I realize that someone may challenge me to a culinary duel over this, but the best fried chicken in the world is currently served up at the Mennonite-owned Gingerich Dutch Pantry on the corner of S. Broadway and Auberry Grove in Jamesport, Missouri. I’ve been there three times in the past few years, just to make sure. We drove back to Jamesport yesterday, passing by unreal green fields with blue skies above us, listening to plenty of Garrison Keillor’s narrations of small-town life in A Prairie Home Companion. As we drove into Jamesport, we saw kids playing Red Rover in front of the elementary school, as if they had been waiting to show us that yes, small town America is alive and well, and still picture-perfect.
Dusty downtown Jamesport is lined with candle and quilting stores, and more antique shops than you could browse in an afternoon. I say dusty, even though the roads are paved now, because it has an aura of fine dust that perhaps never settled after the pavers came through. Or maybe it’s just the imagination running wild in a town of clapboard storefronts and the occasional horse and buggy. But for the cars parked on the street, you could easily imagine you’d slipped into the past any number of decades or centuries. The FedEx Ground truck we spotted seemed fantastically out of place, with its purple-and-green logo standing for hurry and haste in a way nothing in the rest of this town does.
The Gingerich Dutch Pantry has a menu, but I’ve never seen anyone order from it. It seems everyone flocks from far and wide to hover over the buffet, where no one will look at you twice for taking an extra ladleful of peppered white gravy or spreading a half-inch of apple butter onto your bread because they just did the same thing themselves. I have dined in some of the great food meccas of the world from New York to Rome, but a tour of the world’s best would not be complete unless it included a plate heaped with mashed potatoes, country gravy, and succulent fried chicken in a small midwestern town whose name you’ll probably forget by the time you’re done reading this post. There’s nothing else like it.
To walk off the meal, we browsed a handful of the antique shops. Passing piles of rusted farm implements, glass bottles, hand-painted lamps, and stacks of washboards (my personal favorite – the mini washboard with faded writing that boasted it was “travel-sized”), even the most modernized, IKEA-minded decorator would be tempted to pick up some rustic furniture or aging books. You’re not really sure why, as it would go with nothing else in your house, but it seems like a good idea when you’re standing there. Danny and I usually settle for a few hand-poured candles whose scents can be found nowhere else. We use up our supply of long-burning candles every year, and that’s when we know it’s time to go back – back to Jamesport, and back to the Gingerich Dutch Pantry for more fried chicken.
I hope you go someday. And when you do, don’t skip the cobbler. It’s fantastic.
Haha. And YES the cobbler was amazing! And the ice cream was spoon soft – perfect.
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