Southern Six-Pack

1.  The fourth annual International Biscuit Festival and Southern Food Writing Conference wrapped up this past weekend in Knoxville, Tennessee. You don't have to be Southern to appreciate a good biscuit or a great biscuit festival. 

2.   As remembered in posters from the United States Food Administration, a Memorial Day reflection on the importance of food in war-time.

3.   The Gulf of Mexico dead zone, an oxygen deprived stretch of the Gulf where only algae survives, is now estimated to be about 5,700 square miles in area. The only way to resuscitate that dead zone is to re-engineer the way the entire Mississippi River works. How to re-engineer the Mississippi? Answers may vary.

4.   The time has come, To talk of many things: of PVC pipe -- and spats -- and seafarms, Of the Georgia oyster industry poised to rebound. (with apologies to Lewis Carroll)

5.  "Once again, owning an exotic pet was proving to be nothing but trouble." Christopher Boffoli's utterly charming collection of photographs, Big Appetites, is on display in New York beginning June 6.

6.  Unless your calendar is incredibly thorough, you may not know that May 20 was National Strawberry Picking Day.  Don't despair.  In this case, missing the holiday doesn't mean missing the fun!  The cold wet spring heralds a bumper crop of the sweetest strawberries in years.  In the mid-South, they're ripe for the picking.  Go find some.

New Greenhouse Film! Smooth Ambler: A West Virginia Distillery

Ladies and gentlemen, we are pleased to share our second Greenhouse Film with you. (Did you miss the first one, Mile High Pie? Watch it here!)

In Smooth Ambler: A West Virginia Distillery, filmmakers Dale Mackey and Shawn Poynter take us to Maxwelton, West Virginia, to learn how the folks at Smooth Ambler Distillery make their small-batch vodka, gin, and whiskey (both bourbon and rye).

Enjoy the video while you daydream about the spirits you'll enjoy this holiday weekend.   

RVA Eats: A Day Trip to Caromont Farm

Photos 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.

Part of my job at Richmond's Secco Wine Bar involves sampling a wide variety of cheeses. Lucky me! Even more fortunately, one of my favorite Southern cheesemakers, Gail Hobbs-Page, is just an afternoon’s drive down the road in Esmont, Virginia, at Caromont Farm. 

Gail was raised on a peanut and tobacco farm in northeastern North Carolina, where, she says, “if you wanted French fries, then you grew a potato.” She fried her first chicken at 8 years old. Gutting a deer came not long after that. Gail's upbringing was centered around farm and family. She says that working the land and learning both self-reliance and sustainability from her parents and grandparents primed her for a career in food. In her house, “A souffle was just spoonbread. I pieced my culinary education together intuitively from my farm background."

After 26 years of cooking in restaurants in North Carolina and Virginia, constantly on the lookout for top-quality ingredients, Gail decided to try her hand at a different side of the food business. Before starting Caromont Farm, she says, “I knew I could make cheese, but I really didn’t know what I was doing." The experience was "a crash course in everything!”

Esmontonian, Caromont’s signature offering (pictured above), is an aged, raw milk goat cheese, bathed in a local Viognier vinegar brine. It's a stunner: nutty and complex with a gentle tang. Her cow’s milk bloomy rind, Bloomsbury, could hold its own against any French triple-cream. Gail attributes her success to the quality of milk her cows and goats produce. “I am a milk farmer," she says. "I can’t make good cheese until I know how to make good milk.”

Gail feels that cooking in testosterone-fueled kitchens prepared her for life as a woman farmer, yet she still has to deal with sexism. “Someone tried to sell me bad hay, because they assumed I didn’t know any better—stuff like that." She adds, “It’s a man’s world, but you have to get over it. That’s the reality of being a woman in this business. You can’t whine about it.”

Despite the challenges, Gail loves what she does. “Is it fun everyday? No! It’s a seasonal life, and you do the work in 104-degree heat, or in freezing rain.” She tells me that Southern cheesemakers, once isolated from one another, have formed an alliance and want to help each other succeed. Two of her cheesemakers have left to start a sheep’s milk farm of their own. In the years to come, I imagine Gail will be a mentor to others like them.

