Southern Six-Pack

1.  May has been the cruelest month for barbecue pit-masters. We bid farewell to Ricky Parker of Lexington, TN; Donald Pelts and John Willingham of Memphis, TN and Douglas Fincher, Jr. of Macon, GA.  Who's going to fill their shoes?

2.  Douglas Fincher saw his barbecue travel into outer space. Donald Pelts saw his barbecue circumnavigate the globe. Move over pork, it's chicken's turn to travel. Now comes word that KFC is being carried across an international border and through a smuggling tunnel to reach fast-food hungry patrons in Gaza. It's a four hour journey from counter to table, making this the slowest fast food around.

3.  Bully pulpit, n. -- as for making ones views known or rallying support.  Wendell Pierce has the bully pulpit but he isn't just talking about transforming New Orleans' food deserts, he's doing something. His Sterling Farms grocery store (and two smaller convenience stores) opened earlier this spring.  Spend $50 in the store and get a free ride home in the Sterling Farms' shuttle.

4.  Grits, Demystified answers several bubbling questions:  Are grits the same as polenta?  What's the deal with instant grits?  May I, in the privacy of my own home, put sugar on my grits?

N.B. I went to high school with a girl who, bless her heart, ordered "a grit" at the Cracker Barrel.  She wanted to try grits without committing to an entire portion.  The waitress obliged.  And, my high school pal recoiled at what she described as "a hangnail on my plate!"  Our lesson that day was one we might have learned in the classroom -- grit is gross and unappetizing and has no place on the plate but, grits are delicious.

5.  The food world took to the internet today to express its collective outrage at the firing of long-time Village Voice food critic, Robert Sietsema.  As well they should.  During Sietsema's 20 years at the Village Voice he found the city's best food in the city's most unlikely places.  And,  wrote without ever losing his sense of wonder and whimsy.   Also, he once called the patty melt the tuna salad sandwich's slutty cousin.

6.  Trevor Runyon broke into the ValuMarket in Mt. Washington, Kentucky and ate six steaks, a couple of pounds of shrimp, a dinner salad, a birthday cake, a case of soft drinks, and 57 cans of Reddi-wip.  And then fell asleep in the ceiling of the store.

RVA Eats: Heritage

Emilia and Joe Sparatta (L) with Emilia's brother Mattias Hagglund.
Together, they opened Heritage in the fall of 2012.
Photo by Nicole Lang

Throughout the spring, Nicole Lang is blogging for us about her adopted hometown of Richmond, Virginia (aka RVA). Richmond is the site for this year's Summer Foodways Symposium, which will take place from June 20–22. Over on her own blog, Food Punk, Nicole is telling more stories of the folks—from musicians to fashion bloggers—who make Richmond awesome. Check out her "One Day in RVA" series to meet these men and women. 

As you may have noticed, I’m quite smitten with Richmond’s food scene. But there is one establishment that, for me, encapsulates RVA’s movement toward not just greatness in our collective gastronomy, but the elevation of our community. That place is Heritage.

Joe and Emilia Sparatta, along with Emilia’s brother Mattias Hagglund, opened Heritage in the fall of 2012. They put their passion on every plate, in every glass, and prove their love for Richmond with dedicated and expert service. A trip to Heritage is rejuvenating, like a visit home. You leave feeling well cared for and full of good food and drink.

Photo by Nicole Lang

Heritage is a true mom-and-pop establishment. Joe and Emilia welcomed their first baby just months after opening. Little Hunter Ryland is named for the restaurant where the pair first met.

“Joe and I met at the Ryland Inn in 2002. We were both line cooks,” Emilia recalls. “We later worked together at two other restaurants and then helped to open Elements in New Jersey. We asked Mattias, who was then in Richmond, to join us and manage the bar.”

Behind the bar at Heritage. Photo by Nicole Lang.

Opening a place of their own was the goal, so they returned home to Richmond.

“Eventually, there comes a point where you have taken in as much as you can from your mentors—when it's time to get going,” Emilia explained.

“We knew that we worked well together—that we each bring something different and important to the table—so it just made sense for us to open a place of our own,” adds Mattias.

Leaving the network of friends they established up north was difficult, Joe tells me, and I wonder if he had a plan—an inkling to what Richmonders wanted to eat, not having grown up here himself.

“I really believe that people are looking for food that is not too intimidating and handled with care. We make just about everything in house and having value-added product is very important to me. I keep in mind that we're here to make people happy.”

