The Best of Southern Food: Selected Essays from Southern Cultures, 2008-2014

By Harry L. Watson and Marcie Cohen Ferris

Nourishment, nostalgia, Native ingredients and global influences. Southern Cultures's debut "best of" collection gets straight to the heart of the matter: food.

For those of us who've debated mayonnaise brand, hushpuppy condiment, or barbecue style—including, in some quarters, whether the latter is a noun or a verb (bless your heart)—we present here a collection equal to our passions.

Culled from our best food writing, 2008–2014, this special volume serves up tomatoes, turtles, molasses, Mother Corn and the Dixie Pig, bourbon, gravy, cakes, jams, jellies, pickles, and chocolate pie. Dig in! And stay tuned for more "best of" collections to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781469623894

Book preview

Introduction

Welcome

by Marcie Cohen Ferris

A summer supper shared by friends and family at the Braswell Plantation near Rocky Mount, North Carolina, September 1944. Photo courtesy of the North Carolina State Archives.

As Southern Cultures begins its twenty-first year of publication in 2015, we are delighted to celebrate this moment with a special volume, The Best of Southern Food: Selected Essays, 2008–2014. This collection represents the exciting evolution of Southern Studies in the past twenty years as new areas of innovative scholarship, including foodways, have been embraced by the discipline. These developments signal the expansive growth of the field already underway and emergent in the global and digital landscapes of the American South. The essays and poetry gathered here evocatively illustrate how food—including blackberries, bourbon, cakes, chocolate pie, Dixie Pig, gravy, lard, molasses, Mother Corn, mullet, pork, tomatoes, and turtles—allows us to contemplate southern history, culture, and experience in a deeply textured and nuanced analysis. In these pieces, aesthetics, consumption, flavor, gender, labor, pleasure, production, race, class, and taste are considered in all their complexity, moving beyond notions of food solely as cooking and recipes. In turn, southern history, culture, and experience uncover the real worlds and everyday forces that lie beneath these iconic southern foods, ensuring that we do not over-sentimentalize or exoticize them in contemporary quests to market regional authenticity.

For example, we might imagine a nostalgic southern sisterhood as a white urban housewife purchased a carefully wrought, home-baked caramel cake from a local farmwoman at a 1920s curb market. Historian Rebecca Sharpless tells a more complicated story in her essay here, where "long before the word locavore entered the national vocabulary, southern rural women produced foodstuffs for sale and urban housewives bought them. The relationship of urban and rural women in this era reveals the impact and tensions of an urbanizing South, as both groups hoped to profit and gain advantage" in their economic exchange—country women undercutting in-town store prices, and city women assuming they were buying better quality products for less money.

Bernie Herman’s essay describes a fall gathering of friends on the Eastern Shore of Virginia for Theodore Peed’s Turtle Party, an impressive feast of fried turtle and potluck dishes, savory and sweet. The host, Mr. Peed, describes the annual event as just my thing for my friends, but as Herman observes, it is Theodore Peed’s celebration of the black and white community in which he lives. Before the crowd eats, Peed’s wife Mary calls for a blessing and ends with the words, We thank You, God, for yet one more year that You have allowed this crowd to be together. And, God, we give You thanks for this food. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

So, with that said, it is time to eat. Enjoy this taste of the South.

Mother Corn and the Dixie Pig

Native Food in the Native South

by Rayna Green

Native food was once the only food story. Early travelers and colonists of the Americas spoke at length of the abundance and richness of the natural environment, the good that Indians made of it, and the absolute dependence of the would-be colonists upon Indian mastery of that environment. From their indigenous relatives in Mexico, Southeastern (and Southwestern) Indians had learned the knowledge and skills associated with cultivating corn, which they shared with receptive settlers. Pounding corn on the Cherokee Reservation in North Carolina, c. 1950, courtesy of the Durwood Barbour Collection of North Carolina Postcards (P077), North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Native food is in the news. Every day. All over the country, except in the South, foodies, farmers, chefs, environmentalists, and food writers are excited about Native food and foodways. That excitement usually comes from a discovery (or rediscovery) of the many virtues of old slow foods in the now hip vernacular—local, fresh, and seasonal foods that are good for you, good for the land, and good for the small food producer. Often, these rediscovered foods come from Native varieties that seed savers, naturalists, nutritionists, and Indians have propped up, from animals that regulators, commercial producers, and advocates have brought back from the brink of extinction, and from habitats redeemed from under middens of waste and neglect.¹

