For true comfort food, Libby Williams takes the cake

Olivia “Libby” Williams EVAN WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLY Olivia “Libby” Williams, 78, always woke up around 3 a.m. without the aid of an alarm clock. Seven days per week, in the morning darkness, she’d go to the Farmers Market Restaurant in Fort Myers and start cooking: meatloaf, mashed potatoes, mustard greens, chicken and dumplings, candied yams, gizzards, fried mullet, ham hocks and coconut cream pies. Those are just a few of the dishes she made over the years.

This New Year is Ms. Williams’ 30th as a cook at the Farmers Market Restaurant on Edison Avenue. She retired last year, but has come back to work Monday and Tuesday mornings. It’s a humble but venerable place that generally garners ecstatic reviews from food critics, and whose clientele ranges from political royalty to neighborhood locals.

Ms. Williams had her picture taken with Tipper Gore in 2000 when she was came there to eat while campaigning for her husband, former Vice President Al Gore. Seasonal residents of Fort Myers also sometimes call to ask what “Mamma” has on the menu. There are specials every day.

“I have one call me from Canada wanting to know what I’m having on the menu when they come down, and another from Ohio that does the same thing,” she said.

A lot her co-workers also call Ms. Williams “Mamma” because she’s been cooking there longer than anybody else. Before 1980, she was a cook at other local diners, including Sam’s Drugstore (when “drugstore” meant both a convenience store and diner) in downtown Fort Myers. She worked there, and later at the East Fort Myers location until it closed in 1979.

“I’ve been cooking ever since I was 12 years old,” Ms. Williams said.

She grew up the oldest of 10 siblings — five girls and five boys, the children of sharecroppers in Dawson, Ga. As the oldest child, it was often Ms. Williams’s job to prepare the meals.

She learned how to cook from her mother, a strict teacher. “One Sunday morning we were cooking breakfast before we went to church,” Ms. Williams remembered. “We had these iron skillets and I was cooking eggs. I put too much shortening in the skillet and, when I did, the eggs went all over the stove. That’s when she hit me — the first time she ever slapped me in the face. She said, ‘I’m gonna make a cook out of you and I’m gonna make a clean cook. And I learned.”

Born on July 4, 1931, Ms. Williams grew up in a world that seems distant to her now. Her family made their own butter and shortening, and slaughtered their own hogs.

“We grew everything,” Ms. Williams said. “We didn’t have to go the grocery store for nothing but sugar, flour, and soap.”

Every Sunday, they went to church in a wagon. When Ms. Williams was a girl, she would plow the fields behind a mule. She helped harvest corn, cotton, peanuts, bell peppers, tomatoes, okra and other commodities. Every morning before school she milked a cow.

She graduated from high school in Pelham, Ga., and was married at age 18, then started sharecropping with her husband. (They are long since split up.) They had to give the boss half of what they made.

“It’s amazing,” she said, recalling how different things were then. “People don’t believe it, but it’s true. I tell my kids that and they say ‘how did you survive?’”

She has five children and five grandchildren, who live in New York and New Jersey. Her children want her to write down some of her recipes, but so far she hasn’t.

“They say, ‘what if we want to fix something like you did (after you’re gone)?” she laughs. “I said, ‘just dig me up out of the ground — the recipes are in my head.’”

When she’s not cooking, Ms. Williams lives alone in a big, three-bedroom house. Sometimes she visits her children up North or has a friend over for dinner, as she did on Christmas. She cooked capon (rooster), mustard greens, candied yams, dressing and coconut cake. It brought back memories of the cakes her mother used to make.

“My mother used to cook 10 or 12 (at a time),” she said. “She’d leave them sitting out. You could wake up in the middle of the night and smell those cakes.” ¦