Smoky Mountain Living April 2014

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING

SOUTHERN WINE | HIKE THE SMOKIES | GRAVY GOODNESS | RECIPES APRIL/MAY 2014

Celebrating Southern Appalachians THE

YOUR SERVER WILL BE RIGHT WITH YOU • HOMEGROWN APPEAL • LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE HOG • ABOARD THE GRAVY BOAT

A Taste of

Appalachia Exploring traditional foodways

COMMUNITY COOKS smliv.com

APRIL/MAY 2014 • VOL. 14 • NO. 2

Recipe collections that provide a sense of place

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Contents

FEATU RE STO RIES

SERVICE WITH A SMILE Asheville, N.C.’s restaurant workers don’t get the same kind of recognition as their head chefs and well-known restaurants. Yet servers are an integral part of the culinary scene, responsible for so much of patron’s dining experience, which means their job is anything but easy.

BY PAUL CLARK

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52

HOMEGROWN IN HAYWOOD

TASTES LIKE APPALACHIA

COOKING UP COMMUNITY

In Western North Carolina, one community is helping farmers continue a way of life by increasing economic opportunities.

The region’s traditional foods draw from Native American and Scots-Irish cultures, which blended hunter-gatherer ways with cultivated agriculture.

Churches, scout troops, social clubs—it seems that everyone once put together a cookbook to call their own and in doing so, preserved a part of the past.

BY PAUL CLARK

BY ANNA OAKES

BY JAKE FLANNICK

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PAGE

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Contents MOUNTAIN VOICES

DEPA RTME N TS

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

What it means to have a hankering for some hog

MOUNTAIN MUSIC

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sing it louder, tiny songstress

OUT & ABOUT

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Hit the trail from the Cradle to the Grave in Pisgah National Forest

OUTDOORS

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Urban life meets outdoor adventure

MOUNTAIN LETTERS

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Southern Foodways Alliance examines the human experience through food

ON THE COVER Piping hot cornbread in a cast-iron skillet is ready to eat.

PHOTO BY MARGARET HESTER PICTOGRAPHYBYMARGARET.COM

ARTS

CUISINE

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

North Georgia winery grows more than grapes

MOUNTAIN VIEWS

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Take a ride on the great gravy boat to the sky

Good Living

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Partnership brings hip-hop dance to East Tennessee

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Hendersonville, N.C. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Waynesville, N.C. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 East Tennessee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Abingdon, Va. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Crossword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Select Lodging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

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p e rs p e ct i ve s :

FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR

Whenever I visit a place, I make a point of seeking out foods unique to the area. In Cincinnati, chili dogs are piled high with cheddar cheese. Ladies shape and cook tortillas that are sold piping hot from walk-up windows in Old Town San Diego, Calif. Deep-dish pizza, with its thick crust and ladle-full of tomato sauce pooled over a gooey layer of cheese, prevails in Chicago.

At home in Southern Appalachia, there’s one meal that defines our culture’s rugged and pragmatic nature more than any other— pinto beans, greens, cornbread and onions. Sometimes called a poor man’s supper, this staple is anything but a culinary relegation, as it’s just as hale and hearty as any meat and potatoes.

It’s honest and unadorned.

And it confounds Yankees.

Last year, on a tour of the Sevierville, Tenn., area, I shared a table with a group of travel writers at Dollywood, country singer Dolly Parton’s familyoriented theme park. Affable and adventurous, the writers had little to no previous experience with Appalachia and were as mystified by and curious about our local Sarah E. Kucharski culture as we mountain dwellers would be about their own. David was from China but lived in Southern California. Matt was from the Midwest had taken up in L.A. Sylvia hailed from Quebec, Canada. And Ruskana, from India, married a European and lived in Atlanta, Ga. Aside from our host Amanda, who was born and raised in East Tennessee, I was the only other Southerner. And we were the only two to know just what to do with a plate of pinto beans, greens, cornbread and onions.

As I shook a few drops of white vinegar onto my greens, cut up my onion slices to eat with my beans, I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself when I heard someone ask, “How am I supposed to eat this?”

“Well, some people like to crumble their cornbread into their beans,” Amanda said.

I’m not in favor of crumbling, at least in large quantities, solely because I don’t like mushy bread. If I crumble, be it cornbread or crackers, I crumble only a little bit at a time so that the bread doesn’t lose too much of its density and texture. There are some, I’ll call them Those Who Sop, who believe in abusing bread with soup, gravy or the like to the point that it completely gives way, nearly losing its solid state. They’re the ones whose milk claims more cookie than their mouths, whose sandwiches fall apart under the weight of condiments. Those Who Sop are wrong.

I also don’t believe in crumbling one’s cornbread into a glass of milk, though my mother and grandmother would disagree. I

recall many a hunk of cornbread meeting its demise upon being broken apart, plunged into a cold glass of milk and eaten with a spoon while standing in the kitchen. My dad, a Yankee, is opposed to cornbread in general, lest it be made with sugar and eggs, as opposed to the traditional method that does without such luxuries. I like it all, so long as there’s plenty of butter. And thus we remain a family divided.

Such culinary idiosyncrasies define us and immediately bring a sense of place back to our taste buds long after we’ve grown and perhaps moved away from our roots. Sometimes it takes a stranger’s wonderment at ours to make us appreciate the foods we’ve taken for granted.

This issue of Smoky Mountain Living explores Appalachia’s foodways—the historical ways things were grown and raised, how they were prepared, harvest duties shared, and the resurgence of interest in local food that is shaping our communities and professional chef’s menus. I hope it provides you with a hunger to discover your own culinary traditions and, if nothing else, food for thought.

— Sarah E. Kucharski, managing editor

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p e rs p e ct ive s :

FROM OUR READERS VOL. 14 • NUMBER 2

The view from Whiteside Mountain, located between Highlands and Cashiers, N.C. MARGARET HESTER PHOTO

CAPTURING THE MOUNTAIN MYSTIQUE Now over 26 years old, The North Carolina Arboretum’s campus and programs have been designed and constructed by embracing our mountain heritage, crafting upscale design using native sources and materials, and remaining true to the botanical and cultural diversity and uniqueness of our regional location.

It strikes me that Smoky Mountain Living has established an exceedingly masterful grasp of these same ingredients from a journalistic perspective. Exploring the pages of each issue brings our mountain ways and people to life in an interesting, enlightening and entertaining fashion. The content is enriched with a sensitive blend of graphic and photographic prowess, and makes at facebook.com/smliv and virtual visits to unique mountain places twitter.com/smokymtnliving. and experiences a convenient and Fans have access to special comfortable pursuit. promotions and giveaways This shared focus on capturing and including subscriptions, tickets interpreting our mountain mystique has and more! made Smoky Mountain Living both a valued community partner and a respected mentor. We appreciate the association and admire the journalistic elegance with which you carry out the magazine’s unique mission.

Connect with us

Contributing Writers . . . . . . . . . . Paul Clark, Grace Deal, Jake Flannick, Joe Hooten, Andrew Kasper, Jeff Minick, Matt Payne, Mary Casey-Sturk Contributing Photographers . . . . Paul Clark, Ashley T. Evans, Anna Gates, Jo Harris, Heide Hatcher, Margaret Hester, Elizabeth Majcher, Margie Metz, Jason Sandford, Bonnie Waigland, Edgar Ward Contributing Illustrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mandy Newham-Cobb Smoky Mountain Living is published bi-monthly

by SM Living LLC. Smoky Mountain Living has made every effort to insure listings and information are accurate and assumes no liability for errors or omissions.

For advertising information, contact Hylah Smalley at 828.452.2251 or hylah@smliv.com.

For editorial inquiries, contact Sarah E. Kucharski at sarah@smliv.com.

George Briggs Executive Director The North Carolina Arboretum

Smoky Mountain Living assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or photographs. Queries should be sent to Sarah E. Kucharski at sarah@smliv.com.

Submit your letter to the editor by email at editor@smliv.com or by mail to Editor, Smoky Mountain Living, PO Box 629, Waynesville, N.C. 28786. Letters should be exclusive to Smoky Mountain Living. We do not publish open letters or third-party letters.

Letters should preferably be 150 to 175 words, should refer to the magazine in general or an article that has appeared within the past two editions. Letters must include the writer’s address and phone numbers. No attachments, please.

Smoky Mountain Living reserves the right to use material at its discretion, and we reserve the right to edit material.

We'll do our best, but due to the volume of correspondence we receive, we are unable to respond to all questions and comments.

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Publisher/Editor . . . . . . . . . . . Scott McLeod editor@smliv.com General Manager . . . . . . . . . Greg Boothroyd ads@smliv.com Advertising Sales Manager . . Hylah Smalley hylah@smliv.com Managing Editor . . . . . . . Sarah E. Kucharski sarah@smliv.com Art Director . . . . . . . . . . . Travis Bumgardner travis@smliv.com Graphics . . . . . . . Micah McClure, Emily Moss Finance & Admin. . . . . . . Amanda Singletary Sales . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Greg Boothroyd, Whitney Burton, Amanda Bradley Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scott Collier Editorial Assistants . . . . . . . . . . Colby Dunn, Andrew Kasper, Glenda Kucharski

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

©2014. All rights reserved. No portion of this magazine may be reprinted without the express, written consent of the publisher.

Smoky Mountain Living is published bi-monthly (Dec/Jan, Feb/Mar, Apr/May, Jun/Jul, Aug/Sep, Oct/Nov) by SM Living, LLC, 34 Church Street, Waynesville, NC 28786. Periodical Postage paid at Waynesville, N.C., and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address changes to Smoky Mountain Living, PO Box 629, Waynesville, NC 28786.

p e rs p e ct i ve s :

ABOUT OUR WRITERS Susan Reinhardt

is an award winning journalist, columnist, and author of five bestselling books, including her latest novel, Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle.

