The Sanford House Restaurant in Milledgeville, Georgia, was a hub for the kind of rigid, faux-genteel Southern society that Flannery O’Connor skewered in her fiction — and she referred to it humorously as “the Local High Dining Establishment” in her letters. The building that housed the restaurant, an example of the Milledgeville Federal style (portico, circular stairs), sat next to the city’s Old Capitol Building and originally served as a hotel for visiting legislators. In O’Connor’s time it became a white-tablecloth restaurant frequented by politicians such as Carl Vinson. Despite O’Connor’s austere personal habits and allergy to pretension, the writer lunched there weekly with her mother, Regina, after her diagnosis of lupus forced her home to middle Georgia for good. The restaurant “wasn’t her scene at all,” biographer Brad Gooch told me. Left to her own devices, O’Connor ate cornflakes or sardines from tins and drank endless thermoses of coffee. “Her food was convent food, and her life was a convent life,” Gooch said. She only ate at Sanford House to keep her mother happy.
O’Connor’s regular order was fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie, Gooch writes, recipes for which have come down to us via a cookbook published in 2008 by Mary Jo Thompson, a co-owner of the restaurant. The cookbook is out of print, but a curator from the Andalusia Farm museum, located in the house where O’Connor spent her final years, sent me the recipe for the shrimp, which turned out to be pleasingly simple and all-American, as one would expect from both O’Connor’s palate and 1950s cuisine. Dr. Amy Wright, director of Georgia’s Old Capitol Heritage Center, who dined at the Sanford House as a child when O’Connor was a regular, remembers all the restaurant’s food as “tasty but plain.” My version, below, uses peanut oil for a Georgia twist and includes a contemporary dipping sauce, inspired by a dressing in a cookbook by Molly Baz, to spice things up a little.
Conventional, narrow-minded mothers were a theme of O’Connor’s work, as were their scornful intellectual children, who fared little better than the parents they rebelled against. She was critical of her mother’s values, but she poked plentiful fun at herself, too, and saw the humor in her situation. One anecdote in Gooch’s book has O’Connor’s publisher Robert Giroux stopping by Andalusia to visit his star client. Over breakfast, Regina asked, “Mr. Giroux, can’t you get Flannery to write about nice people?” Giroux was flummoxed, but O’Connor remained deadpan. In a letter, she related another of Regina’s comments on her work: “Does it have symbolisms in it? You know, when I was coming along, they didn’t have symbolisms.” Still, she loved Regina as much as she satirized her. We don’t know if she had a secret fondness for the pageantry and absurdity of lunch at Sanford House, but we do know that during her final weeks, spent at a hospital in Atlanta, the restaurant sent care packages of food, including a baked potato, roast beef, a shrimp salad, and the peppermint chiffon pie — home cooking.
Sanford House Fried Shrimp
Serves 4 as an appetizer
— 1 pound shrimp, tail on, peeled and deveined
— 7 ounces saltine crackers, ground to crumbs
— 1 cup buttermilk — 2/3 cup flour
— 3 cups refined, high-temperature peanut oil
— 1 teaspoon salt
— Pepper to taste
Chipotle Dipping Sauce
— 1/2 cup sour cream
— 1/4 cup mayonnaise
— 1/2 teaspooon salt — 1/4 cup liquid from 1 (7.5 ounce) can of chipotles in adobo
— 1 garlic clove, grated
— Zest and juice of 1 lime
1. Rinse shrimp and spread flat on paper towels to dry. Set out the flour, buttermilk and saltines in three separate bowls, and prepare a wire rack for the battered shrimp. 2. Season the buttermilk with 1 teaspoon salt and pepper to taste. Dredge the shrimp in the flour, dip in the buttermilk (shaking off any excess) and roll in the crushed saltines. 3. Place the battered shrimp on the wire rack to rest for 30 minutes, allowing the coating to set. Heat the oil to 375 degrees in a 12-inch skillet; you want it hot enough to fry the shrimp to crispy and golden in around 90 seconds per side. 4. Fry in small batches, maintaining the oil between 350 and 375 degrees. 5. Serve with lemon wedges and dipping sauce.
