Mildred Council, "Mama Dip"

Mama Dip's Traditional Country Cooking
408 W Rosemary St.
Chapel Hill, NC 27516
(919) 942-5837
http://www.mamadips.com/

“I’m not a chef. And I don’t like people to call me a chef because a chef is more like—I call them the artists. They have so much artist in them, artistic, ever what you call it. Artist, I guess, because they can just make things so pretty, you know. And I try to make things good.”

– Mildred Council, “Mama Dip”

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Mildred Council, better known as Mama Dip, started cooking when she was nine years old. The family cooking duties fell upon her early, but not just because she was the youngest of seven children. Mildred was put at the stove after impressing her father with the cornbread and egg custard she made for a family meal. Still, her father wanted her to go to beauty school, so she would have a career. But Mildred knew that cooking was her calling. After years of working in other people’s kitchens, Mildred Council decided to open a place of her own. One fateful day in 1976 she opened Mama Dip’s restaurant with the sixty-four dollars she had in her pocket. She made the first meal served using the eggs and grits she bought at the grocery store earlier that morning. Today, Mama Dip’s Traditional Country Cooking has a menu that features countless entrées, more than twenty vegetables, and dozens of desserts. The success of Mama Dip’s restaurant, coupled with her infectious charm, inspired two cookbooks, Mama Dip’s Kitchen and Mama Dip’s Family Cookbook.

Listen to this 3-minute audio clip of Mildred Council talking about when Craig Claiborne ate at Mama Dip’s. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

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What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: Mildred Council, “Mama Dip”
Location: Mama Dip’s Traditional Country Cooking – Chapel Hill, NC
Date: June 2, 2007
Interviewer: Amy Evans

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Amy Evans:  This is Amy Evans for the Southern Foodways Alliance on Saturday, June 2, 2007 and I’m in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at Mama Dip’s restaurant with Mama Dip herself, Mrs. Mildred Council. And Mama Dip, if you wouldn’t mind saying your name and your birth date for the record, please, ma’am?

Mildred Council:  My name is Mildred Council, and my birth date is April 11, 1929.

I wonder if you could start with a little background of your life and where you were born and growing up in a big family with your father and that kind of thing?

Okay. I was born about eight miles out in Chatham County [North Carolina] in the Baldwin Township. And it was seven of us children. [Mildred is the youngest.] But my mother [Effie Edwards Cotton]—we was raised up on this farm but my mother—I don’t remember my mother. I don’t think but just one or two remember my mother; she passed in 1931, and my father [Ed Cotton] raised us by himself, you know. So he had a challenge, I think, but I think he enjoyed us, learning us how to do so much and so many things and like planting and harvesting and canning and all this. And we had fun also; he let us do things that we wanted to do also. It wasn’t much back then, you know, in the ‘30s but it was a lot to us….

Papa wanted me to go to cosmetic school, the beauty school, and then that’s what I signed up for. I didn’t really want to go because I knew I could cook, you know, because I started cooking when I was nine. And so he asked me to stay there at the house and fix something to eat. That was the thing, that it wasn’t no dinner, supper, in there. It was just something to eat. And so he [Laughs]—I went to beauty school and then I started to work over here [in Chapel Hill]. It was nine months before you graduated, and I got in a beauty shop over on Franklin Street, and I really didn’t like it…And so then a lady come up one day and asked—she was looking for somebody to cook because her son was coming from Hawaii. His name was Patterson. And I said, “Well, I will take that job!” That’s what I said. And so that’s how it started me to cooking, you know. And after that, he just stayed here a year. And then I started working down to the Carolina Coffee Shop, and I just started working everywhere then.

Like in ’47—’49 that’s when my first child was born. Another one was born in 1949 and after that I just had a child about every fourteen, fifteen months after that until I had—but I got a set of twins. [Mama Dip has eight kids in all.] And so I always didn’t mind cooking. And I worked a lot of places. I worked at the Carolina Inn; I worked at the [University of North Carolina] Dining Hall; I worked at the Carolina Coffee Shop…I worked everywhere. [Laughs] You know, because at that time, when you got pregnant, you had to leave the job and so—but I always get a job [Bloop] just like that, you know. [Laughs]
But in 1957, my in-laws—I got married in 1957 [to Joe Council]…So what happened is that he [my father-in-law] opened a restaurant [Bill's Bar-B-Q on Graham Street], and it was so funny that when I—they was my in-laws because I get—married, you know, to her son, and I start working for them. And I worked there for a long time. I worked fifteen—probably fifteen years but I always had another job…It was work up there [at the restaurant] because I made the barbecue sauce there and then, you know, I fried chicken, you know…And they had a delivery service. They had about twenty cars out there delivering, you know on campus and around, so it was a good business, you know.