Besides traveling and serving as a taxi cab and debit card to her children, she loves to eat and try new restaurants and recipes. She loves everything about Western North Carolina, from the heartbeat of the city life to roaming the outlying areas, finding charm and adventure.

Grace Deal

is a retired educator who lives in Fletcher, N.C. A Tarheel born and bred, she loves her native state and has lived from one end of North Carolina to the other. Her ongoing genealogic research reveals her family’s deep roots in the history of the state and confirms her belief that she’s kin to just about everybody here.

Paul Clark is a resident of

Weaverville, N.C., and has been a journalist for more than three decades. He is currently studying photography and videography.

Joe Hooten was born in Macon,

Ga., but spent his formative years surfing the beaches near his home in Mt. Pleasant, S.C. He eventually found his way to Western North Carolina. Hooten taught public middle and high school history in Hendersonville, Cary and then Raleigh for 10 years before moving back to Asheville with his wife and three young kids in 2008. Hooten writes about his alltime favorite hobby—music—for The Smoky Mountain News and Smoky Mountain Living. A second-rate guitarist, he can be found most evenings pickin’ some tunes on the back porch while enjoying the beauty of the Appalachian Mountains.

Mandy NewhamCobb is a lefty vegetarian artist

and illustrator living right outside of Philly. Newham is the illustrator of three children’s books: Razzmatazz!, “Bullet” Joe: A Kansas City Monarch, and The Little Brown Hen. She earned her bachelor of fine arts at Florida State University and her master of fine arts in drawing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Andrew Kasper

Mary Casey-Sturk

is a freelance travel and features writer.

Her work has appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Tennessean, Smoky Mountain Living Magazine, Venice Gondolier Sun, Kentucky Explorer Magazine, Nashville Arts Magazine, examiner.com and others.

Jeff Minick

lives in Asheville, N.C., where he tutors home-educated students and writes for various publications. He is the author of two books, both self-published: Amanda Bell, a novel, and Learning As I Go, a collection of essays and reviews.

grew up in a tight-knit neighborhood in Madison, Wi. His family and neighbors instilled in him a love for the great outdoors and a deep interest in community and culture. As work and travel guided him across the United States and the world, Kasper explored those topics through writing and photography. The latest stop, Waynesville, N.C., on the doorstep of the Smokies, in the heart of Appalachia, has proven to have no shortage of inspiration.

Jake Flannick

spends these days working partly as a freelance writer. It is a livelihood that has evolved over the past few years, as he has worked to live in different parts of what he considers a wonderful country. He grew up in the hills and woods of western Pennsylvania, and is now branching out in the majestic southern Appalachians . Writing is a path he has taken to try to find meaning, to try to capture the essence of a place and its people.

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p e rs p e ct ive s :

MOUNTAIN MUSINGS

A place at the table

T

he old dining room table, round with faded wood laminate, sits in my parents’ garage. The chairs capped with green vinyl cushions crack with time and the weight of thousands of family mealtimes.

For some reason, my parents can’t seem to let the table go.

Sure, it’s been replaced by a gleaming and newer model in a creamcolored wood, but the history surrounding that old dinette set is too priceless for departure or relegation to the Goodwill.

Sunday dinners served while growing up in my small hometown of LaGrange, Ga., are the meals I remember most. Mama would wake us for church, Susan Reinhardt proclaiming she couldn’t go because all of her L’eggs pantyhose had runs in them. And besides, who would cook the pot roast or fry the chicken golden brown the way Granny did when she was alive if Mama went to preaching?

We’d come home from the sermon, my sister and I, and take our places around the table, the avocado-colored chairs matching all the kitchen appliances, the color du jour circa the 1970s.

Smells of fried onions and that delicious aroma of burning flour crisps permeated the house. I can still hear the ice cubes tinkling as Mama poured the sweet tea and set the glasses to the right of our plates.

“Let’s all hold hands now and say the blessing,” she’d say, and we’d reach out to one another and thank God for the food, asking him to nourish it to the good of our bodies.

Having a family of four, a circular table seemed a metaphor for the family’s cohesion and devotion. During weeknights, Daddy would come home from his job as an industrial engineer, and Mom always had something ready for supper within an hour or so, after he’d sipped a stiff Maker’s Mark over water and ice.

I remember the meals as a clockwork pattern of regularity.

Spaghetti on Mondays, tacos on Tuesdays, tuna casserole on Thursdays and the nights of frozen Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, which seemed a huge treat along with the Swanson Pot Pies we’d eat if my parents were going out dancing and hired a sitter.

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My mother, back then, wasn’t a great cook. But she did know the importance of sitting her family down at night, the four of us together for the evening meal. Rarely did we go out, save for Wednesdays, the weeknight Mama stowed away her pots and pans, and we ordered the hamburger steak special at the Moose Lodge and played bingo.

Fast forward about 35 years and step into my mother’s renovated kitchen in Spartanburg, S.C., where she and Dad moved after my sister and I went off to college. Despite the changes, she and my dad continue the tradition of sitting together every evening meal, never going out. Mama has grown from a new bride who didn’t even know how to make a “tossed” salad. These days she’s a good enough cook to delight Dad who sits in his leather recliner, Fox News blaring, bourbon and water by his side, waiting to be called to supper.

Mama typically starts the meal with a large bowl of inseason fruit, a salad made colorful with spinach and spring greens, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots and a selection of dressings we never dreamed of back in our Moose Club days.

What I love most when I go home to visit, besides feeling the calluses of my father’s palms as we say our blessings, is the audible pleasure Dad emits with nearly every bite.

And this brings me full circle, like that old dining room table, to my own cooking and the regrets I have as a mother. On the nights I’d cook, the D my mother made in home-economics almost proved hereditary. I could toss a roast in the Crock Pot, make spaghetti and other pasta dishes, but never learned to fry chicken. Since I worked full-time, we often ate out. The Piccadilly in the Asheville Mall or trips to Frank’s Roman Pizza were our go-to solutions on hectic weeknights.

Most nights now it’s just my teenage daughter, her iPhone, and me, sitting at the bar in my kitchen. “Dear, God, thank you for this food, and please bless all the hungry people in the world so they don’t have to go without,” she says. While we don’t hold hands, or sit at my own rickety and round dining room table, this is good enough for me.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

Rarely did we go out, save for

Wednesdays, the weeknight Mama stowed away her pots and pans, and we ordered the hamburger steak special at the Moose Lodge and played bingo.

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p e rs p e ct ive s :

MOUNTAIN VOICES

How about a hand for the hog

BY GRACE DEAL

“The language they speak is things to eat.”

— “Some Words for Fall,” James Applewhite

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I

do love me some pork. I was raised on pig—pork chops, ham, bacon, sausage and livermush. One of my earliest memories is of watching hog killing as I peered through the wavy window glass of my grandparent’s house. I heard the rifle’s sharp crack and saw steam roil from the hog’s opened carcass into the cold morning air as it hung from the tall, old tree, legs outstretched as in supplication. Boiling water scalded loose the hog’s bristles, and sharp knives flashed and scraped the flesh until it was white and clean. Once I started school I wasn’t witness to the slaughter, but I knew what the day’s work had entailed when I got off the school bus and found a washtub filled with a giant hog’s head and a large, reddish purple liver sitting on the kitchen floor. Time to make livermush!

My grandfather stopped raising hogs after my grandmother died. Daddy tried keeping a hog in a make-shift lot at the bottom of our backyard, but his hams started “souring at the bone,” and the last hog was one that kept escaping. Too many times, we came home from church in our Sunday best only to engage in fruitless and muddy pursuits. Uncle Roy was the last one in the neighborhood to keep a hog. He liked to see just how big a hog would get.

Despite my ties to hog raising, I didn’t learn about barbecued pork until I was almost a teenager. My family went to a church fund-raiser barbeque in nearby Newton, N.C. The sauce-less meat was served on a paper plate with sweet mayonnaise-based slaw and potato chips, no bun, no hushpuppies. Oh, man! Was it good! Thus began a lifetime romance with pork barbecue, cooked dry and served plain. The closest facsimile I’ve found is Little Pigs in Asheville, N.C. My love for barbecue pork does not, however, preclude my love for other forms of pork. I’m mighty partial to bacon. My mother-in-law really knew how to cook pork. Nearly 50 years ago the sizzling of beaten Evelina Price Bebber, third eggs poured into an inch deep owner of the #5 Griswold cast pool of bacon grease in her #5 iron skillet. FAMILY PHOTO Griswold cast iron frying pan would bring me running to the table. I still use the pan, which belonged to my mother-in-law’s grandparents, and its surface remains shiny black and slick as Teflon. A piece of “streaky lean” was the secret to my mother-in-law’s green beans that had been carefully picked early in the day, washed, strung, and broken. After a piece of streaky lean was “fried out” in the pressure cooker, she would add the beans and a little water and cook them for 30 minutes, as the little weight atop the pressure cooker cheerily rocked. The beans, shriveled, shrunken and shiny with grease, could no longer be called “green.” At mealtime, they were reheated in the Griswold skillet until they achieved a sublime state of tenderness. I have tried to recreate these beans, to no avail, although I can taste them still. Her pork chops,

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

We spent most summers in the backyard shade peeling washtubs full of peaches and tomatoes and breaking beans. Daddy’s mother didn’t quit canning each season until she had processed more than 100 quarts of beans. daddy is mighty partial to “killed” lettuce: sliced new onions and the first tender leaves of lettuce wilted with hot bacon grease. Although called a “cake,” the cornbread, baked in the ubiquitous cast iron skillet, was not the namby-pamby kind made with flour and eggs, but a straightforward concoction of cornmeal, buttermilk, and baking soda. Mama’s mother, Bina, who lived to be 92, ate the same meal every evening: half a small cake of cornmeal crumbled into a glass of milk and eaten with a spoon along with a raw, white onion she The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center in Mountain City, Ga., is a ate like an apple. great place to learn about the region’s historical foodways.

