Foscue House, Demopolis, Alabama * (and even one star is a stretch)

So my ol' man and I were driving across Alabama and it got to be lunchtime. We stopped at Foscue House in Demopolis to eat Sunday dinner. Big mistake. The building is very interesting -- built in 1840 -- but the food was downright awful. For $6.99 you got a choice of one meat (from among three offerings), two "vegetables," iced tea, and choice of cornbread or "roll." Dessert was extra at $1.50. The meat offerings were fried chicken, baked chicken and one other we can't remember. The "vegetable" offerings were -- get this -- rice and gravy, macaroni and cheese, "sweet potato cass," english peas, and "corn nuggets." Have you ever seen so many starches on any one menu?! Well, I had to think for a while before I figured out that "sweet potato cass" meant sweet potato casserole. I'm thinkin', Would it have been too much trouble to type EROLE? Anyway, I ordered the baked chicken, rice with no gravy, English peas and cornbread. The English peas were straight from the can. The baked chicken was the sort of baked chicken I despise -- slimey. How do folks do that -- cook slimey baked chicken? Everything about it was slimey -- the skin, the meat, the bones. Nothin' crispy about this bird, for sure. The rice was gummy and wasn't supposed to be. But the worst thing on the awfully bad plate was the thing they called cornbread. It was one of those rectangular cut-out squares, a block, of white, crumbly, from-the-refrigerator cold something-or-other. Beyond awful. Those folks either don't know or don't care what real cornbread is supposed to be. Cornbread can be a very fine thing. What I was served at Foscue House doesn't even deserve to be called cornbread. We declined the dessert, one offering of which was peach cobbler. I can't remember what the other offering was. During this meal we were not served butter, or a salad, or a slice of anything fresh or raw, as is usually the custom with Southern dinners. This whole meal was a good example of what I call "subsistence eating." It's the kind of thing I eat ONLY when I'm starving and there's nothing else to eat. Foscue House will have to change hands before we'll consider going back. And it's a shame, because the physical place is very interesting.