One Friday morning, in early December, Mike and I drove out of Richmond, Virginia, heading west and south toward Knoxville, Tennessee.

As we rode, we listened to Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, a novel set in Knoxville in the early 1950s. Its epic length requires more than a drive to Knoxville and back to hear the whole thing, even when taking a slightly longer return route, through North Carolina, to eat a barbecue lunch.

All of the writing in Suttree is vivid, overflowing its pages. Crossing over from Virginia into Tennessee, we heard a particularly visceral passage about (more…)

 

From Turner Ham House in Fulk’s Run, Virginia, slowly cured ham, sliced luminescent-ly thin, salt and sugar preserved, deeply flavorful.

 

A gift for my family, by love and the color of blood, not skin.

 

Other gifts: a half-gallon of must-shake raw apple cider from Smith’s Fruit Market in Augusta, West Virginia, comfortingly tart; fresh-made biscuits from Bonnie Blue Bakery in Winchester, Virginia. Winchester, proclaimed apple capital of the world, is located in the Northern Shenandoah Valley at 39.1670° N, -78.1670° W, making it practically the most north-western spot in Jim Crow South.

 

To Bond Street, home of 95-year-old Mary Virginia Cook Cross, and (more…)

Not an ounce of good taste is wasted in this house. Sesame seeds collected at the bottom of the paper bag that once held a loaf of sesame rye bread are saved and sprinkled on buttered and honeyed toast the next morning. The residue of mushroom liquor and butter clinging to the insides of a container that held sautéed mushrooms is freed with a splash of hot water and put into the service of a mushroom omelet.

 

I have to admit, I sometimes slip up and forget to be mindful; I forget to give that over-looked throw-away item a second life in my kitchen. When I do, I berate myself. But one type of missed taste opportunity that is never lost on me or my husband, Mike, are the remnants of dressing, sauce, or appetizing drippings in plates or bowls or pots or pans. A swipe of bread through these flavorful dregs becomes dessert (and if we’re out of bread, a spatula or index finger works).

 

At these savor-the-flavor moments, Mike often does the honors. He’ll rip off a piece of bread and run it through the serving bowl. Then, like a rooster (more…)

I was searching my book shelves for a copy of The Sun Also Rises or For Whom the Bell Tolls. Instead, I found Lives of the Saints, a relic from when I was an art history student, before I’d struck a path to editing cookbooks and writing about food. Its pagan orange edging and ecclesiastical purple binding with faux leather texture and faux gold stamping beckoned. I picked it up and discovered it is the perfect size, fitting easily in my hands.

 

I don’t believe I ever spent much time with Lives of the Saints when I was an art history student. But now, looking through it, I found a code I’d overlooked, a signpost for the turn off from art to food.

 

When you open Lives of the Saints, you come to a full title page featuring a group portrait of several saints. After that each saint is given his or her own short write-up, some with their likeness included. The book is organized chronologically: It starts on January 1 and proceeds to the end of the year, with a saint for each day.

 

 

Some of the saints are patrons or patronesses of specific professions or health conditions or categories of people, like orphans. Take St. Apollonia. She is the Patroness of Dentists. In the year 248 or 249, this Virgin and Martyr “fell prey to a howling mob venting its fury on any Christians it could find.” The mob knocked out all of her (more…)

 

A few weeks ago, I sat quietly in a candlelit room, my fingers resting lightly on the planchette that came with my Ouija board, poised to interview my grandmother for my story on boiled custard.

 

Following the instructions on the back of the box to “concentrate very hard on the matter at hand,” I repeated my questions, slowly, like a mantra:

 

“Grandma, why didn’t you make boiled custard? Is it because you actually didn’t like it? Or because you hated having to help your mother make it when you were young, and swore off making it ever again”?

 

As minds tend to do when pressed to focus, mine started to wander from the questions to random thoughts of my grandmother. Snippets of conversation, snapshots of her preparing foods, and other memories percolated up.