There are pork parts with SARAH E. KUCHARSKI PHOTO which I am not familiar (hog dredged in flour with salt and pepper and jowls, chitlins) or for which I have not fried in the same skillet, were culinary works developed a taste (pickled pigs feet, pork of art. When sufficiently browned, each chop rinds), but I remember that my daddy’s daddy individually was wrapped in aluminum foil loved pigs feet, and I think my sister some and baked in the oven on low heat for 30 years ago confessed to liking fried pork rinds. minutes. They were melt-in-your-mouth and My only format for eating that most suck-on-the-bone tender and flavorful. mysteriously named and bland of pork Fat back is, as its name implies, salted fat products, Canadian bacon, is in a from the back of a hog. It is sold in hunks, McDonald’s Egg McMuffin. I enjoy a and when cut into strips 1/4-inch thick and bologna and cheese sandwich with lettuce and fried out until crispy, becomes the basis for the season’s first tomatoes. Several family white gravy served over cold biscuits (or members love livermush, but certain weaktoast). Aunt Dora, my mama’s sister, says she stomached in-laws won’t allow it in the house, often carried a fat back biscuit in a lard pail to which leads to subterfuge and plain old school for her lunch. Mama used fatback to sneaking around in order to eat it. At least flavor her beans—green, pinto, black-eyed, these pork products speak to their true nature. crowder—but her go-to fat was shortening.

A recent edition of “This American Life” on After trying for years to duplicate them, my National Public Radio noted that pork sister finally conceded that shortening was the processors don’t let anything go to waste, even key to Mama’s light and crispy-around-thethe blood and parts that can be marketed as edges potato pancakes and fried apple pies. something else, including unspeakable bits, In addition to the beans shiny with pork chewy and circular, that become “calamari.” fat, a typical meal might consist of “soupy” We didn’t eat much beef when I was taters, sliced maters, and a cake of cornbread. growing up. Cows were for producing milk Other options from the garden (depending on and butter. A Sunday roast was usually the only what was “coming on”) might include time we ate beef. It was placed in the oven cabbage (either as slaw or “stewed”), fried while we went to church just up the road and okra, fried squash, and pickled beets. My served in well-done glory. My mother-in-law WWW.SMLIV.COM

didn’t drive and had to be chauffeured in her almost sacred weekly pilgrimage in search of “a little piece of meat.” I don’t remember anybody cooking a pork roast when I was growing up, but now even Aunt Dora puts one in the crock pot with a packet of barbecue spices.

Everybody had a garden. Daddy did the garden, and Mama did the canning. We spent most summers in the backyard shade peeling washtubs full of peaches and tomatoes and breaking beans. Daddy’s mother didn’t quit canning each season until she had processed more than 100 quarts of beans. Pickled beets were the worst; it took days for the purple to wear off one’s hands. Chow chow, a relish of cabbage and green pepper, was very labor intensive. Daddy loved to pick blackberries.

He didn’t mind the chiggers and buzzing June bugs. Mama loved to make blackberry jelly.

Her mother loved to make apple butter. They welcomed the time spent patiently stirring a large pot of an ever-thickening concoction.

Preparing food for their families was an expression of love. A couple of decades ago, when my son was a wet-behind-the ears, fledgling cook, he dared to declare to a kitchen full of women that every single one of his female relatives licked the stirring spoon of whatever they were cooking and then put it back in the pot! The accusation was promptly and vigorously denied.

Things have changed. One of my granddaughters is a vegetarian, and my son really doesn’t like porkchops. He had an organic blueberry and garlic farm a few years ago, but now he only has a few fruit trees that he has to pick clean to keep the bears away.

Daddy grows a few tomato plants from Walmart on a trellis in the backyard, and my garden is limited to okra, tomatoes, and beans grown along a fence in a subdivision in Fletcher, N.C. My niece, a sometimes vegetarian, and her husband are the only ones who keep a real garden, meticulously planned to attract beneficial insects and eliminate chemical pesticide or fertilizer use. But no matter what’s on the table or where it came from, we still begin our meals together with a familiar request: “Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest, and let these gifts to us be blessed.”

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Margie Metz • Biscuits near Gatlinburg, Tenn.

Elizabeth Majcher • Strawberry Hill near Chesnee, S.C.

Smoky Mountain Living prominently features images from across the southern Appalachians in each edition. Our June/July issue will feature images from the Appalachian Mountain Photography Competition.

One of the region’s most prestigious photography competitions, AMPC attracts photographs by amateur and professional photographers from across the country. Selected images are on display at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts in Boone, N.C. through June 7.

Elizabeth Majcher • Springhouse Farm, Vilas, N.C.

Heide Hatcher • Cows Elizabeth Majcher • Sky Top Orchard, Flat Rock, N.C.

I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter’s evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream... I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old people’s tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting.

— Mark Twain

Elizabeth Majcher • White’s Mill near Abington, Va.

SML’s August/September edition will be dedicated to the mountain landscape.

Submit your images to photos@smliv.com by June 23. Submissions should be hi-resolution digital images and include information about where and when the photos were taken and by whom. Reader submitted photos are unpaid but those selected are rewarded with publication in our nationally distributed magazine. View previous issue’s images in the Perspectives section at smliv.com.

Jo Harris • Mennonite Garden, Delano, Tenn.

Edgar Ward • Honey Bee Carl Sandburg House, Flat Rock, N.C.

I don’t know what it is about food your mother makes for you, especially when it's something that anyone can make— pancakes, meat loaf, tuna salad—but it carries a certain taste of memory.

—Mitch Albom

Diana Gates • Apples

Bonnie Waigand • Blackberries in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park

d e p a r t m e n t :

MOUNTAIN MUSIC

Small songstress channels country music’s queens

BY JOE HOOTEN

W

hen you’re only nine years old, the world seems like a pretty big place with lots of rules and adults running the show. There are a few things, though, you’ve mastered by that age, like the art of coloring in between the lines, knowing your multiplication tables, maybe you’ve even had a taste of geometry. When it comes to music, most kids in elementary school are only exposed to what their parents play on the ride to school, what big brother or sister play on their headphones, or the occasional movie soundtrack, but the up and coming child sensation from Madisonville, Tenn., Emi Sunshine, has been fortunate enough to know traditional country and gospel music as it was played and sung in her home for generations. And while other kids are still working on their coloring books and puzzles, this entertainer is looking forward to a new album due out this year. How many 9-yearolds can say that?

In 2014, Emi will release Black Sunday ‘35, a compilation of 16 original songs written by an old soul trapped in a young body with a sound that seems to tell the world that she’s already gotten life figured out.

Music has been in Emi’s bloodline for a least three generations. Her great-grandmother Wanda was a regular on Knoxville’s Midday Merry-Go-Round, a popular mountain music show on radio station WNOX, and earned a reputation as a consummate singer and entertainer who could turn on the Southern charm at a moment’s notice, a trait Emi has clearly learned to her advantage. Emi’s grandmother, Patsy Hamilton, was also highly regarded in her community as a lovely gospel singer who passed along her musical talents to her son, Randall Hamilton, Emi’s father. Randall plays bass and tours with Emi to her vari-

18

Randall Hamilton, Emi’s father, plays bass and tours with Emi. DONALD SPURGEON PHOTO

ous gigs across the state of Tennessee.

“My mom helps me with writing and getting ready for shows. My dad helps me learn my songs so I can play them out,” Emi said.

Black Sunday ‘35 is an impressive collection of original country-tinged ballads and traditional folk inspired tunes that showcases the blossoming talents of this awe-inspiring preteen. Although her voice still sounds appropriately youthful, you can clearly hear the promise of what’s to come with age and experience. On songs like “Madelyn’s Hill” and the classic “Mary Don’t You Weep,” she hovers somewhere between an early Dolly Parton and a young Loretta Lynn with enough conviction to be taken seriously. Playing ukulele on most songs, Emi, along with her band, The Rain, get the toes tapping and the dance floor grooving with honky-tonk flavored tunes like “Lay Your Burdens Down.” Meanwhile “Blue For You” is quite the jam when the band hits its stride as Emi sings, “I’ll go

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

“I just listen to what

the melody says. I try to stay true to the song and only put what it needs. No more and no less.”

— Emi Sunshine

April 24-27, 2014 Over 130 Artists on 13 Stages

Old Crow Medicine Show

Carolina Chocolate Drops

Alan Jackson

Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder

Sam Bush Band

Peter Rowan Band

Tim O’Brien & Darrell Scott

Jim Lauderdale

Merle Haggard

Steep Canyon Rangers

Keller Williams and The Travelin’ McCourys

The Kruger Brothers

Dr. Ralph Stanley and The Clinch Mountain Boys

Junior Sisk & Ramblers Choice

Della Mae

Town Mountain

Sutton, Holt & Coleman

Claire Lynch Band

Dailey & Vincent with Jimmy Fortune

www.MerleFest.org 1-800-343-7857

MerleFest & WCC are 100% Tobacco Free The views presented are not necessarily those of Wilkes Community College or endorsed by the college.

d e p a r t m e n t :

MOUNTAIN MUSIC

“It’s amazing. To make an audience happy or feel something just by using my words and melody is the best.”

— Emi Sunshine

to seek my fortune. I’ll go to find my fame. One day you’ll be sorry. You’re screaming call my name.” Move over Taylor Swift, Emi Sunshine might be the next big thing.

Having performed at several festivals, house parties, churches, and even winning the Youth Talent Grand Prize at the Tennessee Valley State Fair, Emi Sunshine and The Rain have their sights set on the future as they begin preparations for a regional tour in 2014 to promote the release of her new album. And if this album is any indication of what’s to come, keep an eye on this young lady, one day she might be the star she hopes to be.

Q&A with Emi Sunshine SML: Tell me your earliest memory involving music.

Emi Sunshine: Listening to my grandmother and great grandmother singing to me. My mom says that when I was a baby, before I could talk, if a song came on the radio that I did not like, I would cry until they changed it.