As I tuck into a spectacular dish of red snapper collar, I can report happiness is an immediate condition. The care that Joe mentions extends beyond folks dining at Heritage: they regularly host and collaborate with other restaurants on benefits and are heavily involved in local charity work.

I ask Emilia why she thinks Richmonders are taking to Heritage with such zeal. “It’s a place where you know you can consistently get great food; friendly, intelligent service; quality crafted cocktails in a casual setting. You can pop in and not have to be too serious.”

Cocktail menu at Heritage. Photo by Nicole Lang.

Mattias is quick to note the collective support of the RVA restaurant community. “It's great being in a place where people work together to promote the whole scene, rather than just themselves.  I love this city.”

Sustainable South: Jones Valley Teaching Farm

All photos by the Jones Valley Teaching Farm.

In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about urban agriculture and the solution it provides for sustainable and healthy living (on Sustainable South, we wrote about it in Houston and Atlanta.) The Jones Valley Teaching Farm (JVTF) in Birmingham, Alabama, however, is much more than an urban farm. Their vision is to educate 10,000 Birmingham children annually.

The project started in 2007 as the Jones Valley Urban Farm, when the organization transformed three and a half acres of vacant downtown property into an agricultural oasis. The mission was to make the downtown Birmingham community a healthier place. Soon, the farm’s educational programs proved to be the most relevant of all the organization’s initiatives. As a result, the leadership shifted the focus of the farm and changed the name. 

Today, it is the Jones Valley Teaching Farm, and it is a place where young minds blossom. By connecting young people to their food, and helping them understand where it comes from, the JVTF believes that future generations will be empowered to eat smarter, think healthier, and live better. The JVTF works with parents, principals, and teachers to provide educational programs that are responsive to the needs of 21^st century learners. This school year, JVTF built a "farm lab" at Glen Iris Elementary School with the help of a design fellow from the Rural Studio and piloted its "Good School Food" curriculum. As part of the program, fifth graders developed a business plan and ran a farmer's market at the school, selling 1,000 pounds of produce from the on-campus farm lab.

JVTF has developed hands-on, standards-based enrichment kits that will be distributed in 8 Birmingham elementary and middle schools in 2013-2014. These kits provide the materials and resources needed for students to work in small teams, developing skills such as problem solving, critical thinking and communication—all relating to food systems and nutrition. The JVTF also provides field-based education to students so they can actively participate in the learning process.

If the farm’s produce is any indication, the JVTF is planting seeds that will grow into a vibrant and healthy young generation in the Birmingham community.

Director's Cut: The Future of Food Scholarship

The field of food studies has come a long way in the 21st century. Photo by Alfred T. Palmer, 1943, courtesy of the Library of Congress

"Director's Cut" is a weekly post from SFA director John T. Edge.  

Last week, the Food Studies program at Indiana University hosted an interdisciplinary workshop, “The Future of Food Studies,” underwritten by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 20-odd scholars from around the country gathered in Bloomington for two and a half days of discussions.

In attendance were Krishnendu Ray, chair of the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University; Analiese Richard, faculty chair of the School of International Studies at the University of the Pacific; Richard Wilk, director of food studies at Indiana University; and more than a dozen other energetic and engaged thinkers.

I met scholars who approached food studies from a variety of disciplines: A literature professor who explores food imagery and recipes in immigrant memoirs. An anthropologist who does ethnographic work with farmers in the West African nation of Mali. A historian who studies the American school lunch program.

Open, curious, and without posturing, the group worked to define the field and plot its trajectory.

Together, we talked through strategies for undergraduate education. We debated the efficacy of interdisciplinary studies. And we settled on a canon of texts and then dismissed said canon.

No matter the seriousness of their scholarship, many seemed to grapple with what Krishnendu Ray called the “triviality barrier.” They recognized that, in this American moment when food sovereignty and food justice are pop memes, those of us who study foodways and food studies claim a space that is both at the center of the current American cultural conversation and, for now, on the fringe of academic legitimacy.

Women at Work: Wrapping up "Give Me Some Sugar"

Photo (and pie crust) by Emily Hilliard.

Writer, folklorist, and baker Emily Hilliard has been blogging for us this spring about Southern female pastry chefs. Here, she reflects on what she learned.

