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CHOICE TABLES;Fried Chicken + Cracklin's + Biscuits = Atlanta
By Rick Bragg

THE biscuits, Lord, the biscuits. Down here they call them cathead biscuits, because they are about the size of a kitten's head, crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside, slathered with muscadine jelly and white butter, or opened up and smothered in white milk gravy.

Then there is the chicken, expertly patted with white flour, dusted with salt, then fried in an honest iron skillet that has been blackened and seasoned over a generation. It is served with pole beans -- green beans, for the ignorant -- that have been slow-cooked with a drop or two of bacon grease, and mashed potatoes rich with milk and butter, and fried okra, and scraped corn. Ruby Pearl Barber scrapes it off the cob herself. The only way to get it any fresher is to go out in the field and gnaw it off the stalk.

For dessert there is cobbler made from blackberries or tiny wild strawberries, or her famous carrot cake, rich and moist and studded with pecans, coated with a cream cheese icing that is more smooth than sweet.

"Most recipes call for putting vanilla in the icing, but I think that makes it too sweet," said the 75-year-old Mrs. Barber, who is originally from Randolph County, Ala., but now lives in Atlanta. Hers is the kind of genuine, traditional Southern food that visitors to the Summer Olympics may be expecting. There is only one problem.


It is not for sale.

Mrs. Ruby Pearl, as she is also known here, cooks only for her family or friends, in her kitchen. Once, years ago, there were several sit-down homestyle cafes and barbecue restaurants in Atlanta that served traditional Southern food of this style and quality. But in Atlanta's headlong rush to bulldoze its past and become an international city, they have mostly disappeared. There remain six or seven places -- no more -- that serve genuine, traditional Southern barbecue and homestyle meals. You can cruise the endless suburbs looking for others, but, considering the expected impossible gridlock of Olympic traffic, you may never be seen or heard from again.