So I wanted to get away from the food a little bit, so I went down and put an application in at the hospital. And I got the job. I was in central sterile supply. I run the autoclave. This guy was in the Army and he—in the Reserves—and he had to go away and stay two years, and this job didn’t last but two years. So after this two years was about up, I was walking the street and there was a little house that had a cab stand and I was walking down the street and Mr. Tate across the street—across Mitchell Lane and he come up and said, “Mama Dip,” said, “Mr. Tucker is going out of business. Why don’t you take this restaurant over over there?” And I thought he was just talking this—you know, anybody—if I wasn’t probably a strong woman, I would think he was just making fun of me, you know, something like that. But he was serious and I didn’t have no money. And so the next week—I got paid every two weeks—and the next Friday I come through, and he run out there about the same place and said, “Now he going to leave tonight.” “He going to leave tomorrow,” I mean. “He going to leave tomorrow,” and said, “what you need to do is tell him you’ll take it and don’t even worry about the rent,” you know. “Just rent the—if you make the rent, you make the rent; it’s all right. If you don’t, it’s all right.” He was a really, you know, a talker, that guy. He was a real estate person, you know. [Laughs]
And so I had got to the store—I had went to Fowler’s and bought some food to take home for my children for supper, you know. And so when I got home I got thinking about it and we come back up here when—that Saturday. He left and so we come back up here, and we cleaned the place up, you know. When he was out at six o’clock, and I guess we was up here at six, too, you know. And we cleaned the place up. And I didn’t have—the money was left out of my check was like $64, you know. And so with the cleaning and the buying some food—cleaning, my stuff to clean with and buying some food, you know, that’s all I had to spend, you know. So that night we stayed up here ‘til about two o’clock you know. We went home, and I got up the next morning, I guess about—well, early. I can't say what time it is because I know I was up here when Fowler opened at seven o’clock. I was—I was uptown, you know. I went in and bought something for us to eat. They come uptown later. Their daddy brought them uptown later. And it was like, I bought a pound of bacon and a little old box of grits and some bread and a dozen eggs. And I wasn’t even looking at, you know, this is what we going to eat. And as soon as I got it done, you know, people—somebody come and says, “Is you open?” And I said, “Yeah, come on in.” And that’s when the eggs started going, and that’s when the children started running back and—just like a fairytale-like, you know. One would go get the eggs and bacon this time, and then one would go the next time, you know—just going back and forth to the store. And about—I guess it was about 11:00 or 12:00—11:30 and I said, “We need to change and get some chicken,” you know. And—and so they went and got two chickens, and then they got a long pack of the pork chops, you know. And so I cooked them with some garden peas and some rice and—and—and it—they had to keep going back and get the chicken and keep going back and get the chicken, you know, and pork chops until that—it was about 8:30 or 9:00—about 9 o’clock and I said—I said, “You know, we got to get out of here because y’all got to go to school tomorrow,” you know. And so my oldest daughter, Norma—she running the cash register—she could count the money. And so she counted $135. I‘ll never forget it, you know. And when she started over to the 50—it was 50-cent pieces then, you know. And when she started with the 50-cent pieces I said, “Just leave that there.” I said, “Just don’t bother with that,” you know. “Just leave it there.” So I just—it was just something to think that you’re making like $75 every two weeks, and in this one day, you know, you come up with $135. And it was probably $15 in the 50-cent, quarters, dimes, and nickels and pennies and such, you know. It was a joyous feeling, you know. And so it just started out from there.

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But it’s just—we just come up out of a food family. And it’s—this cooking has just been this kind of food. I’m not a chef. And I don’t like people to call me a chef because a chef is more like—I call them the artists. They have so much artist in them, artistic, ever what you call it. Artist, I guess, because they can just make things so pretty, you know. And I try to make things good [Laughs]. And that’s the difference. Because everything that I—everything that I have here—like right now, I probably have to get some string beans in the wintertime. I have to get some string beans in the can. But I think I have helped all of these people—big companies that can these things. It’s that you don’t have to cook them to death before you can them, but you know just—. And so other than that, I use everything fresh. Everything is fresh. Everything—most everything is local. This time of year most everything is local, you know, because I get—it’s not very much at this market out here [Carrboro Farmers’ Market] but the cabbage—people love the—the cabbage, the fresh cabbage in the winter, you know? And so now, probably today when I go out, there they might have—she said she might have some squash.

