Durkee’s Is Dead

When I was a boy, my small-town-attorney father had a client who paid his legal bills not in money but in deliveries of homegrown tomatoes. I still think about those tomatoes, almost vulgarly red, the size of softballs, juicy, earthy. My dad liked to put salt on them “to make them bleed,” he said.

This was the mid-1980s, and life in the Mississippi Delta still moved in fading agricultural rhythms. My parents had grown up around a few old people who remembered the Civil War. Clarksdale, where we lived, smelled like defoliant sprayed from low-flying yellow crop dusters. In the summer, most of my high-school friends and I went to work at 6 a.m., chopping cotton or working in the gin yard.

My family ate those tomatoes nearly every night of the summer, usually on sandwiches—bacon and tomatoes on Wonder Bread covered in a mayo-mustard hybrid called Durkee Famous Sauce. Durkee’s, as it’s known, served as the base ingredient in my mother’s stuffed eggs—we never called them deviled—and was the only acceptable condiment for a Thanksgiving-leftovers sandwich. It’s a staple of refrigerators across the South.

But this summer, right in the middle of tomato season, my mom burst into my house with terrible news. Durkee’s had been discontinued! There were no bottles anywhere! Her friends in the Delta had all been searching, in stores, online. Attempts at bootleg recipes had begun. She told me that summer would never taste the same. “You just count on some things being there,” she said. I looked at her and knew she wasn’t joking.

“It really is the taste of summer,” she said. “I wonder what the poor tomatoes are going to think.”

My mom grew up during the civil-rights movement in Shelby, Mississippi, a farming town that is now dead, and soon after she married my father, they moved 20 miles north to Clarksdale, a farming town that is now dying. She’s 79. The headlines she reads these days feel like dispatches from a time she thought would never return. Like a lot of progressive southerners, she’s had to watch the thing she counted on most, the flawed yet moral core of the United States, turn to ashes in the last years of her life. Sometimes the big losses are too much to process, and little things, such as losing a familiar taste, become mourners’ benches. (Also, those sandwiches were really good.)

She asked me, her reporter son, to find out what had happened.

I quickly confirmed what my mom told me: Durkee’s was dead.

B&G Foods, which bought the Durkee brand back in 2016, killed the condiment sometime last year. The company made no announcement and issued no press release. Some people learned that the sauce was dead when others posted screenshots of emails they’d received from B&G. Many more realized this summer, as the last bottles in the supply chain disappeared from shelves. (I emailed the company multiple times; eventually, a spokesperson responded to say that Durkee Famous Sauce had been discontinued “at least temporarily” because of a problem with the manufacturer.)

“I guess it wasn’t big enough for them,” Otis Maxwell, a food blogger, told me when I called him.

He started noticing as far back as 2013 that he could no longer find Durkee’s regularly in stores and had to chase it down online. “I’ve been aware for some time that it was endangered,” he said.

Maxwell wrote about the sauce being officially discontinued over the summer and offered his own take on Durkee’s; those posts have been among his most read. “My copycat recipe really is very good,” he said. “People are passionate about it.” My reporting showed me that Durkee’s has fans outside the South: Maxwell lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, and I read online about lovers in Butte, Montana.

Other recipes are circulating online, and an emerging Durkee’s subculture revolves around the many attempts to re-create it. My mom got a recipe and bought the ingredients the other day. I’m waiting on her report. Casey Roberts, writing for The Perry County Herald, described how, after experimenting with three different recipes, he settled on a mixture of egg yolk, apple-cider vinegar, mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, sugar, dry mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and salt. After cooking it in an improvised double boiler, he had something approximating Durkee’s. “Pales in comparison to the real deal,” he told me, “but we do what we have to in such desperate times.”

I asked him what seemed to be missing.

“There’s something sweet, but almost umami,” he said. “Like, this balance that’s really difficult to achieve as I’ve been tinkering.”

My friend Jeffrey Reed recently moved down to the beach. He loves to fish. A few days ago, he came back to northern Mississippi one final time to get the last load of things from his house. He packed up frozen redfish and speckled-trout fillets into a cooler, along with elk, oryx, sandhill-crane breasts, duck, and his Hatch chiles. And his two remaining bottles of Durkee’s. “That Durkee’s was one thing I made damn sure to put in the ice chest,” he said.

I posted online about the death of Durkee’s, and people have been writing me nonstop, dozens of them. They are distraught, and cataloging how they used the last bit from their last bottle. “Durkee’s was at every family gathering that I can remember,” my friend, the southern rock-and-roll-tour photographer Andy Tennille, told me. “Durkee’s, Maker’s Mark, Vantage cigarettes.”

Searching for answers about Durkee’s led me to corners of the internet where people gather to reminisce about vanished brands and bygone restaurants, such as Fleur de Lis Pizza, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; the Ranchero, in Clarksdale; and 14th Street Grill, in Phenix City, Alabama, to name three closings that really affected me. (If Doe’s Eat Place, in Greenville, Mississippi, ever went out of business, it would be like losing a part of my late father all over again.) In a country where people so often move to chase work, home is defined mostly by familiar tastes—the ones that bring us hurtling back in time, to a kitchen table, to parents and grandparents, to a moment when all the possibilities of what we might become remained.

[From the October 2024 issue: To understand Mississippi, Wright Thompson went to Spain]

Advertisements in the 1930s suggested pouring Durkee’s over boiled meat. Some people made salad dressing with it. Others used it to marinate shrimp, or to make a sauce for chicken by mixing it with apricot jam. People put it on green beans. It was a secret ingredient in pimento cheese. Florida folks served it with lobster and stone crab. And we’ve all got stories of cousins sneaking out to smoke a joint after Thanksgiving dinner, carrying breath spray and eye drops, then raiding the fridge for turkey and the Durkee’s sauce.

Tomatoes with bacon and white bread remains my preferred delivery mechanism. I went through my pantry and found one bottle of Durkee’s way in the back that we’d forgotten about. It expired two years ago. I’m definitely eating it anyway. Like my mom and her friends, I tried searching for any straggling bottles on the internet. I didn’t find one. eBay doesn’t have any. Neither does Amazon, Kroger, Walmart, or Publix. I cannot find a single bottle for sale anywhere. There are rumors, though, of secret stashes. “Like black-market Durkee’s honey holes,” Tennille said, laughing. “Kinda reminded me of when my aunt was ordering Tab by the case from Yugoslavia.”

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “Durkee’s Is Dead.”