For the past 3 months, I’ve been talking with women pastry chefs from across the South for the Southern Foodways Alliance’s series "Give Me Some Sugar." One of the questions I asked each chef was how being a woman has informed—or hasn’t informed—her work. I asked this, fully understanding that the question has its problems (as described by this Eater piece that was published when I was working on the series), as it marks women as an “other” in the professional culinary world, where women chefs are no longer a rarity.

But I still wanted to ask the question. I knew some might feel indifferent, but also thought that particularly in the world of baking, a realm that at least in the home sphere is still commonly associated with women, that it might elicit some interesting responses. And though a few did laugh at the question, it evoked some powerful stories in others.

Table 310’s Stella Parks spoke of her disbelief in gendered flavors—how to her, ingredients like tobacco and bourbon don’t feel masculine, but instead feel “homey,” inciting her memories of growing up middle of a Kentucky tobacco field, a stone’s throw from the world’s most famous bourbon distillery.

Phoebe Lawless said that while she doesn’t feel like being a woman has necessarily informed her baking, being a mother certainly has. As a parent, she’s had to adjust her schedule to cook more meals at home and choose recipes that she can make with her 8-year old daughter—both of these factors have influenced her baking repertoire and the menu at Lawless’s Durham, NC, bakery, Scratch.

Many of the chefs I spoke to, including Cheryl Day, Christina Tosi, and Carla Cabrera-Tomasko, learned to bake at home from the matriarchs in their family. As adults, they professionalized these domestic skills they developed with their mothers and aunts and grandmothers, some supplementing them with formal culinary training.

I thought about how I might answer the same question when applied to my own work—as a writer or folklorist or home baker, and I realized that being a woman doesn’t affect how I write or research or bake, but it does inform in part why I do those things and what I chose to write and study and recognize. I believe it’s important to acknowledge the legacy of women’s work from past generations, whether in a field that was typically seen as feminine, or one that was always male-dominated. In my academic work and writing at Nothing-in-the-House, I seek to bring attention to the power of creative domestic skills not only within the home itself, but in the ability for those skills to transfer to and influence other public spheres—commercial, social, and communal.

Though women pastry chefs may no longer be a rarity or a marked category, there is something about preserving the memory of women’s contributions that I think is important. And the exciting thing about baking, is that we can make this memory manifest, as many of the chefs I interviewed do, in the form of baking our grandmother’s chocolate cake, using our mother’s lemon juicer, or carrying on the tradition of making something beautiful and delicious with what we have.

Nicole Taylor Takes the Cake

Lemon-coconut stack cake. Photo by Nicole Taylor.

SFA guest blogger Nicole Taylor is Brooklyn-based writer and radio host with Georgia roots. You can follow her on Twitter at @foodculturist. 

“Let's do a cakewalk!”

I over-zealously emailed this suggestion to my CSA (community-supported agriculture) group as a fundraising option for a farmer wiped out by Hurricane Irene in the late summer of 2011. Silence ensued.
           
I remember my first experience of musical chairs and numbered, layered confections at the Thomas N. Lay Community Park in Athens, Georgia. The centerpiece of the fete was a long table of grand, stout, tall, showstoppers: coconut filled, chocolate covered, and vanilla laden. Popular radio tunes from the boombox filled the air while kids strutted in a circle to win desserts. The songs stopped, and the winners swooped up the prizes.

Young ladies do the cake walk in Van Cortlandt Park, New York City (date unknown). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

According to narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, cakewalks began as a pastime for southern slaves, where individuals mocked the ballroom-style strides of their masters and the best dancers were gifted a cake. After emancipation, the plantation dance became popular in white Northern nightclubs and was then labeled a dance style.

The cakewalk—both the dance and the game—has almost vanished from pop culture and grade school carnivals. I'm ready to do it again. With the growing movement of food swaps and blogger bake sales, I’m predicting a comeback of the entertainment that put smiles on the faces of young and old, black and white.
 

We're Bringing Potlikker to the Big Apple...

...the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, that is.

Potlikker Film Festival


at the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party
Friday, June 7, 2013


6:00 – 9:00 p.m.


Blue Smoke


116 East 27th Street, New York, NY
 


Presented by the Southern Foodways Alliance 
and 
Union Square Hospitality Group

On June 7, 2013, the Southern Foodways Alliance will celebrate the annual Big Apple Barbecue Block Party with SFA-produced films about barbecue, smart talk about barbecue, and riffs on barbecue from some of the South’s best chefs.
 