“Now that I’m older, I can look back and see the significance of my life in food; in the way I was raised," she says. "I don’t think folks raise people like that anymore—or maybe they do. I hope that they do.”

Director's Cut: Cologne Water and Flights of Barbecue Fancy

An early copy of The Virginia Housewife. Image courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society.

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

One of the things I like most about my job is that I get to conspire with cooks and chefs and other smart folks on SFA menus. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been juggling two assignments from Melissa Hall, SFA’s assistant director and organizer of events.

For our first Summer Symposium, set for June 20-22, I’ve been talking to collaborators in Richmond who are devising menus for a dinner that pays homage to Mary Randolph, author of The Virginia Housewife (1824). Yesterday I talked to Beth Dixon, a member of the RVA Swappers, about the tomato marmalade she plans to serve, and the gin cocktails she plans to mix with “cologne water.”

My second assignment has been managing the menus for the Potlikker Film Festival, set for the evening of June 7 at Blue Smoke in New York City. Unlike the Summer Symposium, tickets are still available.

The lineup, which showcases the state of modern Southern cookery, will include Shem Creek barbecue roe shrimp from Mike Lata of the Ordinary in Charleston. And ramp salt–cured Simmons Farm delacata catfish with sweet peas and homemade buttermilk ricotta from Kyle Knall of Maysville in NYC.

Matt Kelly of Mateo Tapas in Durham will dish ensalada de chicharrones with baby collards, toasted peanuts, fried shallots, and Eastern N.C. BBQ vinagreta, while Joseph Lenn of Blackberry Farm in Tennessee will serve smoked quail, glazed with jam and black pepper in the [Leah] Chase style, with smoked potato salad, pickled ramps, and hickory gastrique.

I didn’t do much conspiring with Kenny Callaghan, the chef, pitmaster, and partner at Blue Smoke. After all, the event will take place on his home turf, within reach of his pits. I named his contribution "Flights of Barbecue Fancy."* If you know Kenny, you know that he’s a man’s man, and you recognize that my description of what he’ll cook and serve sounds a little fey. That’s another thing I enjoy about working on these menus: Sometime I get to mess with my friends.

*Editor's note: Just before this post went to press, Callaghan informed us that he will be serving spice-smoked lamb ribs with minted yogurt. We can't wait. 

Sustainable South: Leann Hines

Leann holding a chick. Photo by Amy Evans.

In 2011 Amy Evans, the SFA’s lead oral historian, conducted an oral history project on the Downtown Greenwood, MS Farmers’ Market. One farmer, Leann Hines of Levee Run Farm, told us the story of farming in the area. As the Farmers’ Market, established in 2008, nourished economic recovery in downtown Greenwood, it planted seeds of inspiration in Hines’s own recovery from a debilitating illness. 

“They said, ‘Oh, well you’ve got a virus.’ Well, yeah, I had the virus to end all viruses. The next morning when I woke up, I couldn’t move anything but my left hand, my left arm. And so and I have not been able to walk since then. That was 2007. As it turned out, they finally got a diagnosis of West Nile Virus Polio, and it’s a demyelinating disease.”

What began as an activity to get her out of the house proved to be a source of both income and personal satisfaction. In response to Greenwood’s demand for fresh eggs, Hines, formerly a labor and delivery nurse, bought her first chicks in March of 2009. “I mean, we’re in the Delta and we’re still a farming and agriculture community and for nobody to offer any produce or eggs, I just thought was awful.” Now, shoppers and restaurants across North Mississippi seek her products, from chicken, duck, goose, and quail eggs to mesclun baby greens, figs, blackberries, and cut flowers.

We caught up with Hines this week at the new Oxford City Farmers’ Market. “The goose eggs are a fun product to sell,” she says, adding that the duck eggs are also becoming popular with market customers. For those wanting to try something new, Hines reveals that quail eggs are the perfect size to fry and top a sausage patty on a hot homemade biscuit.