 

When I discovered I was no longer repeating my string of questions, I returned to them. The process repeated until I could focus more and more on the questions without departing quite as quickly from them. My mind soon felt cleansed of the day’s debris.

 

Though I never did hear from Grandma, I spent time with her all the same. And I learned something unexpected, something I would guess Hasbro didn’t intend—that the Ouija board is an excellent device for meditating and remembering ancestors. Is Hasbro missing a marketing opportunity here?

 

This posting is my second foray into the macabre. My first was a story about Bloody Butcher cornmeal that I posted around this time last year. It was illustrated with appropriately “bloody” photos.

 

It was right when I was about to hit the “publish” button on Bloody Butcher that I came across a short film called Attack of the Helping Hand, shown above, and immediately recognized it as ideal Halloween-themed material for a food blog.

 

What could be a better metaphor for the horror show of the corporate food system than a sinister “helping hand”?  And this short has star (more…)

Some new experiences are best undertaken with a guide: sky diving, rock climbing, foraging for wild mushrooms. Acquiring a taste for the Eastern Black Walnut (Juglans nigra) is another. Don’t go it alone.

 

The English at Jamestown were blessed to have the Powhatans as culinary guides in a new land, and it is they who likely introduced the colonists to the native black walnut, a nut with more protein than any other tree nut as well as high levels of healthy fats (omega-3 fatty acids and oleic acid), selenium, manganese, and vitamin A. To a starving settler, the extra effort required to hull and shell this unfamiliar nut would have been worth it, to get at the nutritional riches inside.

Today the nutritional value of black walnuts is lost on most of us because most of us consume them in sweets—from ice cream and cakes to fudge, brownies, and pies. If you grew up eating black walnuts, you might think nothing of snacking on them, but you are the rare bird; for many, the assertive flavor black walnut is too strong for nibbling out of hand, regardless of their health benefits.

 

The first lure that hooked me was black walnut ice cream. I order this flavor whenever I come across it, which is seldom, and the last time I encountered it was probably four or five years ago. Still, no matter how much time would pass between scoops, the memory of (more…)

I hate to waste food. Even bad food.

 

That’s how a loaf of bread made with more ingredients that I can count on both hands worked its way into the two photographs below, illustrating quotes that get at, with more folk wit and elan than I could wring from a slice of milk-soaked bread, why you should avoid processed, or “white,” bread.

 

The mixed media, faux egg-colored (or it the color meant to conjure butter?) loaf of bread that I sacrificed to art came into my possession this October, during a weekend get-a-way with my husband. Destination: My family’s (more…)

The Pet Turkey

(Click on the link above to hear the story.)
“The Pet Turkey”
by Marshall Dodge, Robert Bryan
Originally published in an album titled Bert and I Stem Inflation (1976)

 

 

Last Friday the 13th, on a mild, blue-skied mid-November afternoon, I took a drive out to Keenbell Farm. Fridays are the Farm Store day at the farm, and are a good time to catch C.J. Isbell. The purpose of my trip was to run a couple of embryonic story ideas past C.J. and to check up on my pardoned turkey, a Bourbon Red hen who will remain nameless. Of course she is not “my” turkey, but upon hearing her story, I was immediately taken with this feisty broad who managed to escape the dinner table fate of her colleagues. Somehow I felt invested in telling her story for the Thanksgiving holiday, and I was curious to know how she was getting on.

 

C.J., co-owner of Keenbell Farm with his father, Eddie, had relayed the story to me in late August during a farmyard walkabout. (I was there to interview him about Keenbell Farm for a story published in the Nov/Dec issue of Edible Richmond Magazine.) During the tour C.J. introduced me to some of the farm’s outliers: Mimi, a fainting goat; Charley and Ritzy; two riding horses; and an escapee Bourbon Red turkey who moved so quickly I could hardly catch sight of her. Undoubtedly lonely but glad to be alive, she was the sole survivor from (more…)