Potlikker

flag pond ramp festival

May twelfth was the twenty-seventh annual Flag Pond Ramp Festival, but it was my first time attending. They didn't establish the festival until I was a (very young) teenager, so it's not anything my parents would have taken me to as a child. Plus, while I'm technically a Unicoi county native (since all people in Unicoi county not born at home are born in Johnson City/Washington county, TN hospitals), I'm not eager to claim that identity. Oh, it's complicated and suitable for another type of blog, but not this one. And since it's one of those things that kind of happens in my back yard it doesn't seem exotic enough to capture my interest, so I've never been. Also, I asked one my of friends in the know whether it was any account. He said to skip it. Since I delayed in getting tickets to the Lake Eden shindig, we ended up at the Ramp Festival instead and that worked out just as well. 

Would have written about the ramp festival experience while it was fresher in my memory except that Ian had a gallbladder depositing us at the ER early Sunday morning (the thirteenth) and I sat at his hospital bedside all week comforting him and blogging was not a priority.

Nonetheless, the ramp festival was worth the $7 I paid for a plate of the best eating I'd had in a great while. I think that if Ian had made it home from work in time to come to the ramp festival with us and had eaten ramps, he wouldn't have had the gallbladder attack. Oh, the power of the ramp.

Funny, that at my age (40) I had never eaten a ramp. Since they became all the rage in the big city, I have even less desire to eat something so trendy. It's just the way I am, the anti-trendy. My grandfather and I hunted them on several occasions in the forests of Tennessee and North Carolina. He knew several patches. And undoubtedly he offered them to me, but I declined.

As did Elsa when I offered them to her. Folks who eat raw ramps are shunned. The odor is offensive, you see. My father-in-law mentioned that when he was in the reserves that the ramp-eaters were obvious from the non-ramp-eaters. But, cooked ramps are tender and subtle as -- gee-- a communion wafer. 

Seven dollars bought a large plate filled with bacon, ramps and potatoes, soup beans, cornbread, cole slaw, your choice of pickled items, dessert, and a drink.

Elsa is not an adventurous eater. We goad her into trying new things. Ironically she loves soup beans, a food I avoided as a child. We shared a plate. She ate the beans and nibbled the cornbread. My potatoes were half and half: half cooked with ramps and half plain; Elsa ate some of the plain. Both were delicious as they were seasoned with bacon fat. 

She saw the skillet/pile of bacon as we edged through the line and trilled "Bacon... I love bacon..." and the kindly man in charge of the bacon area slipped her two pieces before we received our plate and our serving of bacon.

Seating was limited, so we wandered everywhere before landing on the steps outside the cafeteria. The festival was held in the former Flag Pond elementary school building. Fortunately we weren't too much in the way. Elsa was happy. She made a craft, swang on the swings, and played on the playground. She made friends with the people who stood around us in line. Everyone loves a toddler, especially when she shouts out "My Daddy works in Carolina." And then acts all shy when they try to make further conversation with her. Chatting with folks at festivals is always fun. I absorbed information about ramps being early this year, and even earlier over in North Carolina. 

Ramp festival next year? Sure thing!

forage me this--fat of the land

Should you stumble upon Langdon Cook's blog, Fat of the Land--which centers around his foraging of flora and mostly aquatic fauna in Washington-- or encounter any of his writing in Outside, Gray's Sporting Journal, or other publications where his work appears, you're in for a rare treat. Several months ago that was my luck and then when I discovered a book based on his blog was published by Skipstone, I contacted them to ask for a review copy and they kindly obliged and sent their catalog which is filled with impressive titles, most of which focus on Pacific Northwest topics and therefor aren't particularly useful to someone living in the loamy armpit of Appalachia as I sometimes identify my locale.

But enough about me.

Cook's prologue sets up how his foraging began-- ostensibly to impress a woman would did not eat at McDonald's. And then each section of the book progresses seasonally. Within each section he includes one flora to three or four fauna, as a general rule. Beginning in winter Cook covers razor clams, squid, and stinging nettles and provides a recipe for each.  His coverage of each topic is thorough and he addresses each with context such as description, history, and in the case of the razor clam, how we can blame the Grandmas for their overharvest and depletion given the gentle clam's ubiquity at the dinner table. Nowadays the digging season is limited to less than a month with a limit of fifteen clams per day. Cook's description of the clam makes the mouth water. He describes them as six inches in length and as the "King of American comfort food."