Hines points out that very few people today realize the work involved in raising animals or vegetables for food. “But there is hope!” she adds. “Farmers’ markets are so important for promoting community, healthy eating, exercise, animal welfare, and entrepreneurship.” There is a "long row to hoe" to make our state healthier, she says, but farmers’ markets are providing a variety of fresh foods that cannot be found in many grocery stores.

“One of the greatest things that you can do in a community is have a Farmers’ Market, not just from the financial point of view but for, you know, building community, getting out—everybody seeing what’s going on, exchanging ideas.”

To read more about Hines’s story, visit our Oral History Index. To learn more about becoming a vendor at Oxford City Market, click here.

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

Kitchen to Classroom: Eating in the Archives, Part I

Fannie Lou Hamer at the 1964 Democratic National Convention

Kitchen to Classroom is a weekly dispatch from our postdoctoral fellow, Angela Jill Cooley. We'll miss Jill when she moves on next month—she has accepted a position as an assistant professor of history at Minnesota State University-Mankato. We look forward to welcoming our 2013–2014 postdoctoral fellow, Zac Henson, at the end of the summer.

Eating in the archives? Well, no, everyone knows you can’t eat in the archives. Archivists are understandably prickly about protecting the historical documents, rare books, and other delicate material under their care. So you won’t find any actual food, but you will find loads of information about food in the archives. From personal papers to government documents to old cookbooks, historical repositories tell the story of our foodways.

Recently, I went to New Orleans to research at the Amistad Research Center on the campus of Tulane University. As the country’s largest independent archive specializing in African American history, the Amistad Research Center might be the region’s best-kept secret as a repository of the history of black foodways. My research focused on the personal papers of civil rights activist and Mississippi native Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977). Hamer is best known as a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worker who fought for the voting rights of black Mississippians. She came to national attention during the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City when she tried to convince the credentials committee to seat a biracial delegation to represent Mississippi instead of the all-white group nominated by state party officials.

After SNCC’s decline, Hamer advocated on behalf of the region’s poor. Her papers reveal efforts to ameliorate food insecurity for Mississippi farm families. In 1969, Hamer founded Freedom Farm, a cooperative designed to feed hungry farmers in her native Sunflower County. Her best-known project was a “pig bank,” whereby Freedom Farm loaned hogs to needy farm families in exchange for the farmer’s promise to return two of the hog’s offspring to pig bank. Freedom Farm also grew okra, peas, butter beans, corn, cucumbers, and snap beans for the sustenance of disadvantaged families. Freedom Farm served more than 850 poor families. Proceeds from cotton and soybean cultivation helped finance Freedom Farm’s land notes. Despite these efforts—including a fundraising campaign led by the singer and actor Harry Belafonte—Hamer’s papers reveal that Freedom Farm had a difficult time financing its operations and holding onto its land. Sadly, this was a common story for African American farmers.

In addition to feeding the hungry, Hamer served as an ambassador for the extreme deprivation hidden from most Americans in the 1960s. Her papers include the script for a film entitled Hunger: American Style, which aired in February 1968 on public television. Hamer appeared in this documentary describing the struggles many Mississippi Delta families experienced obtaining healthy food. In the script, Dr. Aaron Shirley, a pediatrician and activist in the Delta, describes problems associated with a food desert long before anyone coined the term. “We see people who are not under weight because they get enough calories,” Dr. Shirley says in the film, “but they don’t get green vegetables; they don’t get fruits; and they don’t get some of the minerals and vitamins that they need.” Hamer’s personal papers remind us that food insecurity is not a recent problem and that it has historically had a disproportional effect on black families in our region.
 
Note: A finding aid for the Fannie Lou Hamer manuscript collection is available at the Amistad Research Center’s online finding aid database. This post is the first in a three-part series on locating our food history in the archives.

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.

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

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.