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Welcome to the Southern Foodways Alliance -- an institute
of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture with headquarters
at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.
The Southern Foodways Alliance documents and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South. We set a common table where black and white, rich and poor -- all who gather-- may consider our history and our future in a spirit of reconciliation.
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2001
Jack Daniel Lifetime Achievement Award
Marie Rudisill
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| Photo credit: the Tonight Show |
You may know Marie Rudisill as the Fruitcake Lady from the
Tonight Show. She first appeared onstage with Jay Leno in December of
2000, teaching Mel Gibson to cook. Marie, who had just written a book,
Fruitcake: Memories of Truman Capote and Sook, was sassy. She was
bawdy. She did and said things that only a nonagenarian can get away with.
In 2001 she returned to Burbank to stuff a turkey with Hugh Grant. While
the cameras rolled, she cupped Grant’s rear and, judging its curvature,
called it – if my memory serves -- “a nice little biscuit.”
Beginning in 2002, the native of Monroeville, Alabama served as the show’s
advice columnist. In a recurring segment, “Ask the Fruitcake Lady,”
Marie -- dressed in a severe back suit, her gray hair pinned in a bun,
her talon-like fingernails lacquered red -- addressed matters of fidelity,
grooming, and bathroom etiquette. She is combative. She does not suffer
fools. She uses decidedly unladylike words like “pecker” and
“lazy son-of-a-bitch.”
Her performance was camp. But her outré Southern pedigree came
honestly. Marie was the sister of Truman Capote’s late mother, Lillie
Mae Faulk Persons Capote, who committed suicide in 1954. Capote called
Marie “Aunt Tiny.” She helped raise him. And like her nephew,
who was a Johnny Carson-era Tonight Show favorite, she employed cathode
rays to her advantage. But, as was the case with Capote, Marie was not,
upon her passing, remembered by the demi monde for the flame and spittle
and slur captured in television appearances. Nor was she remembered for
the fruitcake book.
Marie Rudisill will be remembered as the author of a slim 1989 volume,
Sook’s Cookbook: Memories and Traditional Recipes from the Deep
South. Using plantation daybooks from the early 1800s as her primary
sources, weaving in character studies of friends and neighbors and relatives
from Monroeville, she wrote one of the best cookbooks to hit Southern
shelves. It’s a portrait of place. It’s a portrait of people.
It’s full of recipes for green olive jambalaya and watermelon rind
preserves and poinsettia cake. And, sadly, it’s now out of print.
I love that book, but my recollections of Marie will be more personal.
After I helped with a book deal negotiation, Marie phoned. She was, at
the time, eighty-nine. And she was effusive in her thanks. “I’ll
do anything for you,” Marie said, her tone raspy, her timbre bright.
After a three beat pause, she added, “Except sex.” A hail
of cackles followed. And soon after, a dial tone.
In 2000, the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrated her contributions by
awarding her the Jack Daniel Lifetime Achievement Award. In November of
2006, Rudisill passed away.
-- John T Edge
Read an oral
history interview with Rudisill.
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Help the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrate, preserve, promote,
and nurture the traditional and developing food culture of the American South.
Join us.
Each fall, the SFA (with support from the Fertel Foundation) honors an
unsung hero or heroine, a foodways tradition bearer of note, with the Ruth
Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award.
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