Having spent a year by the sea, I know little of ocean creatures, and now I hold Cook responsible for much of my education on the subject of squid. In "Doin' That Squid Jig" I learned how to fish for them, how they move and communicate, the basics of their anatomy, a brief history of squid fishing, and Cook's recipe for Risotto Nero Con Calamari.

Each chapter was beautifully written as Cook interwove past with present and anecdote with fact. His facility with words tickled me and when he used chockablock on page 121 I was smitten. While he stars as main character in each foraging adventure he gives center stage to his friends and to fisherfolk and foragers alike from whom he takes advice, advises, or fails to communicate with altogether through no fault of his own.

Yet, as the tob-billed figure in the book, Cook never presents himself as the expert or as the person with all the answers. He references books and other people. As he embarks on each adventure he prepares to fail. Sometimes he does so brilliantly, or merely half-fails, captures a partial limit. But he tries again, perfects his technique, and refines his skills. He never quits. And so this is one of the strenghts of Cook's essays: there is no perfect foraging form; it's all free-style. 

Endowed with Cook's rich penstrokes, or keystrokes as the case may be, Dave and the homeless men who questioned him about taking their "dandy lions," and Cora and Lori, and Steve in his XXX wetsuit, and Trouthole, Warpo, and everyone else leap off the page into your lap and leave their ashy (in the case of the morel-hunting Coras from the burn site) residue, or seawater in the middle of you living room.

Reading Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager reminded me of my childhood in some ways. My Papaw Don took me foraging for ramps and we spent long afternoons together in the woods with a quasi-feral Lsha Apso--don't ask. Don made cherry wine, cooked venison stew from deer he hunted, gutted, and dressed himself, and showed me how to nail a catfish to a tree and strip its skin away from its flesh with pliers. After bringing it inside to the kitchen he breaded it in cornmeal, tossed it into a cast iron skillet, and fried it. He was a cook in the Navy. He cooked from scratch while his wife, my mamaw used a lot of boxed and canned goods, which I find perplexing.

Cook's chapter "The Inhuman," describing how he dove for Ling Cod, stabbed, and caught one, took me back to my summer working in Alaska as a seafood processor. Fortunately I worked most of the season on the frozen side and saw quite a few Ling Cod come my way. We worked twelve hours shifts and god so slap happy at times the puns fell from our mouths uncontrollably when Ling Cod was on the line: "Oh my Cod!" There were more, but I've since forgotten. It was long, long ago.

Ultimately Cook's book inspired me as well. Dandelions. I have dandelions in my yard because I don't use chemicals to treat my lawn, and his description of dandelion encrusted bread tickled my fancy. I encourage Elsa to blow the seeds into our yard all the time because a proper yard interests me not. More foraging for me, for us, actually. Elsa loves the outdoors. My plan was always to have her hiking, camping, canoeing. Now, it's to have her identifying plants, foraging, picking berries, mushrooms, etc.

heartland

"Midwest comfort" doesn't roll off my tongue. Does it yours? Nor is there a liquor by that name. But if you call the midwest home and you know its comfort and feel a fondness for its landscape then you can appreciate how a place and its foods grips our hearts, minds, stomachs, and ultimately, our bowels. Heartland by Judith Fertig is a thick walnut of a book whose photography and recipes cover twelve states: Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. 

Incidentally, I'll take this opportunity to be straightforward in outlining my minimal midwestern cred: My grandfather was born in Detroit and his people were from Ireland and Germany by way of Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. My husband's parents are from Ohio and I've visited parts of Canton and Cleveland and sampled those regional cuisines (they are not foreign or peculiar at all--the cuisines, that is). Likewise, I've traveled thorough the midwest and visited all the twelve states except for Michigan, Minnesota, and the Dakotas.