Some Native communities, in revitalizing their own cultural histories and economies, have begun again to raise, catch, and market crops and critters long associated with them, but just as long ago replaced. Hopis and other Pueblos farm and market native varieties of corn, beans, and other vegetables to provide a better diet and income for their people, while Ojibwas do the same with wild rice in the Great Lakes. In the Plains, where once the death of bison was synonymous with the defeat and death of Indians themselves, buffalo herds now thrive on tribal and public lands. Northwest Coastal people fish for salmon, pack and ship it to an audience eager for it, and serve it at salmon feasts, some for the communities, some for the income generated by cultural tourism.

In spite of the good press, Native food and foodways are, as ever, subject to massive assaults on their maintenance and survival. What hunters, hat makers, the cavalry, miners, and trains didn’t deplete or destroy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, industrial and domestic polluters, ranchers, big farmers, dams, cities, and roads rolled over in the twentieth century. Modern tribal efforts at resource revitalization still meet resistance because they interfere—as Indians always have—with large non-Indian economic and cultural interests. Native people and park rangers in the Plains fight ranchers over the renewed presence of brucellosis-carrying buffalo in proximity to the huge cattle herds that graze, subsidized by federal money, on public lands. Northwest Coastal people struggle against international agency regulators, Japanese fish factories, and sport fishers for the right to catch the fish emblematic of their survival as a people. Always, Native Alaskans battle with the state and federal governments and with animal rights activists to continue their traditional subsistence diet, and thus maintain cultural skills and legal rights. They all know, out there in Indian Country, that the loss of traditional diet and the cultural skills needed to maintain it has killed more Indians than Andy Jackson. And they all know that the food fights, like the struggles to restore language and ceremony, are modern fights for survival. Where they are known to be central to the economies and cultural histories of the entire region, Native food and the politics that govern Native resources are at the top of regional discussion.

Archaeologists of Jamestown and other southern sites confirm that Natives in pre-colonial North Carolina and Virginia, the Upland South, Coastal Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama ate well and often from a huge and diverse larder. The broyling of their fish over the flame of fier, by John White, c. 1590, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

Native food and foodways in the South, however, neither attract the rabid enthusiasms nor wild resistances of other parts of the country. Four hundred years ago, the settler-saving gifts of Indian food and food production technologies, along with the salvation of an English adventurer by the Indian chief’s beautiful daughter, anchored colonial mythology; three hundred years ago Indian corn and tobacco centered the new growth economy; two hundred years ago Indian food resources still constituted, in essence, the base diet of the region. Yet this history seems nearly irrelevant today—as do Indians themselves—to popular conceptions of the South.

It was not always thus. Native food was once the only food story. Early travelers and colonists of the Americas spoke at length of the abundance and richness of the natural environment, the good that Indians made of it, and the absolute dependence of the would-be colonists upon Indian mastery of that environment. Archaeologists of Jamestown and other southern sites echo and reinforce these early accounts, confirming that Natives in pre-colonial Virginia and North Carolina, the Upland South, Coastal Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama ate well and often from a huge and diverse larder.² In most instances, they cultivated appropriately and well, renewing their resources by methods of complementary planting, crop rotation, nutritional enhancement, and resource-restorative rules for the gathering of plants and hunting of animals. Meat, fish, shellfish, vegetables, fruits, and nuts made for a better, richer, more abundant, and more nutritious diet than available to most of the Anglo-Europeans that journeyed to the South and a more dependable, consistent, diverse diet than most Indians elsewhere (except those in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest).³

