Kleinpeter Gravy, Maybe

The Archivist Got in a Zone

The back room of the Belle Perdue Public Library smells like old paper and mild regret. Banker's boxes, shoe boxes, a hatbox from 1937 my mother would have called a perfectly good box, so I am saving it. Wedged behind it, sideways, under a Post-it note that had given up, was a box labeled: DOG RIVER CAFE = MISC.

Inside: menus, a 1961 health inspection I chose not to read, rubber bands that disintegrated on contact, index cards in handwriting invented by a man in a hurry, and a photograph.

Black and white photograph, wavy edges, politely fading. Two people in front of a chalkboard. Not posed. Just two people and a Tuesday and somebody with a camera. One was Gus. I know Gus's silhouette at thirty paces, the slope of a man who had been leaning on things for eighty years. The other was a young woman not looking at the camera. The bearing of someone with opinions, held in reserve until exactly the right moment. Then God help you.

I did not know her. But I recognized the type.

I turned to the chalkboard.

Creeky Eats — Est. 1948
Daily Specials

MONDAY SPECIAL: Red Beans & Rice
TUESDAY SPECIAL: Smothered Pork Chops w/ greens & cornbread
WEDNESDAY SPECIAL: Chicken Fried Steak w/ mashed potatoes & gravy
THURSDAY SPECIAL: Crawfish Étouffée
FRIDAY SPECIAL: Thin-Cut Fried Catfish, FF, coleslaw & hush puppies
SUNDAY SPECIAL: NOLA Sloppy Roast Beef po'boy

I read it once for information and once for the thing underneath.

Monday: Red beans and rice. Wash day. Beans on in the morning, cook themselves, do not think about it. Not a coincidence. Architecture.

Tuesday: Smothered pork chops, greens, cornbread. Just food, with a neighbor's soul.

Thursday: Crawfish étouffée. The bayou showing up mid-week like a cousin who does not call ahead.

Friday: Fried catfish. No explanation required. Rome had spoken.

Sunday: NOLA sloppy roast beef po'boy. Gravy soaking through French bread the way memory soaks through everything.

Then I looked back to Wednesday.

Chicken Fried Steak.

I looked at the pattern. Monday: bayou. Tuesday: soul food. Thursday: bayou. Friday: Catholic calendar. Sunday: New Orleans.

Wednesday: Where in the world did this come from.

It sat there like a man at a party who knows everyone but whom nobody can place. I have a low tolerance for the inexplicable. Everything has a provenance. You just have to be patient.

I put the photograph down and went home.

I absolutely was not thinking about it over supper. Much.

I ate, washed dishes, made coffee just for the smell, and sat with it. Not thinking about it so hard I could hear myself not thinking, a little too loudly.

Then I remembered the cobbler.

Leftover peach cobbler, back of the fridge, foil, patience and goodwill. I warmed up a bowl and reached for the milk. I was pouring the glass when it happened.

Milk.

The Kleinpeter milk.

My brain twitched half a beat.

The Germans came before the Revolution. Settled upriver on the stretch called the German Coast, Côte des Allemands, because Louisiana put a French name on everything, including the Germans. They farmed, married into Creole and French families, got folded into the long creole story of a place built out of survival.

They brought schnitzel. It lost its name, names wear down like river stones, but stayed. Veal became beef. The milk gravy passed grandmother to grandmother from a kitchen in a country none of them had seen in three generations. The breading, the frying, the thinness. Too useful to die.

Somewhere between the German Coast and Dog River, Schnitzel became Chicken Fried Steak. Nobody mentioned where it came from. By then it had been there so long it simply was.

I ate my cobbler. Drank my milk. All of a sudden thinking about biscuits. White gravy is a breakfast staple. Unless there's a pounded and breaded steak involved.

Epilogue

I found Miss Lettie on her porch two days later, early March, the air still making up its mind about spring, but the azaleas had decided.

I showed her the photograph.

She looked at it a long time.

"Where did you find this," she said. Not a question.

"Dog River Cafe box. Back room of the library. Behind the hatbox."

"You opened the hatbox?"

"I did not open the hatbox."

She made a sound that was not quite a laugh. Held the photograph at an angle, the way people do when they are deciding something.

"What do you want to know," she said finally, "because there are a few stories here."

"Why Chicken Fried Steak on Wednesdays?"

She handed the photograph back and settled into her chair.

"Now that one I cannot tell you for certain. But I have a theory." She looked out at the yard. "The Kleinpeters. German Coast family, older than Belle Perdue. Good farmers. Married everybody eventually." She paused. "Gus knew them. Third generation by the time he knew them. And I always reckoned they got their milk involved somewhere along the way. That gravy did not come from nowhere." She shook her head slowly, more to herself than to me. "Do not know that for a fact. But they might."

I looked at the photograph. At Gus. At the young woman.

"And the woman?" I asked.

Miss Lettie stood up.

"Honey, that is a mirror that cracked decades ago," she said, and winked.

And she went inside.

Archivist's Note: The Kleinpeters and the German Coast are real enough. The rest is what happens when you sit with a box of old pictures long enough to get hungry.

Texas, bless their hearts, will tell you they invented chicken fried steak. We had Germans on the river before they called a ditch Houston.

If anyone knows the Kleinpeters and would like to ask on my behalf whether they have opinions about where chicken fried steak came from, I would be obliged. Or ask if they would like to make this story family canon. Either way.

The hatbox remains sealed.

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