People love land, community, and what those tings represent and Fertig's introduction ties recipes and traditions to foodie trends such as artisan bakers, micro-breweries, and charcuterie. She also looks to midwestern literature and draws from scenes in My Antonia to illustrate the role food plays in the work of regional authors.

Fertig organizes the book traditionally into pantry, breakfast and brunch, breads, appetizers and drinks, salads and soups, main dishes, and deserts. And then her end matter includes resources, permissions, credits, metric conversation and equivalents and an index. 

This is another lovely coffee-table type book that's too nice to bring into the kitchen and cook from. It's perfect to browse and drool over, and the photography by Jonathan Chester and Ben Pieper contribute to the book's overall excellence. Some of the more eye-catching recipes are home-rendered lard, egg pasts, bacon-infused vodka, no-knead clover honey dough, clover honey challah, farm girl cosmo with rosy rhubarb syrup, and the garden gimlet with fresh herb syrup.

This reminded me a great deal of Cider Beans that I reviewed in November simply because both books embody a "new" regional cooking and not the traditional regional cooking that we associate with that region. One of the sections that I loved in this book was the section on foraging. 

If you've been living under a rock the last two or three years, foraging--or wildcrafting as I've always known it as---has made a come back. There was an NPR story late last month. Fertig's book includes a section on foraging that features the Omaha tribe and their traditional foraging of elderberries, pawpaws, wild greens, ramps, morels, and hickory nuts. 

take me to your bell cow

Though Joan E. Aller wasn't born on a mountaintop in Tennessee like Davy Crockett, she lives on a mountaintop in Tennessee. As newcomer from Fresno, California she witnessed the changes that development brought to the Tennessee mountains. She didn't like them. Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly: Recipes from Southern Appalachia represents her journey to capture the region's landscapes in photos and collect recipes representative of the region.

Cider Beans celebrates the region's food in full color. Landscape photos were shot by Aller, yet the food photos are by Ben Fink. Bed and breakfast inn owners shared their recipes, stories, and perspectives on the region with Aller, and that comprises Cider Beans' contents. Other recipes were provided by her friend John C. Rivers. Each recipe contains a few sentences about the bed and breakfast from which it originated, or sometimes a lengthy paragraph tracing a recipe's history if it's not affiliated with a bed and breakfast.

The first chapter introduces reader to the region by offering bits about its geography, history, and culture, and those morsels continue throughout as sidebars.Most natives can skip the introduction, but my sense is that the book was written to educate a different audience: strangers to the region. 

Aller's presentation of the region reflects no ugliness, no evidence of poverty or undernourishment, no evidence of strip-mined mountain tops. No dawgs. No hollers. Cider Beans presents a bucolic, romantic vision of Southern Appalachia. I like it. It's lovely to see and I wish the other stuff, like reality, was so easily omitted from reality.

Cider Beans follows standard cookbook organization: breakfast, appetizers, soups & salads, vegetables & beans, breads, meats, desserts, and beverages. After beverages is the country store section which offers recipes for pickles, relishes, marmalades, jellies, and syrups. The breakfast recipes represent offerings from bed and breakfasts, not dishes that real Southern Appalachian people might eat on a daily basis. If you think about it, who stays in bed and breakfasts? Not locals.

Okay, once I stayed at a local bed and breakfast, but it was a hardship case. About a dozen years ago I selected my wedding date without any thought  to regional events and how they might affect me or my wedding guests. There are two huge races in Bristol, Tennessee. One in March, one in August. Accommodations during those races are booked at least a year in advance.  I didn't want to stay at my apartment on our wedding night, so my mom booked a room for my husband and me at the Blair Moore House in Jonesborough (it's much nicer in person than how their website depicts them). 

But back to the review: The meals reflect their origins and their eaters, not so much the region. And yet, all these ingredients can be had, fairly easily, from most grocery stores and that makes the recipes accessible to a large number of cooks and eaters.

Don't get me wrong, Southern Appalachian staples appear throughout Cider Beans. What is a book about Southern Appalachian cookery without grits & redeye gravy, ramps with bacon, corn pone, burgoo, country ham, barbecue, and stack cake?