How important is music to you and your family?

Music is very important to me. I love it. It is just a part of me. Most of my time, I am either playing, singing, writing or listening to music. It is just as important to my family. My mom helps me with writing and

20

getting ready for shows. My dad helps me learn my songs so I can play them out.

When did you finally learn that if you put some chords together you’ve got a song?

At 6, playing ukulele I figured out I could play along to Patti Griffin’s “Deaths Got a Warrant,” and I was hooked.

Who are the other musicians that back you up on the album? How did you come to meet them?

Randall Hamilton, my dad, played bass.

Bobby Hill played drums; he is a longtime, close family friend. John Letner, my brother, played mandolin. Neil Turpin played guitar; he is a close family friend and our go-to guy for any session we do.

We also pulled in other session players for certain songs, but mostly we keep it simple. For fiddle, we pulled in Ben Probus from Nashville Gig Finder and his playing made the album for me.

You sing some very heart-warming songs on your album. Was it a challenge to write them or did they just come naturally?

They just come naturally. I just listen to what the melody says. I try to stay true to the song and only put what it needs. No more and no less.

How would you describe to kids your age what it’s like to play and sing songs?

I’m starting to learn how to play guitar, I recommend to kids under 10 to start off playing ukulele because your hands are so little that a guitar would be too big and a

Do you remember the first song you sang all the way through?

“Traveling Solider” by Dixie Chicks for my family and friends at five years old. I had to sing that all the time.

Total strangers would stop me and ask me to sing it.

Let’s talk about your new album, what inspired you when you started writing songs for this album?

Different things inspired me for each song. “Black Sunday” was inspired by a school lesson on the Dust Bowl.

“Little Weeping Willow Tree” was inspired by a little boy that liked me.

“Creole Boys” was inspired by a New Orleans restaurant owner in Gatlinburg that really treated me very kind so I wanted to write a song for them.

“Jesus Loves Mama” was inspired by my mom, that I love, and I wanted to write a song for her. Other musicians like Mike Farris, Buddy Miller and Dolly Parton, along with local artist Matt Woods, really move me and make me want to write and play out. If I listen to them, I get really excited and want to go find a spot to write or play.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

uke is easier to play. As far as what it’s like, it’s amazing. To make an audience happy or feel something just by using my words and melody is the best.

Do you ever get nervous when you’re about to perform for an audience?

I get excited, but I usually don’t get nervous. I love performing.

April 24-27, 2014

Alison Brown Quartet

Balsam Range

Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen

Todd Snider

Jim Avett

The Hillbenders

Featuring: Richard Watson • Alan Jackson • Old Crow Medicine Show • Keller Williams and The Travelin’ McCourys • Merle Haggard • Carolina Chocolate Drops • Dailey & Vincent with Jimmy Fortune • Dr. Ralph Stanley and The Clinch Mountain Boys • Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder • Tim O’Brien & Darrell Scott • Steep Canyon Rangers • Todd Snider • Holly Williams • Alison Brown Quartet • Peter Rowan • Sam Bush Band • Scythian • The Duhks • The Kruger Brothers • The Deadly Gentlemen • The Waybacks • Nora Jane Struthers & The Party Line • Claire Lynch Band • Della Mae • Donna the Buffalo • Jerry Douglas • Jim Avett • Junior Sisk & Ramblers Choice • Larry Keel and Natural Bridge • Mark Johnson and Emory Lester • High Valley • I Draw Slow • Missy Raines and The New Hip • Pete and Joan Wernick • Shannon Whitworth • Sleepy Man Banjo Boys • Lonesome River Band • Balsam Range • Darin and Brooke Aldridge • Volume Five • WBT Briarhoppers • And many more!

See the complete lineup at www.MerleFest.org.

Nora Jane Struthers & The Party Line

Mandolin Orange

Holly Williams

Larry Keel and Natural Bridge

The Duhks

Mark Johnson and Emory Lester

Missy Raines and The New Hip

Donna the Buffalo

www.MerleFest.org

The Steel Wheels

Darin and Brooke Aldridge

The Deadly Gentlemen

1-800-343-7857

MerleFest & WCC are 100% Tobacco Free The views presented are not necessarily those of Wilkes Community College or endorsed by the college.

WWW.SMLIV.COM

21

d e p a r t m e n t :

OUT & ABOUT

Hike the park’s greatest hits See stunning vistas, tumbling waterfalls, and discover the hidden gems of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park through the Friends of the Smokies’ annual Classic Hikes of the Smokies program.

“The hikes have brought together a diverse group of people: new hikers and experienced hikers, people who are new to the area and people who have spent their whole lives in the Smokies,” said celebrated outdoor author, blogger, and hiking expert, Danny Bernstein.

Upcoming hikes include Ramsey Cascades, Kephart Prong, portions of the Appalachian Trail and Mountainsto-Sea Trail and a special overnight engagement in July.

Hikes are offered on the second Tuesday of each month. Each hike is $10 for current Friends of the Smokies members and $35 for non-members, who will receive a complimentary membership. Members who bring a friend hike for free.

To register, call 828.452.0720 or email outreach.nc@friendsofthesmokies.org.

Information about support for trail improvements in GSMNP may be found at smokiestrailsforever.org.

FRIENDS OF THE SMOKIES PHOTO

Trail runners have a unique opportunity to tackle 30k and 5k races in Pisgah National Forest this spring.

Although the Cradle of Forestry Historic Site has been hosting a variety of outdoor events for more than 40 years, this marks only the second year that the permitted trail races will take place.

“Last year we set out to design a unique event that would appeal to serious trail runners as well as beginners and families,” said Devin Gentry, Director of Programming and Partnerships for the

22

DONATED PHOTO

PISGAH NATIONAL FOREST TRAIL RACES

Cradle of Forestry in America Interpretive Association.

Proceeds from the races will benefit the association, which promotes educational,

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

recreational, and interpretive opportunities about forest and water resources, natural history, and the Cradle of Forestry in America.

In addition to the races, an entire weekend of entertainment is planned.

“Participants will have the option to camp and will be treated to some amazing food and live music while getting to experience Pisgah National Forest and the town of Brevard at a beautiful time of year,” Gentry said.

Races will be held on Saturday, May 17. Registration is limited. For more information or to register, visit cradletograverace.com.

SAMPLE A GLASS OF LOCAL FLAVOR

NOVEMBER 6-9

2014

Southwest Virginia has seen big growth in wineries in the last few years, now boasting more than a dozen major producers of wine, mead and cider. Heartwood: Southwest Virginia’s Artisan Gateway, a regional artisan center and cultural gateway in Abingdon is a one-stop shop for just about all of the region’s wines. “There’s something for people who like the really sweet fruit wines and people who are seasoned wine enthusiasts,� said Assistant General Manager Jenny Safay, who oversees Heartwood’s two gift shops and four juried craft galleries. “You can see what kind of wine each winery specializes in, taste them here at

SATURDAY, MAY 17th 2014!

10 am to 7 pm

HIGHLANDS 8TH ANNUAL

Culinary Weekend Eat, Drink & Be Merry!

Virtual Waterfall Tour Crafts for Kids Educational Programs Recreational Vendors & Demos All Programs & Events are Free!

Fine dining , Lodging & Shopping await you!

Plan to visit Brevard & Transylvania County t of it!

Make a Weekend ou Traveling from Brevard, Take Us. 64 West to Sapphire North Carolina.

Take a left onto 281 South. 1 mile on your left is the entrance to the park. Take a left into the park & you arrive at the Visitor Center.

866.526.5841 highlandsculinaryweekend.com

For more information Call 828-966-9099

Foxfire

Museum DONATED PHOTO

& Heritage Center

Heartwood, and decide which wineries you want to visit.�

Heartwood, which has a fullservice restaurant as well as a coffee and wine bar, always offers tastings of four featured wines for $1 per taste; customized tastings and pairings can be scheduled for groups.

Heartwood also hosts the Southwest Virginia Wine Festival, an annual event to be held May 17 this year.

For more information on Heartwood, call 276.492.2400 or visit heartwoodvirginia.org; for more information on the Southwest Virginia Wine Festival, visit SWVAwinefestival.com.

Experience Southern Appalachia as recorded and documented by the students of Rabun County, GA—and shared with the world through The Foxfire Magazine and The Foxfire Book volumes. Visit the legacy they created in honor of their families and neighbors over 45+ years.

Home of the Foxfire books– our newest:

45th Anniv.

1SR ÂŻ7EX EQÂŻ TQ

Museum gift shop offers regional folk pottery, home-made soaps, knitted & woven textile crafts, Foxfire books and related titles on history, plant lore, skills & trades, more! ;HRL <: [V 4V\U[HPU *P[` .( ;\YU VU[V )SHJR 9VJR 4[U 7HYR^H` 6UL TPSL \W MVSSV^ [OL IYV^U ZPNUZ [[[ JS\½VI SVK Â&#x2C6; - WWW.SMLIV.COM

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d e p a r t m e n t :

OUTDOORS

Virginia college welcomes students to the outdoors This summer, Emory & Henry College, in southwestern Virginia, is opening one of its popular outdoor experience programs to include high school juniors and seniors. For 12 days in June, students will hike the Channels State Park, backpack and boulder in the Grayson Highlands State Park, navigate rivers on stand-up paddle boats, bike the Creeper Trail, raft the Noli Gorge, and hike to the summit of Mount Mitchell.

Emory & Henry College is nestled in an outdoor adventure paradise with forests, mountains, creeks, cliffs, and deep caves all within minutes of campus.

The Appalachian and Iron Mountains trails, The Virginia Creeper Trail, The Mount Rogers National Recreation Area, The Jefferson and George Washington national forests, and the New, Holston, and Clinch rivers are all nearby.

For more information, call 276.944.6840 or visit ehc.edu/student-life/outdoor-program.

