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Excerpt
In 1976, I was working at UNC Memorial Hospital when George Tate, who was the first black realtor in town, offered me the opportunity to take over a failing restaurant on Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill. I didn't even have the money to put anything down on the deal until my next paycheck. I had only $64 to buy enough food from a local grocer to make breakfast the first day that my restaurant opened. On a Saturday evening, around seven o'clock, some of my children and I went in and cleaned nearly all night getting ready for our first day.
Sunday morning I stopped by Fowler's Food Store on Franklin Street to shop for breakfast. I purchased bacon, sausage, eggs, grits, flour, coffee, sugar, salt, catsup, chickens, Crisco, cheese, cornmeal, and trash bags, spending almost all of my money and not realizing that I could not have changed a ten dollar bill if someone had given me one first thing that morning. I don't know how many times we ran out of eggs and bacon. The breakfast trade was good enough that I left for the grocery store to buy food to make lunch, and then I used the money from lunch to buy food for the evening dinner. At the end of the day, my profit counted out to $135, and I was in business! I named my restaurant Dip's Country Kitchen.
Monday was a rather busy day for me - back to Fowler's to purchase Coca-Colas; then back to the restaurant to make pies; then to Durham to apply for a restaurant license.
I went from eighteen to twenty-two seats in the restaurant in a year.
Not able to add any more seats, we began a take-out business. By 1985, I
was able to rent the space adjoining my restaurant and remodeled to seat
ninety. Soon the restaurant was equipped with a walk-in refrigerator,
two ovens, two steam tables, two fryers, and a dish-washing machine. I
started out with a staff of three and now have fifteen employees.
Since then, I have not looked back. The name of the restaurant changed--to
just Dip's--after a trademark challenge. I've taken business management
courses at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and several seminars to improve my management skills.
And I've been able to hire several of my children and grandchildren, plus
nieces and nephews, to work in the restaurant over the years. In 1998 I
purchased the land across the street from the leased property where I had been in business since 1976 and built my own restaurant, which opened early in 1999--with the name Mama Dip's Kitchen--and will be a legacy to my children.
The restaurant menu has changed with the times. We now offer vegetable platters, for example. However, there are still people in the community who are interested in cooking game meat, like rabbit and squirrel. Recently, someone called the restaurant and said that he had caught a raccoon in his garbage can and wanted to know how to cook it.
In addition to operating the restaurant, I make, bottle, and distribute my own special barbecue sauce, as well as dressings. Many local specialty food shops sell these, and we sell them directly from the restaurant as well.
Over the years, my restaurant has had plenty of good press. A few years ago, Garrison Keillor brought his homespun live radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, to Chapel Hill and invited me to be one of his guests. Afterward, the entire audience seemed to descend on Dip's, eating up "everything-and then some," as one of my daughters described it.
Craig Claiborne, a food critic for the New York Times, has written
about the restaurant, and it's been written up in Southern Living as well. The restaurant has received notice in US Air's in-flight magazine, and it's been featured in a story in the Washington Post. We have also had a lot of good publicity from the local papers--the Daily Tar Heel, the Chapel Hill News, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Durham Herald-Sun, and many more. In the autumn of 1998, I appeared on the ABC-TV news show Good Morning, America, making pecan pie for Thanksgiving dinner.
Preparing and eating different foods has been a mind and soul experience for me. Over the years I have observed that many important discussions take place and many important decisions get made at a table over a plate of food. All over the world, each country has its own cuisine, and whatever the agenda, food is always important. Whether it's at a picnic or a fancy dinner, food always brings joy to family, friends, and strangers. The best is sometimes the easiest to make. Southern cooking seems the simplest.
More than fifteen years ago, people started asking me to write a
cookbook. I even got started on it about ten years ago. But it was a
complicated and time-consuming process--mostly because what I've done all
my life is dump cooking. Over the past ten years, though, I've been
writing things down and measuring them so I can know I'm giving out the
right information for some good country cooking. Still, you should be
mindful of my recipes' origins in the dump cooking style. Feel free to
modify and adapt them as you like. Experiment with them. Don't worry if
your brown sugar is dark or light, if your mustard is yellow or Dijon, if
your seasoned salt is Lawry's or Durkee's. Use what you have. Try it
different ways. Use your imagination. Treat the recipes like sewing
patterns--stretch or alter them to fit. In my own cooking, I've
experimented with different spices, shortening, leavening, flour, and meal
and noticed the different results that I got from each in different foods.
So I encourage you to stretch your cooking luck, too--but remember to try
new recipes with your family first. Most all of my recipes have been
prepared and served sometime during the twenty years that I've operated my restaurant on Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill. If it were not for the restaurant, I would not have put this book together. Some desserts came from family reunions but never with a recipe. A little of this and that, and do you like it?
After more than sixty years of doing my own dump cooking, which I've
shared with family and friends, this is the first chance I've had to put recipes together for a real cookbook. Sharing my cooking with the community reminds me of bringing my dolls together so many years ago for some old-fashioned mud pies. It's another thing in my life
that I can be thankful for--spreading my love and happiness like
pumpkin seeds all around.
Mama Dip's Kitchen by Mildred Council will be available in October: $15.95 paperback, $27.50 hardcover.
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