Feature article
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Betty’s Stockyard Café a defender of country cooking
By Fred Sauceman
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Betty Jones with fried pies
Betty’s Stockyard Café
LOCATION: 2000 N. John B. Dennis Highway, Kingsport
HOURS: Open Tuesday through Saturday, 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.; on horse sale Wednesdays, open until 8:30 or 9 p.m. Saturday hours may extend to 4 or 5 p.m. Closed on Sunday and Monday
CONTACT: (423) 378-3227 |
Betty Jones knows breakfast. She cooks it for post offices, water departments and car lots. Beginning at 6 a.m., she fries pork tenderloin and patties of Tony Slaughter’s locally made sausage.
Betty is proprietor, hostess, chef, sage and defender of country cooking at a Kingsport institution, Betty’s Stockyard Café.
When she was 10 years old, Betty’s mother Margaret Freeman handed over to her the biscuit-making responsibility at their farm in Dryden, Virginia. There were 16 children to feed. Ollie and Margaret Freeman had 15 naturally and adopted one more.
Margaret taught Betty all about fried pies — dough of flour, buttermilk and butter; fillings of seasonal apples, cherries and peaches; a final flourish of cinnamon and sugar. Margaret pan-fried hers, whereas Betty dunks them into the deep-fryer. Otherwise, they’re unchanged from those mornings long ago in Lee County. Betty’s fried pies are the size of moccasins.
The tastes of the country come through in the brown and rich sausage gravy prepared by Betty and her staff, Carolyn and Pam. But, true to her resourceful nature, Betty has devised a way to make it palatable and safe for the lactose-intolerant.
“I don’t put milk in it,” she tells me. “After the flour gets good and brown, I stir non-dairy creamer into it, like these vending machines use for coffee creamer. And there’s not as much fat and cholesterol.”
Betty’s full of kitchen lessons, filed away from a lifetime of pleasing family and customers. She’s figured out that stirring some sour cream into her banana pudding keeps the bananas from turning brown.
Every other Wednesday, there’s a horse sale at the stockyard, and at the café, that means cabbage soup. Betty declares, “It’ll make a jackrabbit spit in a bulldog’s eye.”
She and her husband Don love horses, and once when they were on their way to the Tennessee Walking Horse celebration in Shelbyville, they stopped to eat at a Shoney’s in Lebanon.
“I ate four bowls of this soup before I figured out what it was,” Betty recalls.
She took that Shoney’s soup as a starting point and added Betty Jones touches until she had it just right — ground beef, celery, onions, green peppers, seasoning, beans, cabbage, tomato and hot pepper.
Betty laments the fact that so many restaurants are serving soup beans out of a can. Hers are cooked from scratch and seasoned with hunks of pork hock. For soup bean topping, she buys homemade, cabbage-packed chow-chow from Clouds Bend United Methodist Church. When the York boys travel to North Carolina, they bring back some chow-chow flavored with jalapeño peppers.
Betty’s cornbread is fried on a grill. She says it retains more moisture that way. It’s on the menu every day, along with soup beans.
“Especially on sale days, people come in here as they are,” Betty says. “Maybe they aren’t dressed for another restaurant, but they’re welcome here.
“As you can see outside, it gets a little messy out there, a little muddy, but people expect it. They know what we are, and they don’t expect no fancy place.”
Muddy boots don’t bother Betty, nor does the standing-room-only crowd that shows up on Thursdays for her roast beef and gravy.
“I know about all of my customers by name,” Betty says. “They’ve been coming here so long I can about fix their food just by hearing their name.”
Customers share their recipes and talents with her. Jim Robinette crafted the clock that proclaims, “World’s Best Biscuits and Gravy.” Her brother Danny made her the oak saw, with the name of the business etched in it, that hangs over the front counter.
Farm girl, former Piggly Wiggly cashier, lover of horses, and world-class country cook, Betty Jones, in her tiny restaurant next to the stockyard, keeps the legacy of the Appalachian mountain kitchen alive.
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Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — From Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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