But who eats granola, breakfast pizza, brie with apricot, or trout cakes everyday? Tourists, the recently relocated, locals turned on to gourmet and organic food. Most definitely the upper middle class. Salmon patties made from canned salmon, rather than trout cakes, is a traditional meat dish here. 

Consider the sidebars: An early one translates common phrases such as "Which one of them is the bell cow?" : Which one, in the group of ladies, is the leader? And the rest cover the gamut of topics including the Appalachian Trail, a recipe for 'warshing' clothes, okra, hogs, etc. The sidebars impart information about the unique qualities that combine to form that which is Southern Appalachia. 

Yes, I have mixed feelings about Cider Beans. The photos are lovely, the recipes reflect health consciousness, the information about the region is correct. And though it celebrates the region, it doesn't represent our distinct flavor.

serious, dense food history

Burgeoning foodies often lack context from which to understand the origins of our global food production. Reading Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations is just the book to ground newbie foodie into twelve thousand years of foods. From Mesopotamia to today's compromised food security Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas describe and document the specifics of food production. Learning how the Romans preferred to dunk their fish in brine to preserve it fascinated me. As the fish dissolved in the brine over a period of months the bones and flesh essentially melted. When it was ready to use, it was called garum. The Romans used it like modern-day carnivores use A-1 of Heinz 57, atop everything for flavor.

From bread to dirt to water to ice and back, the book covers the spokes of the agricultural wheel. Of course, chapter eight, Money: Tea and Famine, introduced pirates to the picture, specifically, one James Lancaster of the Edward Bonaventure who was Queen Elizabeth's buccaneer. Lancaster attached a Portuguese ship carrying spices and thus the East India Company was born. Captains sailing under the EIC's flag scoured the seven seas for pepper, nutmeg, and cinnamon, all spices that we take for granted today because of their common availability on the grocer's shelf.

In the end, Fraser and Rimas expound on the "new gluttony" which takes foodies to task for their trendiness about "it" foods. One week it's pork bellies and the next it's ramps. The authors suggest that "turning food into a fashion statement risks undermining the critical danger we face" (243). Foodies seek authenticity in what they eat. Their nostalgia for another culture's culinary heritage and acquisitive natures were quelled with the locavore movement. But that won't solve the coming food crisis outlined in Empires of Food. The book's final chapter is a downer, and riddled with dire predictions, but doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know about the evils of industrial agriculture and the degradation of our environment. Predictions of plagues, droughts, and other natural calamities await us. We may not even notice the changes, "it took about two hundred years for the ancient Romans to whittle their number in half" (248).

In the meantime, perhaps we should eat cake. Red velvet cake.

sharpen your knives

Over the weekend I read The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School (2007). I bought a copy Friday after the reading Kathleen Flinn gave at Malaprop's. There were several trips to bookstores that I almost bought a copy, but then I knew about the Malaprop's event and didn't want to buy from a bigboxbookstore when I can support my local, though out-of-state, bookstore with that purchase. One of the things I hate most of all is going to a book signing without having read the book. Also, I think it's wrong to bring a book you bought elsewhere to an author's book signing at a bookstore, though I've done that once before with Poisonwood Bible (1998) and it wasn't at a bookstore, but at a convention center, of sorts.

Flinn brought cheese and crackers to share with her audience. There were twenty or thirty of us, at least. For her first book signing in Seattle she made beef bourguignon for eighty. Her second stop on her book tour was in Portland, at Powell's. We heard all about that. One of the first things she asked her Asheville audience was how many were vegetarian or vegan. A few raised their hands. I felt the movement behind me, but didn't turn to see their numbers. In the interest of not offending those in her audience who don't eat meat or care to hear of its evisceration, Flinn refrained from reading sections from her book describing boning of meats. It's a shame she felt censored in that way.

Then, too, she was told that Malaprop's customers like to ask lots of questions, and so she didn't read so much because of that. However, she read from the prologue and another section as well. Flinn has a knack for accents. She imitated her British boss's phone call foretelling the loss of her job. And I think there were two Frenchpeople she imitated as well.