DONATED PHOTO

NEW TRAILS ADDED ALONG BLUE RIDGE PARKWAY Hikers along the Blue Ridge Parkway have three new trails to explore this spring, thanks to a partnership among volunteers, the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission and environmental groups. The three trails—the Rose Creek, Little Table Rock Mountain, and the Saddle Mountain trails—range in length from 1 to 3 miles and wind through state game lands in Western North Carolina.

Each trail offers unique views, some that date back to the pre-Revolutionary War era N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission when Native Americans and employees Chris Henline (kneeling) early settlers walked through and Stephen Thomas work on the Little Table Rock Trail. DONATED PHOTO the same forested mountains, said Kip Hollifield, a Wildlife Resources Commission land management biologist.

The Rose Creek Trail follows a uniquely historic route that Patriot militia took crossing the mountains in 1781 on their way to defeat British-led forces at Kings Mountain. The trail follows Little Rose Creek through oak and cove forests. The Little Table Rock Trail also winds through oak and cove forests, but the summit offers multiple views of well-known natural landmarks. Both trails are accessed near mile marker 326, at the Heffner Gap overlook of the parkway.

24

The Saddle Mountain Trail is accessed at mile marker 221 and passes through a dense understory of mountain laurel.

All three trails are located on state game lands adjacent to the parkway, thus hikers are strongly encouraged to wear blaze orange during hunting seasons: April through May and September through February.

TENNESSEE COMMUNITY GETS GROWING The Tennessee Recreation and Parks Association, a non-profit organization, is hosting a series of community garden workshops to promote small-scale agriculture and show interested gardeners the ins and outs of communal gardening.

With the help of a Project Diabetes grant and in conjunction with the Tennessee Department of Health, the park association will host five workshops each year for three years at different sites around the state. This year, the workshops have already been hosting events in places including Selmer and Oak Ridge, Tenn. The workshops are part of an initiative called Community Gardens and Farmers’ Markets: Healthy Foods-Healthy You. Grant money also will help representatives from qualified organizations to attend one of the gardening workshops and jumpstart a community garden, whether that garden is based at a school, local park or other gathering place.

Since receiving the diabetes funds in August 2013, the Tennessee Recreation and Parks Association has launched a project to map the state’s farmer’s markets in an easy to use web format, like the state’s park finder maps.

For more information, call 615.790.0041 or visit trpa.net/CommunityGarden.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

Vibrant. Active. FulďŹ lling.

1617 Hendersonville Rd. Asheville, NC (828) 274-1531 ext. 1 www www.deerfieldwnc.org .deerfieldwnc.org

d e p a r t m e n t :

OUTDOORS

The Keyhole (right) is a favorite spot along Knoxville’s urban hiking trails.

Whether exploring on foot or by bike, residents have no excuse not to head to the woods and step away from the concrete.

DONATED PHOTOS

W

ith daydreams of adventure and longing for a world much wilder than the office break room, concrete streets and manicured trees of the city landscape, Knoxville’s outdoor recreation lovers need not travel far to find where the city gives way to the country.

The city’s Urban Wilderness provides 1,000 acres of inner city green space, linked by more than 40 miles of hiking and biking trails and waterways. Beginning at the confluence of the French Broad and the Holston rivers, which forms the Tennessee River, there are opportunities to canoe, kayak and paddleboard against the backdrop of open meadows, dense forests and rocky cliffs—all located two miles from the heart of the city.

“It’s really the perfect blend of urban and wilderness,” said Carol Evans, executive director of the Legacy Parks Foundation, which has spearheaded the creation of Knoxville’s urban wilderness. “You can be in the woods all day, then you have your nice dinner downtown in a 10-minute drive.”

A 12-mile loop trail ties together the parks that comprise the wilderness. Some pass closely by neighborhoods, while other sections feel as though they are in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains, Evans said. The main trail features rolling hills and open fields dotted with sunflowers as well as mature hardwoods and rugged rock outcroppings.

But it wasn’t always this way. Not too long ago, the future wilderness was just a hodgepodge of disjointed private and public lands,

26

Urban life meets outdoor adventure

BY ANDREW KASPER

city parks, a state wildlife management area and a local non-profit organization’s nature center.

In 2009, Evans and the Legacy Parks Foundation were attempting to purchase a 70-acre tract of private land, one of the last holdouts of unprotected parcels across the Tennessee River from downtown. Losing it to development would have threatened the wooded view from the opposite bank.

However, Evans soon realized that purchasing the property was a lot more important than she originally thought. While flying back to Knoxville after an out-of-state conference, she was examining a map of the tract and the area surrounding it. Soaring thousands of feet in the air, Evans began connecting the dots of green on the landscape below.

“I noted just how green everything was out there, I began counting the parks and counting the green space,” she said. “I began to recognize that this truly was an urban wilderness.”

A large-scale project eventually linked 10 SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

city parks, four civil war sites, the Ijams Nature Center, Forks of the River State Wildlife Management Area, and several private properties through a web of sidewalks, parks, greenways and trails. Evans’ organization, after announcing the launch of the urban wilderness initiative, raised $1.5 million necessary to purchase the 70-acre tract, as well as additional funds to buy up outstanding pieces of the wilderness puzzle.

The project attracted a local mountain biking group’s interest and a group of willing landowners granted easements across their properties to make trails possible. One property owner was an avid mountain biker and already had trails on his property, and another elderly couple in their 90s had hiked in the Smokies every Wednesday until well into their 80s, Evans said. Needless to say they were enthusiastic about the prospect of a wilderness corridor passing through their backyards.

Now, the wilderness initiative is continuing its expansion. Last August a property owner donated 100 acres of land, and the initiative recently was awarded a state grant to develop another six miles of hiking trails. Evans hopes to soon connect the eastern network of trails to a series of green spaces to the west that contain an old Civil War battlefield and three forts.

That’s the beauty of the Knoxville’s Urban Wilderness, she said, there are no boundaries.

“Within one park you have a boundary past which you can’t expand, but with this, there is the ability to continue to make connections,” Evans said.

81-10

Breakfast & Lunch Daily!

Fresh-Baked Cakes & Pastry Delicious Old-World Breads Mail-order Service Available

www.HOFERS.com (706) 878-8200

Plan your trip today and discover your perfect adventure!

WWW.SMLIV.COM

27

d e p a r t m e n t :

MOUNTAIN LETTERS

Foodways come together in engaging academic work

BY JEFF MINICK

A

sk one’s family and friends what the word “foodways” means—I have tried this experiment several times—and one likely will receive either a puzzled look or the response that it references the methods through which the foods we eat come from farmers and ranchers to our dinner table.

However, foodways is a relatively new term social scientists use to describe the cultural and economic practices relating to the production, distribution, and consumption of food. These scholars study what we eat, and how and why we eat it, and then connect that information to such diverse topics as social customs, race, gender and class.

In The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South, editors John T. Edge, Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, Elizabeth Engelhardt, a professor at the University of Texas-Austin, and Ted Ownby, Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, have collected sixteen essays in which the scholars “use food and foodways as lenses to examine human experience,” in this case, human experience gained from living in the American South.

This study of the relationship between humanity and food is not, of course, entirely new. Books and papers examining the impact of food on society—its social customs, its medicine, its technology, even its religion and politics—have increased in number, particularly in the last half-century. Take for example Reay Tannahill’s Food in History, first published in 1973 and later revised in 1988.

An amateur food historian, Tannahill was one of many authors who called the public’s attention to food’s role in shaping mores and culture. That her erudite, witty book has remained in print reveals the public’s interest in what are now called foodways.

Its emphasis on regionalism distinguishes The Larder.

Though the essays are definitely more academic than, say, Tannahill’s sweeping narrative, most readers will nonetheless find some topic with which they can identify. In “Bodies of the Dead,” for example, Wiley C. Prewitt Jr. looks at hunting in the American South, its place in the culture of food and its present condition.

Prewitt gives a quick but thorough history of hunting in the South, pointing out the differences among game and hunting methods that African-Americans and poor whites preferred opposed to the elites’ methods. His comments on smaller game, particularly rabbits and possums, will remind older readers of their childhood, when wooden rabbit traps were a common sight in fields and men prided themselves on dogs that could tree a possum. He goes on to point out what many observers already know, that fewer hunters today have resulted in an explosion among certain animal populations, particularly deer. (Prewitt offers the observation that hunting has become popular for “those interested in the provenance of

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The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South, edited by John T. Edge, Elizabeth Engelhardt and Ted Ownby. The University of Georgia Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8203-4555-0

the meat they eat and those who seek to own the deaths of the animals they consume.”)

One essay that should interest many readers is Katie Rawson’s “America’s Place for Inclusion,” in which the author takes an academic stroll through Waffle House, the diner that has in the last 60 years blossomed from a single eatery in Atlanta to a national franchise. Rawson gives readers the gift of all fine writers of nonfiction: she invites us see a familiar object with new eyes. She describes Waffle House aspects that patrons may take for granted. It has remained a diner rather than a fast-food restaurant; it has remained an “open kitchen” restaurant,” which allows employees closer proximity to the customers; it offers, despite numerous failures, the idea of a restaurant attempting to practice inclusiveness in terms of its clientele.

A lengthy article by Justin A. Nystrom presents “Italian New Orleans” with an in-depth look at some of the immigrant families, their restaurants, and their influence on the French-Cajun culture of New Orleans. Tom Hanchett’s “A Salad Bowl City” examines Charlotte, particularly Central Avenue, and again looks at the influence of different immigrant groups on the eating habits of the Queen City. In “Eating Technology at Krispy Kreme,” Carolyn De La Pena asserts: “Krispy Kreme doughnuts have radiated a particular set of cultural complexities about the place of machines in the South.”

The Larder will not appeal to all readers. Some of the essays are freighted with academic language. Moreover, in some cases, some of the prejudices of these scholars relating to gender, race, and class mar what would otherwise be fascinating history. In Rawson’s Waffle House essay, an employee gives her logoed hat to a man looking to buy one. The man then goes home and washes “crusty old hair gel” out of the hat before wearing it. Rawson analyzes this incident as if it were somehow indicative of class differences, labor issues and snobbery.