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Through all of this time I had peoples come in like Mr. Craig Claiborne [writer and former food editor for the New York Times] and practically all the early people that wrote cookbooks, you know…But it was people that come here over there that just heard about me and just come to visit. And so Mr. Claiborne was the one that really got on me about not writing a cookbook, you know. Because he had never—since he left home [in Sunflower, Mississippi], he had never ate no food like he at that day over at Mama Dip’s. But he liked to scared me to death because I—you know, I didn’t know who he was, you know. But [writer/chef] Bill Neal up there [at Crook’s Corner Restaurant in Chapel Hill]—Bill is passed on now, and he had worked with my brother, Jim down at the Rathskeller [restaurant in Chapel Hill] and he told me, he said, “Mr. Claiborne has been there and,” he said, “he loves your food, Mama Dip.” And I said, “Who in the world is Mr. Claiborne?” He said, “Yeah, he come out.” And there was a lady with him and he didn’t present himself as no cookbook person or nothing, you know. He was just enjoying it, and he ate chitterlings. And he was a white guy. And my daughter, Lane, waited on him. And she went out and she said, “Mama,” she says, “there’s a white man out here, and he ordered chitterlings. What I suppose to tell him?” I said, “Lane,” I said, “go back and ask him do he want ‘em fried or do you want ‘em boiled,” you know. And he—[Laughs]—it was so funny. And I didn’t have really many dishes, you know—not the little bitty dishes. But you know, he wanted to taste of some everything I got. The okra and tomatoes was his favorite and the black-eyed peas. And he was just overwhelmed with it. And my peach cobbler, I had made a peach cobbler that day and the crust was on the side of the—the crust—the juice had come up on the side of the crust and when Lane took it out there he said, “Don’t send this out here to me. No, I don’t want that. What is this you’re sitting in front of me?” And like to scare Lane to death. But then I cut him some off where, you know, the crispy crust, you know, and he was really satisfied when he left, you know.

But then that’s when—after that Bill Neal come. Bill always—he had the restaurant up there [Crook’s Corner] but what he did, he ate down at Mama Dip’s every Thursday. Uh-huh, every Thursday he ate at Mama Dip’s. He got so used to my brother. My brother, Jim had worked for Danziger [Theodor Danziger, owner of the Rams Head Rathskeller restaurant] for 52 years and so he got so used he would just—he was just a fine person downtown. And [Laughs] he said—the telephone rang, and I forget which one it was said, “Mama,” he said, “the telephone.” And I went to the telephone and he said, “This is Craig Claiborne. How are you?” And I said, “I’m fine.” [Laughs] And Bill didn’t tell me who he was, you know. And he says, “I just can't get over,” you know, “coming to your restaurant.” That was about three weeks later and he said, “I really enjoyed myself.” I said, “You did?” I said, “Well, thank you.” And he said, “How you fix the chicken livers and not pop on you?” He said, “Every time I cook chicken livers,” he said, you know, “they pop on me. I have a burn I have to get rid of.” And I told him, I said, “Well the next time you do them,” I said, “stick your thumb in it and pull it.” I said, “Stick your thumb in them to make a hole in them,” you know. He had never hear that. He kind of giggled in there, you know, but it was true when he find it out. [Laughs]

