Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
Last month I craved feel-good, transportive reads. Perhaps it was the darkening days, or the approaching election punctuated by its divisiveness, but as I worked through my to-read list of uplifting fiction, I cozied up with Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987). As a teenager, I fell in love with wild Idgie and delicate Ruth in the 1991 Fried Green Tomatoes film, but I never managed to read the novel itself. I am pleased to report that while it was a very overdue read, it was well worth the wait. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe serves up recipes for good living and good eats as it weaves two story lines together. It reflects upon the complicated history of a tiny Alabama town during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the struggle of one middle-aged woman’s attempts to love herself near the century’s end.
Fried Green Tomatoes is a collage of memories, newspaper clippings, and narrative that fills the gaps as it winds historical fiction into a story about Evelyn, a middle-aged Southern woman facing a crisis as she realizes she hates herself and her limited life. Evelyn’s story becomes intertwined with the history of Whistle Stop, Alabama when she meets elderly Mrs. Threadgoode at the Rose Terrace Nursing Home where Evelyn’s mother-in-law also resides. Week by week, Mrs. Threadgoode tells the story of the Whistle Stop Cafe and its cast of characters as Evelyn struggles to find herself. Mrs. Threadgoode’s stories reveal a community centering around a café run by two women, Idgie and Ruth whose love and lives are anything but conventional, but who offer sanctuary to those in need, often in the form of a hot meal and steaming cup of coffee. As Mrs. Threadgoode shares more and more memories from Whistle Stop and recalls many details of her long life, Evelyn recognizes the limitations she has allowed to restrain her and, following Idgie and Ruth’s lead, she cultivates herself and her future.
This novel delves into many hard histories from the realities of race in 1920s Alabama to the homeless epidemic of the 1930s and beyond. But ultimately, Fried Green Tomatoes depicts a world in which community members come together to support one another through painful family losses and poverty. Even as times change and Whistle Stop all but blows away, the spirit of its earlier glory lives on in Mrs. Threadgoode’s stories. Fried Green Tomatoes demonstrates that a story can, indeed, have inspirational power in the lives of strangers, and that a good tale alongside an authentic friendship can be enough to shake any of us out of our internal melancholy and crisis.
If the novel’s final chapter fails to leave the reader feeling cozy and at peace, the recipes that follow surely will. This novel transports its reader in time, but also excites its reader’s appetite with its constant reference to home cooking (at the Whistle Stop Cafe) and junk food binging (at Rose Terrace Nursing Home). Following the novel’s final lines, Flagg gifts her readers with many of the recipes from Whistle Stop Cafe. Thus she enables any who choose to enjoy the culinary splendor of Southern home cooking, and bring a little of the culture and character of the Whistle Stop Cafe’s inclusivity, authenticity, and good eats to our own lives.
Bibliography:
Flagg, Fannie. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Random House Publishing Group: 1987.
