Sappington Adam - Heartlandia: Heritage Recipes from Portlands The Country Cat

Copyright 2015 by Adam Sappington and Jackie Sappington
Interior photography 2015 by John Valls
2015 by Debbie Baxter

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sappington, Adam.
Heartlandia : heritage recipes from the Country Cat / Adam and Jackie Sappington with Ashley Gartland.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-544-36377-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-544-36378-6 (ebook)
1. Country Cat Dinner House & Bar (Portland, Ore.)
2. Cooking, American.
I. Sappington, Jackie.
II. Gartland, Ashley.
III. Title.
TX715.S145246 2015
641.5973dc23 2014036933

Book design by Jennifer S. Muller
Ebook design and production by Rebecca Springer

v1.0915

I love America, I guess, and the food that supposedly represents itthe high-piled platters of fried chicken, served alongside overflowing bowls of viscous gravy; thick and burnished slices of bacon, sizzling their lives away in an ancient black pan; plump, jet-black berries, spilling out from ethereally flaky pie crusts. You hear a lot about those dishes, and see them in magazines, but how often do you really get to eat them? I know them better as ideals, something I see in a documentary celebrating some shriveled but saucy crone somewhere. They struck me as something of a sham, the front end of a bait-and-switch with me eating instant grits. Then I went to Portland one day, and in a corner restaurant in an out-of-the-way neighborhood, my faith came back to me.

The food that Adam and Jackie Sappington cook at The Country Cat, whatever you may have heard, does not in fact pay tribute to the past. It doesnt reference forgotten foodways, or pass on lessons learned in Grandmothers kitchen. Anyway, it doesnt try to do that. And because it doesnt try, the Sappingtons are able, like few people in America, to escape the trap of time and bring the old cooking, uncorrupted and unstylized, into 2015. If Adam Sappingtons grandmother were alive and working the line at The Country Cat, she would be cooking hard and fast, and thinking of ways to make her roast pork better, and keeping it warm for the last turn of customers. Like Adam, she, too, would no doubt be using the food that is close at hand, whether or not it fits in any particular established style. My favorite memory of him involves no cooking at all; I was in a kitchen amphitheater, waiting to do a burger demo, when he showed up with a zipper bag, looking for all the world like a back-country drug dealer, whispering to me to check this out. He opened the bag a crack to give me a whiff. I naturally expected a heady whiff of cannabis; instead, I got hit with the earthy perfume of freshly dug yellowfoot chanterelles, mushrooms he had picked a couple of hours earlier in the countryside. He grinned like a guy who thought he had the world by the tail. I think maybe he does.

The other thing I like about that story is not the way it expresses his enthusiasm for local ingredients, which every chef in the world shares, or claims to share; its that his excitement centered on something so perishable and unexotic, something that cost nothing and required no particular skill to use. His feelings about those mushrooms were personal; they had nothing to do with him as a chef. And those are the feelings I think most define The Country Cats character. It isnt Adams past or background that really matters; he would be just as good a cook if he were Belgian.

No, what matters at The Country Cat, for all the greatness of its food, are the emotions that brought it into existence and maintained it through some very lean years. Two people who love each other and who love food opened a restaurant with a trippy logo and a modern menu, and served punk rockers and potheads, and strived to make them happy in this particular time and place, the best way they knew how. The connection to an older, more rural America wasnt the point; but again, it was there, and it was powerful. It made me feel a vicarious connection to a place and time that was completely alien to me. I feeland I think all the Cats customers feela kind of distant familial connection to it, like long-lost relations finding our way back to a home we never had. What do I have to do with Mother Sappington? My people come from Minsk, not Missouri, and would be horrified if they saw the way I gobble down ham and bacon at the Cats bar, chasing it with small-batch whiskey and talking to the servers about their abundant tattoos. But for all their disapproval, I think my forebears would be moved by how much feeling holds the place together, and theyd be happy to see that I was part of a community, one bound by loyalty and bourbon and biscuits.

That community starts with the Sappingtons, but it doesnt end with them. The old Southern foodways were as much social as culinary; as their eulogists are so fond of saying, big meals were one of the things that brought people together. That much carries over to the very real, very specific place where Jackie and Adam started their restaurant. The people of Portland cohere famously around cafes and bars; but most of all, they love restaurants. Montavilla, the sleepy northern neighborhood where the Cat is found, is unquestionably its center. There is a three- or four-block stretch of Stark Street that is the nerve center of neighborhood. There is a blue-collar sports bar that makes fine cheesesteaks across the street; around the corner, another, cooler spot caters to cooler types. There is an old movie theater that shows new movies on old screens, and serves beer and wine; an eclectic, sunny caf; a couple of thrift shops; and one or two other places. But it is at the corner of Eightieth and Stark that the action can be found, where the lights shine out the brightest, where the murmur of expectant and satisfied customers come and go, and where frequently whole families stand in the street waiting to get in. They dont mind, because its worth it. If Adam and Jackie didnt own the place, I have no doubt that they and their kids would wait outside themselves, because a great meal is always worth waiting for, and because a neighborhood has to support its own.

But now The Country Cat has gained national fame. TV hosts go there to gawk at Adams chicken. I even went so far as to move all the way from New York just to be closer to it; when I moved to Portland, one of Adams signature fried chickenand-martinis parties marked the occasion, and welcomed me to the neighborhood. Now that you have this book, you should consider yourself at least peripherally part of it as well. The book is called Heartlandia, but it isnt to some imaginary middle America that the name refers; to me at least, its the open heart of the Sappingtons and the people around them, all bound in gravy and the milk of human kindness. I dont know what people ate a hundred years ago, and a hundred years from now, we may be fed by robots; but right here, right now, The Country Cat is open for business, the very heart of what American food is like at its generous best.