Dave Block

Dave Block was an elderly Black man from Jim's childhood in Birdeye, Arkansas who made a mysterious goat gland stew he called "salulin." Jim remembered him the way you remember someone who made food unlike anything you've ever tasted anywhere else — with reverence and a little wonder.

Salulin's recipe, like its maker, is gone. But Jim talking about it decades later says something about the kind of cooking that shaped him: rooted, specific, irreplaceable.