I thought the guy just wanted a clean hat.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

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d e p a r t m e n t :

MOUNTAIN ARTS

Museum presents collaborative art Artist Susan Weil, who was a student at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, N.C. and photographer José Betancourt began collaborating in 1996, eventually creating a dynamic series of blueprint photographs, or cyanotypes, on exhibit at the Asheville Art Museum through May 25.

Cyanotype is a simple photographic process involving a light-sensitive solution that is coated on a paper or cloth support onto which the image is then printed by exposure to ultraviolet radiation. As collaborators, Weil and Betancourt have pushed the boundaries of the traditional cyanotype, constructing largescale collages and inserting 3-dimensional objects, and printing on both paper and fabric.

Additionally, Weil has produced a series of limited-edition artist’s books, Livres d’Artistes, published by Vincent FitzGerald & Co. In her Livres, Weil’s art accompanies stories and poems by Rumi, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, among others.

For more information, call 828.253.3227 or visit ashevilleart.org.

Tender Buttons, 1999 by Gertrude Stein. Etchings by Susan Weil.

Courtesy of Susan Weil and Vincent FitzGerald & Co. DONATED PHOTO

HIP-HOP MEETS CONTEMPORARY DANCE The Clayton Center for the Arts, located on the Maryville College campus and constructed through a unique partnership between the College and the cities of Maryville and Alcoa, is East Tennessee’s newest venue for arts and entertainment.

The 1,200-seat Ronald and Lynda Nutt Theatre features dance, theatre, concerts, lectures and other events. The 250-seat Harold and Jean Lambert Recital Hall hosts a wide variety of musicians and performers. The 200-seat Haslam Family Flexible Theatre is capable of supporting theatrical performances from amateur and professional companies.

Three galleries display collections and works of art from Appalachia and beyond.

The Center for the Arts is celebrating a newly formed partnership with The Carpetbag Theatre of Knoxville, Tenn.

Together the two arts organizations are

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Companhia Urbana de Dançe.

DONATED PHOTO

public performances will be held at 8 p.m.

April 12 and 4 p.m. April 13 at the Clayton Center for the Arts. Tickets are $15 and $25 and may be purchased by calling 865.981.8590 or visiting claytonartscenter.com.

SIT A SPELL, HEAR THE STORYTELLER’S TALES hosting the Companhia Urbana de Dançe, an ensemble of street performers from Brazil working to foster the human experience through dance. Dancers integrate hip-hop and b-boy techniques into contemporary dance. Many of the dancers come from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and choreography highlights their talents and showcases their eclectic skills.

The Company will be in Knoxville and Maryville for a week, holding workshops and classes for local school groups. Two

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

Tennessee’s historic Marble Springs will feature professional storytellers who craft traditional Appalachian, humorous, historic, and tall tales this April.

The storytelling event, held from 2 to 4 p.m. on April 26, will support the Smoky Mountain Storytellers Association and the historical site. Donations of $7 for adults and $5 for students, seniors, or groups are requested. Children under age 5 are admitted free.

For more information, call 865.573.5508 or visit marblesprings.net.

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d e p a r t m e n t :

MOUNTAIN CUISINE

EXPLORE THE CULINARY LANDSCAPE The Melange of the Mountains Culinary Weekend will be held April 10-13 in Waynesville, N.C. The weekend kicks off at the Melange of the Mountains Gala Thursday evening, April 10 at Laurel Ridge County Club.

Chefs will prepare tastings of their favorite recipes and compete for recognition and awards.

Throughout the weekend there will be specialty dinners, culinary demos, and tastings with themes such as Farm to Table, Champagne and Caviar, Hops to Tap, and Dinner on the Mountain.

For more information, call 828.456.3021 or go to visitncsmokies.com.

IMPROVING LIVES

BY TEACHING FARMING CULTURE

North Georgia vineyard grows itself Yonah Mountain Vineyards in Cleveland, Ga., has opened an expanded tasting room on a 200-acre vineyard that features the state’s only known wine caves.

“We believe our new tasting room and facility creates a true destination for our guests,” said Bob Miller, owner of Yonah Mountain Vineyards. “We want our guests to feel like part of our family and share in our passion for wine.”

Yonah Mountain Vineyards is a family-owned farm winery in White County.

Rolling hills and sandy soil are ideal settings for the nearly 15 acres of Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, Malbec, and Sauvignon Blanc grapes.

A second expansion, opening in mid-summer, will feature a 10,000 square foot event pavilion.

For more information, call 706.878.5522 or visit yonahmountainvineyards.com.

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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

Appalachian Sustainable Development (ASD) focuses on creating and expanding economically viable, environmentally sound and socially responsible opportunities to help improve lives and health of local communities in southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee.

Through its Appalachian Harvest program, ASD provides farmers with training, technical support and retail markets, which allows many farmers to support their families through farming.

The Rooted in Appalachia program provides small local farmers with connections to restaurants and businesses seeking locally produced foods.

A program called Healthy Families ~ Family Farms pays local farmers to pick ‘seconds’ produce, creating additional income streams and providing food banks with fresh, healthy fruits and vegetables.

The program donates approximately 70,000 pounds of locally grown produce to Feeding America each year.

Food bank recipients are learning how to garden through a program called Grow Your Own, which is run in partnership with Grow Appalachia. Families with access to green space receive support as well as seeds, plants and garden tools. For people that do not have green space or have physical limitations, the program encourages growing food in waist high garden boxes. Partners from local garden clubs work with recipients to plant, nurture and harvest fresh, healthy food.

To learn more and get involved, call 276.623.1121 or visit asdevelop.org.

d e p a r t m e n t :

MOUNTAIN CUISINE

Put a little history on to cook The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery is perhaps the best resource for anyone seeking knowledge about the traditional kitchen. More than just a cookbook, the work collects generations of wisdom about Appalachian foodways, from harvest to preservation, utensils to open fire cooking.

Folklorists and food editors praised the cookbook, originally published in 1984, which the University of North Carolina Press then republished in 1992.

Editor Linda Garland Page, one of the original Foxfire students, is former director of the Foxfire Press, and editor Eliot Wigginton, recognized as one of America’s foremost educators, founded the Foxfire program in Rabun Gap, Ga. The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center is integral to the program’s mission to promote Southern Appalachia’s sense of place and appreciation for local people, community, and culture as essential educational tools.

Sweet Potato Souffle Chowchow 1 c milk 1 tbsp butter or margarine ½ tsp sale 2 tbsp sugar 2 c cooked sweet potatoes, mashed 2 eggs, separated 1 tsp nutmeg ¼ c raisins ¼ c nuts, chopped Scald milk. Add butter, sugar, and salt.

Stir until butter is melted. Add to sweet potatoes. Stir until smooth. Beat yolks and whites of eggs separately. Stir yolks into potato mixture, and then add nutmeg, raisins, and nuts. Fold in stiffly beaten whites and pour into buttered baking dish.

If desired and obtainable, arrange 5 marshmallows over the top. Bake in a moderate (350 degree) oven for 20 to 25 minutes or until set. Use as main course or dessert. Yield: 6 servings.

1 peck green tomatoes 2 large heads of cabbage 2 quarts small white onions 1 peck string beans 2 quarts sweet green peppers 2 quarts sweet red peppers ¼ c white mustard seed 2 oz white or black cloves 2 oz celery seeds 2 oz allspice 1.5 oz yellow mustard seed 1 oz turmeric 1 lb brown sugar vinegar Chop the tomatoes. Let them stand overnight in their own juice. Drain well.

Chop the cabbage, onions, beans, and peppers, mix together, and add the tomatoes, spices, and sugar. Put in a porcelain kettle, cover with vinegar, and cook 3 hours. When cool, seal in jars.

Process 10 minutes in boiling water bath.

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Okra Cornbread I could make a whole meal out of buttered cornbread. The addition of vegetables renders this buttermilk cornbread absolutely divine. Except perhaps for fried chicken, cornbread is as close to religion in the South as any food gets. At the top of the list of cornbread sins is adding sugar. You’ll notice a complete lack of sugar in this cornbread recipe. Sugar is more often found in what is referred to scathingly as “Yankee cornbread.” Makes 6-8 servings.

2 tbsp unsalted butter or corn oil 2 c medium-grind cornmeal (not self-rising) 1 tsp fine sea salt 1 tsp baking soda ¼ lb okra, stem ends trimmed, very thinly sliced 1 c sweet corn kernels (from about 2 ears corn) ½ poblano pepper, seeded and chopped 1 onion, finely chopped 2 c buttermilk 1 large egg, lightly beaten Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Place the butter in a 9-inch cast-iron skillet or baking dish and heat in the oven from 1015 minutes.

Meanwhile, in a bowl, combine the cornmeal, salt, and baking soda.

Add the okra, corn, poblano pepper, and onion and toss to coat.

In a large measuring cup, combine the buttermilk and egg.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir to combine.

Remove the heated skillet from the oven and pour the melted butter into the batter. Stir to combine, then pour the batter into the hot skillet. Bake until golden brown, about 35 minutes. Remove to a rack to cool slightly. Slice into wedges and serve warm.

From Okra, by Virginia Willis, a University of North Carolina Press Savor the South cookbook.

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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

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Preserving Agricultural Heritage

BY JAKE FLANICK

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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

Jessica DeMarco, chef and owner of Copper Pot & Wooden Spoon, picking beans at Ten Acre Garden, in Canton, N.C. DONATED PHOTO

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I

n a rural farming community outside the small Western North Carolina town of Waynesville, N.C., Skipper Russell’s thick hands have long toiled the fields, working the soil and picking the cucumbers, bell peppers and beans.

That is, of course, during a good year.