Flinn's is a story that combines two of my loves: France/Paris and food. How could I resist? Flinn details her early relationship with food and cooking, as well as her dream to attend Le Cordon Bleu. When she is terminated from her London job, her boyfriend tells her to put her belongings in storage, cash in her 401K, and pursue her dream in Paris. And he'll come along, too. Sounds like the best of everything: Your lifelong dream and love to boot.

This is sort of Top Chef meets Sabrina. There was a small bit of competition between Flinn and the other students for top spot in their class. Mostly, Flinn describes the delightful, sustaining relationships she made with students in her courses and the somewhat contentious, yet ultimately satisfying exchanges she has with her chefs. Occasionally she mentions one or two persons by name who hog ingredients, or take extra grapes or meat for themselves in case they screw up. Basically, those selfish actions screwed the other students out of having enough to make their one dish.

And, Flinn includes a recipe at the end of each chapter. Her writing is clear. Her descriptions are meaty, sensual. She was easy to root for when situations grew tense in the kitchen or she thought she bumbled her exams. Sometimes her oven didn't work. And once, she dropped a duck. Then, there was the language barrier; her years of French didn't prepare her for her immersion within the language at Le Cordon Bleu. Students have translators in the first two courses, but are on their own during Superior cuisine.

But then, back to her reading: She was delightful and charismatic and charmed all who heard her. Her eyes teared up once or twice as she described her relationship with Mike, her boyfriend from the book, whom she married. She answered at least eight or ten questions from the audience and from those we learned things that weren't in the book.

Like, her knife skills are the most important thing she gained at Le Cordon Bleu. And that the school is disappointed, or distressed maybe, because there are fewer and fewer Americans enrolling at the flagship school because the Euro is so much stronger than the dollar. A course at LCB ain't cheap. It's about $10K a course. And one takes three courses to earn a diploma: Basic Cuisine, Intermediate Cuisine, and Superior Cuisine ($30K doesn't include the cost of living in Paris). All her cuisine classes seemed interesting, yet every time Flinn mentioned patisserie, my eyes perked up wanting more.

Almost every memoir published about someone living in Paris, or France, for that matter, I find and read. French culture and society fascinate me. I want to wrap myself in it, like a bit of chocolate in bread. Yet, I don't love French cuisine. I don't seek it out, that is. When traveling to urban centers I go for Thai or Latin or Japanese cuisine. Surely it's the rich cream sauces that keep me away. Years ago the Parson's Table in Jonesborough served divine French cuisine. My family went there for special occasions, like my college graduation, or to celebrate my mother and my birthdays. But, it closed. Now there is no French food here.

Hmmm, I don't like souffle. And puff pastry doesn't do it for me. Oh, but croissant. Yum. And all that bread? Other interesting things from Flinn's book was when she learned that the government regulates when bakers take vacation. People need their bread. They cannot be inconvenienced by bakeries closed while bakers take vacations at the same time.

Something I had never read before, in all my reading of Paris and France, was the Frenchpeople's social obligation to one another. Certainly we have this idea of Parisians, especially, being horrible, snobbish folks, but they take care of each other. For instance, one time her taxi dropped Flinn outside her apartment in the rain with bags and bags of groceries and a stranger helped her carry her sacks up six or seven flights of stairs.

And Flinn mentions seeing a man in a wheelchair sitting at the top of the stairs to the Metro. There was no handicapped access ramp to the tunnel leading to the trains. Two young men came along and picked the man and his wheelchair up and carried him down the stairs, and into the tunnel so he could roll on to the Metro. It's part of French obligation to help one another in these ways. It was refreshing to read, not so much because I think ill of the French, but because so many other people feel that way. Those poor Frenchfolk are simply misunderstood.

One last thing that I liked about Flinn's book was her descriptions of Belleville, a Parisian working class neighborhood in which she lived for a short time. Belleville is one of the most international neighborhoods in Paris and is filled with immigrants. Seeing this "alternative" to all the fancy-schmancy arrondissements was a treat.

Okay, I cannot stop. There was something else I enjoyed about the book: Flinn's charity. Often she gave her practice dishes to homeless people because she and Mike craved more variety in their diet. For the most part, the homeless were grateful. Although one man fingered the fish she gave him and told her how she over-salted it, maybe?

Cross-posted from my reading/book blog, readingroom.