savor
ONCE CONSUMED BECAUSE OF
POVERTY AND SCARCITY, THESE
FOODS ARE NOW SOUGHT OUT
waste to wonderful
B y S imo n G o n z a l e z
“Pig Feet Everyday,” the sign
proudly proclaims. Pig feet
every day? Anyone who grew
up north of the Mason-Dixon
line might wonder why you
would want them any day. But
to Southerners of a certain
vintage, it sounds like a deli-cious
treat.
The sign is at Casey’s Buffet,
the “Barbecue & Home
Cookin’” restaurant on Olean-der.
Owner/head chef Larry
Casey took a chance by offering
Pig Feet Fridays a few years
back. They proved so popular
he added them to the daily offerings. And put them on the sign.
“The first couple of years I didn’t have pig feet out there,” says
Casey, who opened the establishment in 2005. “I got craving
’em one day. I sent someone to the Food Lion and they bought
all they had, about 33. It takes about three hours to cook them.
I ate a mess of them and got full, and I put the rest out on the
buffet. My wife’s like, ‘Man you’re going to gross people out.’ I’m
like, ‘I grew up eatin’ ’em.’ They were gone in about 10 minutes. I
started doing them on Friday, Pig Feet Friday. I finally procured
a couple of sources for the pig feet, and I started doing them
every day.”
The buffet features traditional Southern fare like fried chicken
and pulled pork, peach cobbler and pecan pie. It also includes
fatback and chitlins. Chicken gizzards are available on Wednes-days.
“I call it Southern soul food,” Casey says. “We’ve got country
cookin’, but then we’ve got the soul food too.”
The offerings are enjoyed by a diverse clientele — black and
white, young and old, white collar and blue collar, locals and
tourists. Some of the patrons can easily afford filet mignon,
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caviar and foie gras, but they
frequent the homey eatery with
the nondescript façade, no-frills
décor and Formica-topped
tables.
“We get them all, from every
socio-economic background,”
Casey says. “I’ve got politicians
eating in here. Sanitation
workers. You name it. President
Trump’s son, Erik, he married
a local girl Lara Yunaska
Trump, they come in a couple
of times a year when they’re in
town.”
Pig feet, along with much of
the food at Casey’s, belong to a food group that could roughly be
defined as “stuff poor folk used to eat.” Much of it has its roots
in the antebellum South, when enslaved people had to make do
with the master’s discards.
Casey is well read, a student of history as well as cooking. He’s
researched the background of the food he serves.
“If you look back through history, what we call soul food now,
which is a term that came about in the 1960s, if you go back to
slave times the slaves that were in the field would get what was
left, the feet and the guts, what we call chitlins now,” he says. “It
was out of necessity.”
The “out of necessity” eating was not limited to enslaved
people in the South. Throughout the ages, poverty and scarcity
have been defining factors in food choices. When you don’t have
an abundance of resources, you make do with what you have.
“We didn’t always live in a disposable society,” Casey says.
“There was a time when economic necessity precluded just tossing
aside the unwanted or least desirable. For the majority of history,
there’s been a lack of food. So we would use everything on an
animal.”