From their indigenous relatives in Mexico, Southeastern (and Southwestern) Indians had centuries ago learned the knowledge and skills associated with cultivating corn, which they shared with receptive settlers.⁴ Essential Native practices included combining corn and beans to create protein and amino acid-rich meals; consuming hominy, cornbreads, soups, drinks, and mushes (grits, tamales) made from limed corn (nixtamalization); using nitrogen-enriching leguminous ash in various corn dishes; interplanting corn with nitrogen-replacing or nitrogen-fixing varieties (e.g., legumes); and rotating nutritionally exhausted croplands with alternate crops.⁵ It didn’t take the Spanish very long at all, merely twenty years into their sixteenth-century invasions, to substitute many of their own imports for Native food resources. But well into the seventeenth century—in the remainder of the British-occupied Southeast—Native diet and Native knowledge formed the core of the new southern foodways even as the British process for amending and replacing that diet, Native knowledge and skills, and Indians themselves escalated. It took nearly a hundred years for the agricultural- and hunting-challenged British, in particular (at least the classes of Brits who first came to the Southeast), to begin amending the Native larder and food technologies for their own foods and technologies from home. It took two centuries more of dismantling Indian food technologies and land management skills to understand the errors of doing so, with once good agricultural lands farmed out and eroded by 1900, the population plagued by niacin deficiency, and pellagra reaching epidemic proportions.⁶

By the eighteenth century, when most colonists had succeeded in breaking the exclusive hold that the Native diet had on their survival, the new foods from Europe (Spain, France, the British Isles), Africa, and the Caribbean merged with native staples to create the complex mélange that is today’s southern cuisine. These changes affected Indian and non-Indian alike. From Indians, the new southerners had developed the taste for and habit of eating more vegetables, particularly greens (fresh and cooked), than did other Americans. These native vegetables, both gathered and cultivated, joined Spanish-imported varieties like melons, peaches, and peppers. African food tastes and habits reinforced the Indian vegetable/greens complex and brought in new and healthful crops like sesame and okra, and legumes like black-eyed peas and peanuts thrived in the Lowland and southeastern climate.⁷ From Africans as well, many acquired the taste for hot peppers and spices and for the technique of frying. Later, all would adopt dairy products—as they were able to raise the dairy cattle, wheat flour, and sugar when they could afford them—and more liquor when they could make it. Pigs, introduced in the sixteenth century, rooted their way into Indian communities in the late eighteenth century. Women, the primary farmers of the southern Indian world, first resisted the feral beasts that ravaged their fields and crops, but they eventually accepted the domesticated (and wild) food source that meant meat on the Indian table.⁸ And Indians, like other southerners, learned to use pigs not only as their main meat source but as sources of cooking grease, side meat, and flavoring. They nativized the once alien animal, just as the newcomers once normalized and accepted the American animals and plants new to them, and incorporated pig into dishes featuring Mother Corn alone. These foods remain some of those most beloved by southern Indians.

Indian Removal in the 1830s was supposed to settle the resource fights begun in the seventeenth century. Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, and Chickasaws stood in the way of land grabbers, gold seekers, and farmer/landowners with cash crops based in a slave economy. The forced land cessions accompanying Indian Removal did indeed take most of the prime farm, hunting, and fishing lands held by Indians in the South, leaving behind many small communities with little but the weakened cultural skills essential to their survival. Those removed retained something of the skills and knowledge regarding the basic foods and foodways, which they tried, only partially successfully, to restore in Oklahoma. Indian losses would be the miner’s canary, as they always were, for the environmental and economic disasters that were yet to unhinge large parts of the agrarian South.

The small group of Choctaws, once stellar farmers, who managed to stay in Mississippi were eventually reduced to the poorest of sharecroppers by the turn of the twentieth century. Their hunter-fisher-gatherer Houma relatives, in the Louisiana bayous since the late seventeenth century, would become French-speaking, forced to take protective cover in the ways and manners of their neighbors. They and the Seminoles and Miccosukees who had fled to Florida before Removal had become masters of their environments, persisting in food sourcing from small farms and watery habitats into the twenty-first century. But Houmas, unlike the Seminoles who resisted assimilation in any visible way, would remain unrecognized and relatively obscured as Indians to the world around them. Cherokees who avoided Removal in North Carolina remained in the hills, as poor and isolated as their Appalachian neighbors but able to continue a reasonably successful survival exploitation of the environment left to them. The menu from a 1949 feast given for anthropologists suggests not only how deeply Cherokee foodways had burrowed into the now all-but-Native diet of the Upland South, but how natural, how un-exotic, how southern that diet was.

The forced land cessions accompanying Indian Removal did indeed take most of the prime farm, hunting, and fishing lands held by Indians in the South, leaving behind many small communities with little but the weakened cultural skills essential to their survival. Those removed retained something of the skills and knowledge regarding the basic foods and foodways, which they tried, only partially successfully, to restore in Oklahoma. Catawba man and boy shooting small game with blowguns, 1922, photographed by Frank Speck, courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian, N12398.