Heavy rains swept across the region last summer leaving much of his 35-acre farm submerged, unfit for yielding much more than the bare minimum. And the effects of back-to-back hurricanes in 2004 linger, as he continues tapping his savings to pay back loans for restoring the farm.

“We’ve just been struggling,” said Russell, who now works part time at a local grocery store where he also sells some of his produce. The job is among other means that are helping tide him and his wife over, perhaps until next year.

It is a common refrain, particularly among smaller farmers, whose precarious livelihoods are inextricably tied to Mother Nature’s whim and consumer demand’s fickle nature.

As the farming industry has commercialized over the years, farmers have taken a hit, increasingly having to justify further investments amid lower profit margins and soaring prices for fertilizer and equipment. That particularly is true in Western North Carolina, where mountainous terrain hardly offers the vast fertile grounds needed for commercial farms like those seen in the Midwest.

In Haywood County, located in far Western North Carolina where both Interstate 40 and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park cross the Tennessee state line, the agricultural community is experiencing a period of regrowth, as community advocates have worked to preserve, and redefine, what many see as essential not only to the local economy, but to the community’s social fabric.

There are Christmas trees and broccoli rabe growers, trout fishers, cattle herders and cheese makers. Roadside stands and farmers’ markets abound. And there are the local businesses, including restaurants that base their menus on seasonal and local ingredients.

The local food trend has led to, among other things, more creativity in many kitchens.

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“The sky’s the limit,” Heidi Dunkelberg, who runs the Coffee Cup Cafe, in Clyde, N.C., said of sourcing from local farmers.

She has nurtured that mindset over the past year or so, displaying weekly specials on the café’s chalkboard menu as she has broadened her cooking ambitions.

Now, she haunts farmers’ markets, gathering whatever she sees as a potential staple for her next dish. “I’m like a blank chalkboard,” she said of her visits to the markets. “When the early spring comes, I just get excited.”

She also has established ties to farmers and businesses, arranging visits for ingredients to be picked up and made into things like a Reuben-style sandwich with locally sourced trout and a beef brisket roasted in a porter from a local brewer.

Her use of such ingredients is apparent in her dishes, she said.

“It’s food,” Dunkelberg said of them. “It’s real food, from the earth.”

Beyond that, it has helped her cope with a work environment that involves much repetition.

“It keeps me sane,” she said of thinking about ways to make different dishes with local ingredients. “It’s a challenge.”

Against the backdrop of a local food movement, “agri-preneurs” like Dunkelberg are seeking to leverage their agricultural surroundings as a way to spur spending in the local food market.

Buy Haywood, an agritourism group, works to establish ties between consumers and farmers. A small group of advocates formed the group 2007, as part of an effort to grow the local consumer base and preserve the county’s agricultural heritage.

“There really wasn’t a huge consumer drive,” said Tina Masciarelli, project coordinator at Buy Haywood.

As an extension of economic development, funding for the organization helps spread word about the county’s agricultural bounty, “from the honeybees to the Christmas trees,” she said.

Beyond arranging meetings among local farmers and restaurateurs and offering coupons at farmers’ markets, the group distrib-

“We enable a chicken to be

a chicken, an earthworm to be an earthworm, and a beet to be a beet.”

—Becca Nestler, Balsam Gardens

utes thousands of brochures featuring more than 700 farms, whose fields and pastures cover a total of more than 56,000 acres, Masciarelli said. Of those, about three-fourths include cattle, she noted.

Among them is Balsam Gardens, a homestead that exemplifies the growing emphasis, particularly among younger generations, on sustainable farming.

The younger couple that runs the farm, Steven Beltram and Becca Nestler, grows organic vegetables and raises livestock without using hormones or antibiotics.

“We enable a chicken to be a chicken, an

earthworm to be an earthworm, and a beet to be a beet,” Nestler shares on the farm’s Website. The couple also offers a community-supported agriculture program, or a C.S.A., in which consumers can buy shares of the harvests from their farm.

There are more than a dozen farm-to-table restaurants, ones that source local products during growing seasons—products like Jessica DeMarco’s homemade jams, products that knit the community together.

The 32-year-old has spent the past three years whipping up sweet and savory jams and jellies with her brother at their Waynesville storefront, sourcing much of their fruit from a 10-acre orchard across the county in Canton.

The jams embody the essence of each season.

“It gives you a real sense from where your food is coming from,” said DeMarco, who grew up in Western North Carolina, went to culinary school in California, and worked across the country as a pastry chef. Among her latest jams is a sweet-savory mix of apples and beer, both sourced locally.

Beyond economic reasons, DeMarco sees spending locally as an integral part of any sustainable, close-knit community.

“It brings people back together,” she said.

Chef Ricardo Hernandez, who spent more than 15 years running what was considered one of the first farm-to-table restaurants in the county, shares that view.

“It’s a big circle,” he said.

An accomplished Argentine-born chef who has appeared on international culinary shows, Hernandez is one of the more prolific culinary figures in the region and beyond. His contemporary flair has grown increasingly apparent in the local restaurant scene.

Sustainable Growth The local food movement in Western North Carolina has been gaining momentum, as advocates have worked to raise awareness about farmers and farm-to-table businesses in communities across the mountains.

They are seeking, among other things, to continue connecting consumers to farmers as a way to strengthen the local food market.

“Everybody eats,” said Molly Nicholie, who directs the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project’s (ASAP) local food campaign. “It’s something that ties us all together.”

ASAP, based in Asheville, N.C. has sought to preserve the region’s farming heritage, advancing in recent years a broad effort to strengthen ties between the agricultural community and the food scene.

ASAP distributes an annual brochure across the region that includes an ever-increasing number of farmers, restaurants and other businesses that use their bounty. The Local Food Guide, the most comprehensive in the region, encourages consumers to spend their money on, say, a hot dogs from a Black Mountain, N.C. butchery or seasonal dishes at a Latin American cafe in Sylva, N.C. ASAP also offers a certification program for products grown and raised here as part of the Appalachian Grown brand strategy.

The group has conducted surveys over the years that suggest a significant portion of Western North Carolina’s population is spending its money on local food.

“There’s a lot of power in our food dollars,” Nicholie said of the sway consumers can have over the food industry.

For more information, visit asapconnections.org.

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Empanadas, Latin American savory pastries made by chef Ricardo Hernandez. DONATED PHOTOS

“If I am using local ingredients, I am helping other farms,” Hernandez said.

His ambitions also have extended to gardening. At his home in the tiny town of Clyde—a town by which most people simply pass on their way to Western North Carolina’s flagship destination, Asheville, Hernandez has planted rows of peonies and fig trees, earning him the nickname “The Fig Doctor.” He gives tours

While he no longer works full time in the kitchen—he sold his well-known restaurant in downtown Waynesville, Lomo Grill, to another chef—he has spent recent years giving cooking demonstrations in homes across the region as part of his new venture, Chef Ricardo’s Kitchen. His specialty is empanadas, savory Latin American pastries, which he makes with local ingredients.

across the 35 acres once tilled for North Carolina’s cash crop—tobacco.

In South Florida, Hernandez ran a grocery store carrying imported wines and South American goods. He found his way to the mountains through a cooking for lodging trade with local innkeepers, and he and his wife decided to stay.

“The mountains give you a certain energy,” he said. “Here, you’re connected with nature,

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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

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with God.” It is an outlook he is quick to share, encouraging whomever he encounters during his cooking demonstrations and garden tours to use the land for its food.

“People need to get used to the four seasons,” Hernandez said. “You need to enjoy and eat whatever is coming during those periods of time.

“And when it’s over, wait for the next year,” he said.

Farmers like Russell, the Bethel grower, may consider this leisurely approach to growing to be a luxury.

Prior to farming, Russell spent years working at a paper mill in Canton. He has had to learn to remain financially nimble, sometimes making deliveries as little as a bushel of beans, and at other times, supplying produce to schools across the county, feeding at least some of the local 7,500 students on a daily basis. In addition to working at a grocery store, he attracts visitors with a corn maze during the fall.

Money that comes in ultimately ends up in the ground.

“It’s a shame you have to use one crop to pay for another,” Russell said.

He has poured much of his time and savings into his farm over the years. As a result, the prospect of retiring seems a logistical challenge.

“It’s a whole lot easier to get into farming, but it’s a whole lot tougher getting out of it,” he said, referring to the debt many farmers face, particularly longtime ones.

At the same time, such a livelihood perhaps is inescapable for a man who grew up on a local cattle farm.

“Once it gets in your blood, you can’t get it out,” he said.

Russell, 56, is considered among the most prominent farmers in the county.

Only a handful of farms the size of his remain, well down from some 150 when he first started growing vegetables in the 1970s. But uncertainty remains over whether he might find someone to take over his farm when he no longer can work its fields.

He does have at least one prospect: his four-year-old grandson, who told his teacher recently that “he wants to grow food and people” when he grows up, Russell said.

In the meantime, he remains committed to his fields, holding out hope as part of his perennial optimism.

“You just have to keep hoping for a better year,” he said.

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APPALACHIAN

FOODS: Defining generations

BY MARY CASEY-STURK

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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

“I grew up in a very rural Western North Carolina mountain county on a small farm. Ninety-five percent of everything we ate was from the farm. We had huge gardens and raised our own cows, pigs and chickens,” said Laura Ferner, of Covington, Ky. Family farms meant sharing labor. Women and children worked together to pick, snap, boil, and can fresh produce.

Neighbors helped each other in tough times. Meals were simple and homemade be there venison, squirrel, rabbit or hog, pies or preserves. Seeking traditional recipes, I asked friends and family members across the region to share those that were dear to them. From my own grandmother’s kitchen in Pike County, Ky. came bologna schnitzel and coconut-black walnut pound cake, baked using walnuts from their property, cornbread and beans preserved by having been strung up to dry.

Everyone who shared a recipe had a story to go with it like Ferner’s memories of lettuce and onions.

