towels and toilet paper, and now she had paused in the candy section. Doris favored Brach’s Maple Nut Goodies and those gumdrop colored jellied fruit slices, dusted with sugar. And even if Halloween was a long way ahead, she kept several bags of Hershey’s miniatures—including Goodbars, Krackels, Milk Chocolate, and Dark Chocolate bars—in the sidetable drawer beside the couch where she watched TV.

Years later, by the time I was off to college in Durham, North Carolina, Atlanta had become a city of giant, brightly-lit supermarkets. Durham, by contrast, was decades behind. Downtown still smelled of sweet tobacco being made into cigarettes. Beyond the town center, neighborhoods fanned out with their own grocery stores, not chains. Watts Street Grocery (which is now home to the Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South) looked like a country store with wooden floors and a different smell on every aisle—from PineSol to pecans to pintos in a barrel. The “CASH GROCERY” on Knox Street (now converted into a residence) could have been a movie set for a 1930s gangster film. The Ninth Street Grocery was perhaps the most spacious of these establishments that I knew. It would eventually become the innovative Wellspring Grocery and then the James Beard-winning Magnolia Grill restaurant.

Cottingham’s on Hillsborough Road was the closest to my little house. In the late 1970s after college, I shared office space with a group of creatives in the building next door to Cottingham’s. Shirley ran the push-button register in the grocery and sold countless tins of fruit cocktail, Vienna sausages, and sleeves of saltines to construction workers at lunchtime. Mornings before work at her cottage across the street, she also prepared white bread sandwiches with pimiento cheese or egg salad to sell to customers. Shirley always had an immaculate, jet black bouffant hairdo, and Cottingham’s butcher wore a matching black toupee. One evening as I closed my office door behind me, I saw a pig’s foot resting next to my Toyota. It had apparently rolled over from Cottingham’s outdoor cooler nearby.

Durham has irrevocably changed since those days.

It is still possible, however, to step far back in time in at least one part of town. The Red and White Grocery,  established in 1957 on East Club Boulevard, is yet a paean to the past, an edible museum, and for me, a nostalgic indulgence.

This independent grocery still scribes its weekly specials on long sheets of butcher paper taped inside the front windows. This summer, those specials include fresh local lady peas--shelled and bagged on crushed ice and set out in a simple cooler resting on a stack of wooden crates in the produce room. Impossibly perfumed Ridgeway cantaloupes from Warren County are similarly displayed, though the little melons are almost out of season as of this writing. You can also find locally cured sweet potatoes (even in August) and homemade sausage—the last of the year.

At the Red and White there is often fresh croaker from the coast. You may also purchase any part of a pig already cut and packaged—yes, ears and feet. A bookcase higher than my head holds endless jars of locally made sauces, jams, Chow-Chow,  and pickled everything—all under the King label. There are Moon Pies and Fig Newtons, and at Christmastime the managers set out a whole candy section in bushel baskets, featuring old-fashioned peppermint and horehound sticks and colorful ribbon candy like Aunt Doris would set out in her fanciest cut crystal dish near her heavily decorated tree. Right now there are Red Band Sassafrass sticks on the shelf, made since 1909 in Bristol, Virginia, using copper kettles to cook a century-old recipe.

More than once this year, I’ve set out for King’s on a Sunday morning, hoping to avoid traffic. The store doesn’t open until 11:30 on Sundays, and every time I’ve arrived early and watched the parking lot gradually fill with all kinds of folks, many in their church clothes, all waiting—some in a close line near the entrance—cordially greeting each other, chatting, studying those signs in the windows.

Then, when the doors finally open, we can feel the excitement, the urgency in this tradition, as the undeniable scents of an old and sturdy grocery store envelop us. The women at the front greet each customer individually, many by name, as we each take our turn to secure and push forward a rattling metal cart. We are off to the races. It has been that way since 1957, folks say, and we are grateful.