Other remaining Indians in the South—in South Carolina, Virginia, and North Carolina, in particular—faced a fate different from their removed relatives. Fragmented into small isolated communities, impoverished, collectively landless for the most part, with no federal treaties and a continuing lack of federal recognition, they most often disappeared as Indians. They kept what they could of the old ways and blended through intermarriage and interaction, as they always had done, with white and black folks, with Christians, with English-speakers. They ate more and more like the people with whom they lived, just as their neighbors had once learned to eat like them. But they remained at the edges of that society, further and further segregated into smaller units, with their identity as Indians virtually erased after the Civil War, the end of slavery, and Reconstruction by the South’s primal obsession with black and white. Indian extinction had not succeeded; marginalization had.

Virginia’s Indians, for example, so essential to the founding identity of the place, and so embedded in its historical memory, found themselves without any viable social niche. In 1924, via the Racial Integrity Act, they found themselves in a state that declared most Indians non-existent or illegal entities. This declaration of their legal non-existence drove Virginia Indians to rise up and insist on repeal of the invidious law that separated them from their historic identity. One of the ways in which they did that was to reenact the historic relationship, forged in Native food, between them and the colonists. In the Colonial era, Powhatans (a collective term for all Virginia Indians of the day) had delivered tribute deer to the governor of Virginia every year in lieu of taxes on lands held by Indians. Continuing this practice into the late twentieth century reinforced the survival and continuity of Virginia’s Indians, several groups of which eventually obtained state recognition. Relatively recently, that recognition resulted in the restoration of their right to use the lands’ more abundant larder so praised by early colonists for more than three hundred and fifty of the last four hundred years. By 2005, Pamunkeys and Mattaponi could again hunt deer and fish for shad off their state reservations and collect oysters from the Bay without a state license. Still, the Mattaponi in Virginia currently are trying to stop a proposed reservoir that would divert water from the Mattaponi River, endangering their shad fisheries and the shreds of a traditional life they have remaining. Still, much-loved Virginia spring shad feasts, like those offered the colonists four hundred years ago by Virginia’s Indians, have come to be reserved for Virginia political events that exclude Indians (and women). In many ways, the complex relationship of Virginia’s citizens to Indians, as expressed through the acceptance and rejection of Native food and foodways—as well as Virginia natives’ persistence toward their food and foodways—may act as a paradigm for the southern Indian story.

The menu from a feast given for anthropologists suggests not only how deeply Cherokee foodways had burrowed into the now all-but-Native diet of the Upland South, but how natural, how un-exotic, how southern that diet was. Poster from the 1949 Cherokee feast, courtesy of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, Cherokee, North Carolina.

A few Native dishes never passed into the mainstream southern culinary repertoire and remain distinctly and exclusively Indian, very much a part of native identity, cherished and propped up in a public way, served to strangers and friends and certainly in revitalized Green Corn or stomp dance communal dinners. Bean bread and so-chan among the North Carolina Cherokees are dishes likely not found elsewhere in Appalachia. Choctaws and Chickasaws in Oklahoma eat banaha, a tamale-like corn mush with field peas and/or pea shell ash, and hominy in every form it comes in, including tamfula (often pronounced tomfuller), a hominy and hickory nut soup/cream unlikely to be on a restaurant menu even in Oklahoma. Sofkee, a soup or drink of soured cornmeal, links Seminoles and Miccosukees in Florida to Seminoles, Yuchis, and Creeks in Oklahoma and is never found outside Indian communities.⁹ Many of these precious foods listed above may indeed have been the staples of the long-ago diet. Others, like the various corn-and-pig dishes or berry dumplings (often cobblers or pies) that have characterized Indian cooking since the late eighteenth century, represent the beginnings of dietary change long ago, yet became enshrined within their communities as uniquely Cherokee, uniquely Choctaw, uniquely Indian. Today these foods and foodways belong to the communities that cook and serve them, in spite of the profound changes they represented when first introduced. Some foods maintain the ancient Indian relationships with and responsibilities to plants and animals, and most native communities worry about passing on their skills and tastes, just as they worry about the death of language. Even when they can get canned hominy, frozen corn, bottled grape juice, and four different kinds of greens at the grocery