In some bad news from home, a food icon has died. Ike "Big Daddy" Seymour fed me his excellent Bar-B-Q throughout high school, and every chance since then that I am back in Des Moines, Iowa. His wife, Arnzie, also makes stupendous sweet potato pie. She knew me in college as "the sweet potato pie" guy because of one unusual incident where I flew back to Vermont carrying two pies for my classmates, just to prove that it was as good as I said it was. Of course, putting the pie in the communtiy refrigerator was a sure guarantee that it would be gone before I could have any, so I delayed the opening and devouring of the pie by wrapping it in brown paper and labeling it "Bovine Fecal Sample."
Big Daddy's sauces were legendary. Incendiary. He had a running challenge that if you could consume a large sandwich with his hottest sauce in under 10 minutes, you won a catered party for all your friends. When I first started going there, the sauce was called "Last Supper" then moved progressively hotter to "Emergency Room" (so-named because a challenger had to be taken to the emergency room in great discomfort after eating the sauce). I have a bottle of that sauce in the States as well as a bottle of "Hot Chocolate"--a sauce that mixes a bit of chocolate in with the BBQ sauce. How hot are these sauces? If you have ever seen the Simpsons episode wherein Homer eats the hot pepper and hallucinates, you get the idea. I had a bit of emergency room straight once, and I will attest to the fact that I was nearly in an altered state. It felt like being in a Carlos Casteneda novel.
Big Daddy, we will miss you.
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