I have to give my father credit for one thing: when he wasn’t on a brutal rampage of terror, abusing his family both physically and mentally, he was a damn good cook.
Growing up in Depression Era rural Oklahoma, as poor Choctaws living in Waurika, he was taught at an early age how to make delicious due with some flour and water, a bit of lard, a basket of greens and yams, and if you’re lucky, some fatback to dump in a pot of beans; it’s a starvation-inspired magic trick that, though he’s long dead, is a constant craving I can still find in the area soul food joints that continue on in that tradition of rustic eats, now, thankfully, more a divine delicacy than a life-or-death situation.
While many of the Metro’s top soul restaurants are scattered up and down historic N.E. 23rd Street, it’s been the relatively recent (family-owned since 2005, as the sign says) Mama E’s down on 3838 Springlake Dr. that has managed to capture most of the Southern fried buzz, both locally and nationally, appearing on the Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives and, more notoriously, Restaurant Impossible.
It’s an eatery that everyone seems to have a strangely divided opinion on, but all I know is that I always find my way back to Mama’s welcoming bosom, taking a two-hour lunch and overdoing it way more than I should at least once a month, picking neck-bone meat out of my teeth as my cardiologist recommends yet another echocardiogram. Old habits don’t die, that’s why they’re old.