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But—but the—when I did the cookbook [Mama Dip’s Kitchen], Bill [Neal] come down, and he would say, “Mama Dip, you started on the cookbook? Mr. Claiborne told me to stay on you about the cookbook.” And I said, “Bill,” I said, “I’m not writing me no cookbook,” you know. You know, “I just don’t see it.” He said, “Yeah,” you know. And one day he told me, he said—the Radio Shack had opened down there, you know, and he said, “Go get you a tape recorder and you just—get over here and you just—every time you make something, you talk in that,” you know. And I had never used a measuring spoon. I had never used a measuring cup; so now I got but the equipment to make this thing work, you know. And so I guess I got about—about 20 or 25 recipes fixed, you know. And so my daughter, Norma, could type, you know. And so I give them to her and I said, “Norma, you take it and you type these up,” you know. And so Norma got them—come and got them and the next morning she brought them back. The next morning she brought them back. She said, “Mama,” she said, “I can't do nothing with these.” She said, “I’ll be—it will take me ten years to do this.” She said, “Because you said, ‘Put this in here,’ this minute and don’t say nothing else for three minutes—three minutes down the road.” [Laughs] And I said, “What happened here?” Bill said, “Well you just going to have to get you a composition book,” you know, “and you just going to have to start writing,” you know. And I did, you know. That’s what I did. When he come back, he said, “You started on that book yet?” And then I just started writing, and it took me about eight, ten years to write—to get it altogether.

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And so everybody wants to know how I got my nickname—how I got my name and nickname. And so Dip is my childhood nickname because I used to dip the water out the barrels. We caught the water. Papa put two big barrels at the edge of the house, and then the water would run down in it, and we’d dip it out and that’s what we washed—we had the pots and the tub where we were washing them outside. We would fill it up with water, and then you build a fire under the pot to heat it up to wash in hot water. And I had to be the one to dip it out. I know I started dipping it out, probably, when I was five or six years old, you know. And I would get up there, and they’d call me Dip. “Come here Dip—Dip—Dip.” And they started calling me Dip.

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I want to ask you, you talked about all your siblings being in the service industry and a lot of them working in restaurants. But growing up in the country, you were cooking out of necessity and to feed your family. And then [you came] out in the world and that skill [was] a tool for all of you to make a living. Food has now brought you so much. What does that mean to you now?

Yeah, it means a lot. [Laughs] You see, one of the things is that this is why I try to instill in the—in the children when I go, you know, actually, you don’t have to be a cook to learn how to cook. You need to learn how to cook because, if you’re going to have a family, you need to know how to cook. You understand? And I think that holds a family together…It means a lot and what happened is [cooking] is a low-class job, you know. Now it’s building back up. Once it’s a low-class job you know, and I think that—I think that we as a black people misunderstood Martin Luther King. I don’t think that he thinks that all of us was going to be a doctor or lawyer, you understand? But what he wanted us to do was make sure that we pull out of this and get some education. And but then I think that he looked at it also as I looked at it, everybody is not going to go to college and everybody is not going to get through high school. But what happened is every human being is built with a skill, you understand.

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So how much would you say, then, is—what Mama Dip’s Restaurant is—how much of it is the food and how much is it Mama Dip?

[Laughs] I think—I think the food probably is 75-percent and Mama Dip is 25 [percent]. I think, you know, because peoples—yeah, I think it is, uh-hmm. And just some come in here, and there’s some wanting to make sure that I’m here, you know.

Do you still get in the kitchen very much?

Yeah, I do some, you know. I don’t do a lot because now I just can't get around that much. But Della is right there and has been here 27 years, you know, and on her 28th year, and she can do everything back there. And my daughter, Lane, is back there. And then [my son] Joe, the baker. And people like to be trained, you know. You’d be surprised what peoples just come to—I’ve accepted a lot of students, but they come in for waiting tables, you know. But then they wants to know a little something. You know they want to know something about the food, you know.

How do you teach them, and how did you teach your children, too, when they came to work for you?

My children? I think, you know, they did just like me, you know. If I started cooking when I was nine—my children been cooking, you understand, they been cooking a long time, you know. Nothing that I had that I ever felt like that they couldn’t handle but my money. I want them to learn how to handle money, you understand? But I could send them to the grocery store. They would shop at the grocery store, you know, and do things.

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So have your kids brought anything new to the restaurant—to the recipes—in the way the food is made as time has gone along?

Uh-hmm, yeah. The recipes—what I do is there is I just make them bigger. I fix them so that we need this many pounds to make this much food, you know. Like potatoes—we cook potatoes. I don’t do it in pounds, you know, for the recipe. I have buckets back there, you know, that you—this is what we need. We get a catering [order], we’ll need this; we need this right here, the squash plate and make a squash casserole you know something like that, you know. I make it easy for them.

Do you have a favorite recipe or food that you like to make?

No. No, I don’t. I just really like everything that I cook, uh-huh.

Do you have a favorite meal that you like to eat?

