Health Food, Mississippi-Style

“This place is a find,” announced the woman at the next table with no fear of contradiction. Evidently people are still discovering Flossie’s Healthy Home Cooking, though it’s been around for eight years or so.

Now, some might find a certain contradiction in the concept of healthy home cooking, particularly when they learn that Flossie’s founder, Flossie M. Vence, came here from Cleveland, Miss., which is nowhere near the low-fat, low-sodium capital of the country.

But Flossie’s does fry in canola oil exclusively and trims much of the fat from its meats, and there’s always Flossie’s Vegetable Plate, which is your selection of vegetable side dishes sans meat. “I lost 20 pounds on Flossie’s Vegetable Plate,” boasts a sign on the wall, and it must be true.

Healthy though it may be, this is still Southern home cooking, and of a very high order. Back in the ‘80s, Vence opened the famous Aunt Kizzie’s Back Porch in Marina del Rey, which set new standards for Southern food in our part of the world.

This corner of Torrance would never be mistaken for Marina del Rey, however. Flossie’s shares a quiet mini-mall with a Korean martial arts academy and an Egyptian produce market. It’s a fairly plain room, decorated with African American genre paintings and a couple of celebrity photos, and a lot of its business is takeout.

The food is a welcome relief from the relentless short-order cookery of most restaurants. Most dishes (particularly among the daily specials) are done in advance, with all the rich flavor possibilities of long braising.

Take the beef short ribs, available every day. They’re staggeringly beefy in flavor, and the kitchen thoughtfully picks out the bones and much of the fat, so there’s nothing but meat to your order (well, some connective tissue).

The pot roast, often available on weekends, is nearly as meaty. It comes with its roasting vegetables and a surprising dash of garlic. Flossie’s oxtails are meaty too, but their gravy needs something. Something easily supplied by the catsup dispenser of vinegary hot sauce, as it happens.

Often there’s chicken pot pie with a soft, biscuit-like crust and the usual chicken, peas, carrots and mushrooms for the filling. The most unusual thing sold here is Mississippi-style tamales. They’re basically regular beef tamales, but the distinctive sauce has both the aggressive ground chiles of a Mexican sauce and a dose of garlic and vinegar. I guess it splits the difference between Mexico and Mississippi.

All the fried items use different coatings--crisp batter for the chicken, super-crunchy bread crumbs for the shrimp and a light flour coating for the catfish. They’re all quite good (the shrimp have a nice cocktail sauce liberally spiked with horseradish). My favorite is the delicate catfish, which comes with a couple of hush puppies, faintly sweet balls of cornmeal dough fried quite brown.

With most entrees you get a choice of corn meal muffins or fluffy biscuits. And then there are all the vegetable side dishes. Candied yams, with a dose of orange juice and maybe vanilla, which really taste like candy. Marvelous minced (not mushy) collard greens, flavorful but scarcely bitter at all. The green beans and potatoes look dull, but the beans turn out not to have had the life cooked out of them after all.

The plain boiled cabbage, likewise, is just this side of overdone. There are also red beans, black-eyed peas, quite rich macaroni and cheese, and corn speckled with okra and tomatoes.

The dessert list refers to a cobbler of the day. In fact, there might be as many as three. I’ve had excellent peach and cherry cobblers, both with an exuberant dose of nutmeg. The blackberry cobbler resembled a pint of blackberry jam layered with some pie crust. There’s also a pretty good bread pudding, which cries out for a sauce of some kind.

But the queen of Flossie’s desserts is the sweet potato pie, which, like so much else here, is unusually sweet and spicy. And if it’s healthy too, this place is really a find.

BE THERE

Flossie’s Healthy Home Cooking, Yukon Square Shopping Center, 3566 Redondo Beach Blvd., Torrance; (310) 352-4037. Open 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays, noon to 9 p.m. Saturdays and noon to 6 p.m. Sundays. Closed Mondays. No alcohol. Parking lot. Cash only. Takeout. Dinner for two, $14 to $34, food only.

What to Get: short ribs, catfish, shrimp, pot roast, tamales, collards, yams, peach cobbler, sweet potato pie.