All You Can Eat: Leni

Collard greens for the soul

Leni Sorensen re-examines the legacy of Southern food

By Shea Gibbs

Vast culinary traditions influence Southern food—European, Native American, African, Caribbean. But if you’re thinking individually about those traditions when you’re thinking about Southern food, you’re kind of doing it wrong, according to food historian Leni Sorensen. Those traditions hit American soil in the 1600s and immediately began to mingle, even as they traveled south, she says.

“It happened fast, and it began to happen much earlier than it is ordinarily supposed to,” says Sorensen. “In the last quarter of the 17th century is when it begins to accelerate.”

The result in the American South was a European cooking tradition—staples from Great Britain tinged with French influences—vastly transformed by the indigenous and enslaved people of the New World. Where chefs in Europe may have had luxurious ingredients, clever cooks stateside had to coax flavors out of what the land provided, using seasoning (think plenty of fat and salt) and technique (think low-and-slow transformations).

“Southern food is indigenous food,” says Ryan Hubbard, owner of Red Hub Food Co. “Southern food is not filets or T-bones or rib eyes...It captures more the cuts of meat you weren’t used to seeing.”

The history of the American South also led to a rapid alignment of Southern food into regions, Sorensen says. Just as quickly as the cuisine’s worldwide influences coalesced in the States, the influences redistributed with subtle differences into the Old South, Mid-South, Gulf Coast, and other sub-regions.

“That’s what makes it exciting,” Sorensen says. “You can go 200 or 300 miles, and you are in a different world.”

The regionalism sprung naturally from the different growing regions present across the South, says Sorensen, but it was also due to the new nation’s “immense peripatetic population.”

EZE AMOS

Leni Sorensen shares her knowledge of how modern Southern cooking draws from cultures around the globe.

“Different groups and families were moving and looking for new land,” she says. “You had that tremendous exodus of the slave trade out of the Old South and eastern coastline. In one decade, 350,000 Black Virginians were sold to the rest of the Southern slave states.”

Nevertheless, Sorensen says four ingredients anchor Southern food: corn, rice, greens, and pork. Take hush puppies, one of Red Hub’s most popular menu items. Hubbard points to the Native American influence in the corn and the deep-frying tradition of Scotland coming together to make an inexpensive, humble dish found throughout the South.

Today, Sorensen says Southern cooking is enjoying newfound respect in culinary circles. But where does Charlottesville fit in the Southern culinary tradition? According to Sorensen, central Virginia lacks a specific focus because of its many bounties.

“Part of what it was known for was its fecundity,” she says. “We were a breadbasket and an apple basket...we were really producers—food that was transported to a lot of other places.”

Southern (con)fusion

New Southern cuisine is like putting ranch dressing on pizza. Everyone’s doing it, but no one admits it.

“When we set out to do Whiskey Jar, we specifically were not trying to be ‘new Southern,’” local restaurateur Will Richey says. “We might make some tweaks in the new Southern vein, but I still say we are classically Southern.”

So what is new Southern? The South Carolina Encyclopedia defines it as “a culinary trend that developed during the final three decades of the twentieth century in the American South [when] a new affluence provided the climate to experiment with new foods or prepare traditional fare in new ways.” The University of South Carolina-driven wiki cites grits made with milk, cream, or broth instead of water as an example.

According to Richey, new Southern is all about the extent of experimentation. Vinegar-based coleslaw instead of the traditional mayo base? Southern. Slaw with jicama and avocado? New Southern. Indeed, Richey says the easiest way to spot a new Southern dish is to look for Californian influence. Since Southern cuisine has long relied on farm-fresh produce, Cali’s 1970s-era farm-to-table movement fit right in.

So where does one find a new Southern supper in C’ville? Harrison Keevil’s Brookville was once the standard-bearer, Richey says, but since the restaurant closed in 2016, the genre has been underrepresented. “Maybe Ian Boden at The Shack, because he is so hyper-local in his sourcing,” Richey says.

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