I love breakfast. We used to get up in the morning at breakfast, you know, like six o’clock, we be done that breakfast, you know. And so I love it. I can't do without breakfast. I do. And if they was telling me I couldn’t eat an egg, I don’t know what I would do. Because I just like egg.

How do you like your eggs cooked?

Over medium. [Laughs]

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Do you still cook at home a lot?

You know, some things that I grew up with, I cook them at home. But then I got some customers now that like pig feet, and they’ll call me and ask me whether I, you know—would I cook some pig feet. And I cook them here, and I eat them. And that’s not often, but I cook them and they come over, and I eat pig feet and they eat pig feet. And still people just like to eat some stuff like that every now and then; they don’t get it much, you know. And I don’t think it hurts you if you don’t get it much—not like eating it once a week, you know. [Laughs]

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So what do you think the future of Mama Dip’s is?

I don’t know; it’s hard to say. If somebody said something to me—what they’re saying to me now—fifteen years ago, I said, “Come on.” But I don’t know. I don’t know whether my children will want to keep this on, you know. But now they—they—they—they wants me in Durham and Raleigh and Kerry and Charlotte and Greenville and—and everywhere. They wants me to open up a Mama Dip’s, you know. But where Mama Dip’s is now, you know, it—it needs—it needs—you just can't walk out like I walked in this. It’s altogether a different story, you know. It would—it would need some professional help….And I think it’s out there enough now that it could be without me, you know, but it has to be my name…So I don’t know. I would like to see it go further, as far as the children.

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Are you here at this restaurant just about every day?

I’m here about every day, uh-hmm. I’m here about every day. I’m not a loner person. I have been around people so much. I just can't be by myself.

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What do you think your father would say now if he knew your success with—with food and with your way with people?

He called me baby, and he said that when I cook that meal that spring, it was in April—they always go out and if it rained a lot, you know, and snowed. You always go out to the field and we kicked rocks over, and when you kicked the rocks over how damp it was under the rocks, you can see whether it was time to start plowing or not. And that morning when they would go after we ate and milling around and we got the cows—got the—everything fed and Papa says, “We going to go out and check,” you know, “see how the ground is.” And I said, “Oh, my gracious.” I said, “Papa told me to fix something to eat,” you know. I said, “I got to go tell Flossie. I got to go tell Flossie!” And I started over there and I said, “My gracious alive.” I was so excited. And then I turned around and I said, “I got to go back.” By that time I hear this guinea [hen]—this guinea cackling and the guinea had laid an egg, you know. And what happened is—Papa had always told us, you know—he sold the eggs; he sold the guinea eggs. We didn’t eat the guinea eggs. He sold the guinea eggs out here at Carrboro. And I said, “I’m going to see where that guinea egg is,” you know, where the guinea had laid at. And so the guinea had laid down in the edge of the woods; the guinea had laid that egg, but it was two more eggs. It was three eggs in there. And I got those eggs out, and I put my hand in there and got the eggs out. And I thought about Papa. Always what Papa told us when we was sitting by the fire at night, he was teaching us, you know, things. He said, “Don’t ever put your hand in that guinea egg because she won't lay—they won't lay in there no more,” you know. They’re real sensitive. “If you put your hand in and take the eggs out,” he said, “you always take the egg out ‘til the stick—take the—roll the egg out,” you know. But I didn’t care that day. I got that egg. [Laughs] And I went to the house, and it was damp, you know…Finally got that fire started and I cooked this egg custard and I cooked some—it wasn’t blackeyes then; they were like whippoorwill peas. They were some little whippoorwill peas. And I went and took the axe, and I cut the hambone in two and cut a piece off of the hambone, and I boiled it and put it in there. And I made some cornbread, and I put just a little bit too much in there. And I put just a little bit too much soda in my cornbread, and it was a little bit yellow. It was a little yellow. And Papa said, “Baby, next time just cut it back a little bit,” you know. And when he got to that egg custard, he said, “This some good stuff.” Because he just kept on saying “good stuff” and my brother Wilson said, “Yeah.” They eat it, too. They just loved it. [Laughs] And I’ll tell you, you couldn’t do nothing else with me.

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Well I’ve taken a lot of your time here, and I really appreciate it, but I wonder if we could end on one last question and that is: what is your favorite dessert?

My favorite dessert? I like a coconut cake, uh-hmm. I really do.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.