The SFA, a University of Mississippi–based institute, documents, studies, and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the changing American South. For the past eleven years, we’ve worked with Union Square Hospitality Group to make films about American barbecue culture. Debuting will be a Joe York-produced film on McClard’s Bar-B-Q, smoking since 1928 in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
 


Chefs leading the way include:

Kenny Callaghan, Blue Smoke, New York, New York

Matt Kelly, Mateo Tapas, Durham, North Carolina

Kyle Knall, Maysville, New York, New York

Mike Lata, The Ordinary, Charleston, South Carolina

Joseph Lenn, The Barn at Blackberry Farm, Walland, Tennessee



To Begin:

Potlikker Shots



To Savor
: 
Lowcountry Barbecue Blade Oysters

Simmons Catfish Farms Delta Delacata

Texas Salt and Pepper Beef Ribs

Barbecue Bocadillo with Piquillo Cheese

More Flights of Barbecue Fancy
 


To Sip: 

Full Steam Brewery Beer

Foggy Ridge Cider

Tito’s Vodka

Mountain Valley Spring Water
 


To Watch
: 
Joe York films on the Skylight Inn, Ayden, North Carolina, and McClard’s Bar-B-Q, Hot Springs, Arkansas
 


Tickets, priced at $75 per person, include food, drink, and films, and are ON SALE NOW. No tickets will be available at the door. Snap yours up quickly; last year, they sold out in 4 days.  We can't wait to see you in the Big Apple!

Questions? E-mail sfaevents@olemiss.edu

RVA Eats: Leni Sorensen

Photo courtesy of Sarah Cramer Shields and Andrea Hubbell.

Throughout the spring, Nicole Lang is blogging for us about her adopted hometown of Richmond, Virginia (aka RVA). Richmond is the site for this year's Summer Foodways Symposium, which will take place from June 20–22. Over on her own blog, Food Punk, Nicole is telling more stories of the folks—from musicians to fashion bloggers—who make Richmond awesome. Check out her "One Day in RVA" series to meet these men and women. 

On a road flanked by the Doyles River in the Blue Ridge mountain town of Crozet, Virginia, is Dr. Leni Sorensen’s home, Indigo House. There, she and her husband garden and raise hens and livestock. 

A few weeks ago, I visited Indigo House for the first time. From the end of a long hallway decorated with paintings and framed early blues 78s came a yell, “We’re in the kitchen, come on back!” Leni Sorensen spends a lot of time in her kitchen. And in her garden. In fact, she keeps daily diaries on both. She is warm, direct, and prone to dropping all kinds of knowledge in causal conversation—which she tends to punctuate with a salty phrase here and there. “If I’m talking about food, I’m also talking about history," she says.

Sorensen's journals. Photo by Nicole Lang.

An expert in culinary history and agriculture of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, she was the African-American Research Historian for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. Her resume also includes folk singer and former cast member of the musical Hair. She is now retired—which means that on any given day at Indigo House, she might be butchering a lamb or constructing a garden hoop house. 

Sorensen started cooking at age 9 alongside her stepfather, a Louisiana native who was an avid home cook. “He was my first food mentor, and he left me alone to cook. If something didn’t work out, I fed it to the dog and tried again,” she says. 

Sorensen's chickens. Photo by Nicole Lang.

Because Sorensen learned to cook by following her stepfather's example and tasting as she went, cookbooks were a revelation later in life. Her kitchen is bursting with them, from every shelf and nook. One of her favorites is the 1970s baking classic The Tassajara Bread Book by Edward Espe Brown. Sorensen says that she likes to make several loaves at a time, because “you always end up eating the first loaf when it comes out warm from the oven.”

Sorensen has taught others to cook since the 1960s. “Anything you see in the grocery store, somebody cooked it. Maybe it was in a factory and they added a bunch of stuff, but it was cooked somewhere," she says. "You can make it, too—without the additives.”  

She continues to teach cooking and rural skills classes out of her home. Over the summer, she hosts a monthly open house where folks are invited to show up on her doorstep, tour through her gardens and talk food. "I have a beautiful garden and house, and it's fun to share it," Sorensen says. "They bring some local cheeses or some wine, and lots of conversation—and I make fresh bread!" 

Dr. Sorensen will be a speaker at the SFA’s Summer Foodways Symposium, discussing the relationships between white and black women in 19th-century kitchens.

Food and Art, All in the Family

Emily Wallace guest-blogs for us about food, art, and design. You can check out more of her work here.

When I told my mother I was traveling to Oxford to talk about pimiento peppers at the 2011 SFA fall symposium, she paused dramatically and asked, “Well isn’t everything just coming full circle?”

According to her, my paternal grandmother—Charlotte Heavner Wallace—ate a small jar of diced pimientos everyday that she was pregnant with my father.  In my mother’s eyes, that meant that I was born to deal with the pimiento pepper rather than pimento cheese, which was the topic of my thesis.

Images courtesy of Emily Wallace. Click to enlarge.

Pimientos show up often in my grandmother’s hand-scrawled cookbook—in pimento cheese, naturally, but also in a vegetable casserole and in “Mother’s Chicken Loaf.” These days, however, what interests me most—and what’s recently come full circle—are my grandmother’s drawings. Etched in black ink and pastel colored pencils, they cover the 50-page recipe book that she wrote and illustrated on lined notebook paper for my cousins and me (she did that three separate times, all in cursive with unique drawings, as copy machines eluded her).

Of note, there’s a drawing of orange pieces portioned from rectangular, circular and triangular cuts of cheese (I particularly love this because I only recall my grandmother keeping squares of American, which we draped on steamed broccoli or open faced tuna sandwiches).

There are little round stickers that she colored and used to cover up mistakes.

And there’s a hand-drawn sandwich menu. It’s been years since I’ve looked at it or the portion of her recipe book that it introduces, as I know most of her dishes by heart. But fumbling through the other day, I was struck by the list of sandwiches featured in the drawing, including pimiento cheese, deviled ham, and tuna and egg. It’s just like a hand-scrawled list I recently wrote and checked off for my own illustrations, including a can of ham spread with the caption, “Speak of the Devil.”

I have to think my grandmother would have enjoyed the pun. As the bottom of her drawing states, “No matter the season or the reason, sandwiches are always popular!” I couldn’t agree more, though given the chance I’d like to ask her about her cheese and carrot sandwich recipe. Perhaps I will make a drawing.

Sustainable South: Transplanting Traditions Community Farm

Here at the SFA, excitement stirs when we learn of communities setting a table where all may gather. The Transplanting Traditions Community Farm (TTCF) is one of those communities. Located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the TTCF is a vocational agricultural program that works to build economically viable, environmentally sound, and socially sustainable local agricultural opportunities for refugees in the area.

Through its farming programs, the non-profit seeks to address the challenges of food insecurity, healthy food access, and economic well being in the refugee and immigrant community. It strives to honor the agricultural traditions of the participating families’ native lands, as well as to supplement their training with sustainable techniques specific to North Carolina. The TTCF provides growing space for each farmer, marketing workshops, and outlets for agricultural products. Last year, the farm was supported by a 26-member CSA subscription program, which brought over $11,000 in income directly to the participating refugees.

Most of the 140 participants are Karen—an ethnic population of Burma, also known as Myanmar. Since 2007, immigrants from Burma have represented the second largest group of refugees to the United States. In North Carolina, they are the fastest-growing group, with nearly 1,000 entering the state each year.

It makes sense for this population to be relocated to North Carolina, says program manager Kelly Owensby. The long, hot, and humid summers are similar to the Burmese climate. In the summertime, the farm transforms into a tropical paradise that reminds many of home. They grow nearly thirty different Southeast Asian tropical vegetables, such as Roselle Hibiscus and Snake Gourds, which allows the farmers to hold on to a piece of their agrarian culture, despite relocation far from home. However, the winters here are shocking to them, especially at first, she adds. In fact, much of the educational programming at TTCF is geared toward training the participants on how to farm throughout four seasons, with cool-season crops—such as greens and turnips—that many have never seen before.

Maintaining its agrarian culture has not limited the refugee community unto itself, however. The families are eager to adapt and embrace American culture. According to Kelly, one of the most important aspects of the TTCF is the impact the Karen families are having in making the Chapel Hill area diverse. The flavorful Burmese cuisine at fundraising events has many locals asking of the project, “When are you starting a restaurant?” 

While plans for a restaurant may not be in the future, the TTCF is currently fundraising in order to continue its efforts this fall. For more information, visit the TTCF website or their indiegogo page.

In 2011, before we had heard of TTCF, we collected oral histories with farmers and customers at the nearby Carrboro Farmers' Market. To read those stories, click here.

Emilie Dayan, our office intern/assistant/chief collaborator, blogs weekly about issues of nutrition, sustainability, and food policy in the South.