“The dish was very seasonal and, of course, my grandmother’s was the best,” she said. “From about late March through late May we had it several times per week. It was made with our new green leaf lettuce and tiny spring green onions.

The dressing was a smoking hot pork fat that sizzled and wilted the lettuce on contact. It was normally served with pinto beans and cornbread.

Granny made it in a small wash pan.”

Despite having a recipe, dishes all too often fail to come out just as remembered—and are changed.

“I still make a variation of that recipe often today,” Ferner said. “However, the guilt of my rising cholesterol has pushed me into finding a healthier version that doesn’t sacrifice on taste.”

The Appalachian Region, as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission, includes all of West Virginia and parts of 12 other states including: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. The region extends more than 1,000 miles and is home to more than 25 million people. The expansive territory and pockets of cultural influence within gave rise to a variety of foodways and traditions.

The Museum of Appalachia in Clinton, Tenn. features many historical objects, an array of buildings to tour, a working farm

and a knowledgeable staff, such that one can spend an entire day learning about past and present Appalachian life. Even their restaurant utilizes traditional recipes and grows much of the food on site.

“In our area, we primarily ate what we grew in our gardens, and our meat came from our farm,” said Elaine Irwin Meyer, president of the Museum of Appalachia. “Most folks had hogs, so pork was abundant. We would can our sausage, hang our hams in the smokehouse to cure and use the fat to season our vegetables. It has been said that the only part of the hog that was not used was the squeal!”

Corn, oft thought to be the most important vegetable, was abundant in Appalachian life be it corn on the cob, fried corn, creamed corn, grits, or corn meal.

“Even the shucks were used for mattress filling, and for chair bottoms,” Meyer said.

There wasn’t anything that would qualify as fast food— unless it was something that could be plucked right from the ground or tree and eaten.

“When I think of Appalachian food, I think of long simmering pots of food lovingly prepared by women who enjoyed creating a

DONATED PHOTO

Corn bread, home grown vegetables that were then canned, biscuits and gravy, stews, rabbit, chicken and dumplings and apple desserts—these are the foods commonly thought to be of Appalachian origin.

wholesome meal for those they loved,” Meyer said. “There was nothing quick about this kind of food preparation, and maybe that aroma created an anticipation that made the meal even more appealing. Mealtime was a time of sharing and listening and just being together time for busy families.”

Mark Sohn, Ph.D., a recently retired Professor of Educational Psychology at Pikeville (Kentucky) College, is a foods author, recipe developer, newspaper columnist, cooking teacher, food stylist and photographer. Sohn also was the food and cooking editor for The Encyclopedia of Appalachia.

“One must consider topography and the ingredients available in the area,” Sohn said. “Pawpaws, squirrel, pike, morel mushrooms (called dry land fish by many), black walnuts, corn, beans and wild greens were common and used in many ways. For instance, corn can be served as gritted corn,

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Magpie’s Bakery in Knoxville, Tenn., is perhaps best known for its gourmet cupcakes but also puts its oven to good use for delectable works like these beautiful Apple Stack cakes. DONATED PHOTO

Get a taste of home Dried Apple Stack Cake For the Apple Filling 8 c home-dried (very dry) apples 5 1/2 c water 1 c sugar 1/2 tsp cinnamon 1/2 tsp nutmeg 1/4 tsp cloves For the Cake 8 1/4 c all-purpose flour, divided 2 tsp baking powder 2 tsp ground ginger 1/2 tsp nutmeg 1/2 tsp allspice 1/2 tsp salt 1/2 c milk 2 eggs 1 c sugar 1 c 100-percent pure, sweet sorghum 1 c unsalted butter, melted Prepare the apple filling ahead so that it will be cool when you bake the layers. In a large pot, combine the apples, water and sugar, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 30 minutes. (I cook them for 10 minutes in a pressure cooker.)

Stir in the cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves.

Use a mixer, food processor or potato masher to break up the apples so that they are smooth like applesauce. Measure out 8 cups. Cool.

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Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Cut eleven 12-inch pieces of waxed paper or parchment. (I prefer parchment because the parchment does not smoke during baking, and the cake does not stick.)

In a large mixing bowl, whisk together 8 cups of the flour, the baking powder, ginger, nutmeg, allspice and salt. Make a large well or nest in the center of the flour and pour in milk, eggs, sugar and sorghum and beat until well mixed. Add the butter and continue to beat until fully mixed and smooth. Mixing with your hands, slowly incorporate the flour mixture as you would for bread. When the dough is dry enough to handle, stop adding flour— some may remain in the bowl.

Roll the dough into a log and cut it into equal-size parts—1 cup each. Roll the pieces into a ball; if they are sticky, roll them in the remaining 1/4 cup flour.

On a sheet of parchment or waxed paper, press each ball into a flat disk.

Using a rolling pin, roll it out as you would a pie crust. Using extra flour as needed to keep the dough from sticking to the rolling pin, roll the dough into a flat disk a little larger than a 9-inch round cake pan.

Then press the 9-inch pan into the dough so that the rim cuts the dough into a circle. Save the scraps for an eleventh layer. When you have rolled out and trimmed the layer, slide the paper and layer onto a cookie sheet. Bake for 8 minutes or until the layer is very brown on the edges and browned across the top.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

Repeat for each layer.

Remove the layers from the oven and place them on cooling racks or towels.

When the layers are cool and you have discarded the baking papers, you are ready to stack the cake.

Assemble the cake: Place the first layer on a cake plate and spread about 3/4 cup of apple filling over the layer. Repeat this with each of the layers. Do not spread apple filling on the top layer.

Let the cake stand 6 to 12 hours at room temperature. This allows the moisture from the apple filling to soak into the layers. Refrigerate for 12 to 36 hours, or freeze the cake for several months.

From Hearty Country Cooking by Mark F. Sohn. Published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Recipe reprinted with permission of the author.

Laura’s Lettuce and Onions For the cornbread 1 ¾ c buttermilk ¼ c vegetable oil 2 c self-rising cornbread mix Mix ingredients and bake in an 8” pan (cast iron preferred) for 20-25 minutes or until golden.

For the salad: 12 c shredded green leaf lettuce 6 small green onions 3 tbsp grape seed oil 3 slices Hormel dry salt cured pork 1 tsp salt sliced cherry tomatoes for garnish Cornbread croutons (sliced and cubed from previous step) Shred 12 cups of green leaf lettuce in a large, shallow baking dish. Mince six green onions and toss into shredded lettuce. Add one teaspoon salt or add to taste. In a heavy, iron skillet or frying pan heat three tablespoons of grape seed oil and three slices Hormel dry salt cured pork. Fry until pork is crispy and the oil begins to smoke. Carefully pour the hot oil back and forth across the lettuce and onions. Then toss using tongs. Remove the slices of crispy, fried pork. They can be crumbled and added back to lettuce and onions if desired. Dish into salad bowls, adding cornbread croutons and sliced cherry tomatoes. Enjoy immediately as is or accompanied with pinto beans. Serves four.

As time passed, Cherokee cooking grits, cornbread, hominy or habits combined with European moonshine. Apples were used in traditions as the settlers moved into many ways as well.” the frontier. Peter Koch, Education In an excerpt from an article Sohn Associate at the Mountain Heritage wrote for Mountain Promise, The Center said that the, “Scotch-Irish Newsletter of the Brushy Fork had to transition from a diet based on Institute, Summer 2001, he discusses dairy, potatoes, barley and rye to one how families worked together: based on corn, wheat and pork.”

“During the frontier period and Today, approximately 60 million beyond, people in the region helped Americans are of Celtic descent. One one another with various tasks such as of the primary regions that Celts in corn shelling, bean stringing, sorghum the New World settled in was the processing and barn raising. This Appalachian Mountains. In the first practice extended to cooking. For United States Census (in 1790), it example, fine, complex foods served at The kitchen of the Log Cabin Cooking School is outfitted with an oldshowed that 75 percent of those social occasions were sometimes a timey stove for traditional meals. DONATED PHOTO settled in the Southern Appalachian cooperative effort. One example, the Mountain culture and foods started to lose their Mountains were of Celtic descent. dried apple stack cake, has remained popular. identity that native cultures once had shaped.

The Scotch and the Irish agricultural To make a stack cake, mountain people would Some 12,000 years ago or more, nomadic traditions included the infield-outfield method donate cake layers to create a stack of six to people hunted, fished and gathered in the of farming—heavy farming close to the home, twelve spice-flavored layers.” region, Sohn wrote. As the Native Americans lighter farming and livestock further from the There were no such things as cookbooks began to cultivate foods, they developed home. They rotated crops for better production early on and recipes were handed down orally. methods for growing beans up corn stalks—a and learned the slash and burn method to Common food combinations varied by what practice still common in many Appalachian create fields from the Cherokee Indians. part of the world one was in and as people gardens and, when grown with squash, called The Mountain Heritage Center, located on emigrated out of the region they tended to the Three Sisters. the Western Carolina University campus in adapt to their new local food traditions.

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47

At the Appalachian Mountain Museum in Tennessee, a mule powers a sorghum mill.

DONATED PHOTO

Cullowhee, N.C., showcases the cultural and natural heritage of the Southern Appalachians including the Scotch-Irish with exhibitions and programs.

At the Log Cabin Cooking School in Asheville, N.C., West Virginia native Barbara Swell facilitates classes in her 1930s log cabin. The stove she uses is a wood cooker from 1928 and the cast iron pots are like those used in many homes in the region before electricity’s reach.

What Swell teaches goes beyond reading recipes and enjoying the fruits of one’s labor—she teaches Appalachian traditions.

Using heirloom seeds, she cultivates ingredients. It can take up to a year of planning and growing for a class. There are stories that go with the seeds, stories of families and sharing and of handing seeds down to the next generation.

Swell has spent time with the community’s elders, learning about their lives and families.

The Appalachian community was a fairly isolated place until World War II. Everything one needed had to be nearby: the

more:

Listen to stories from the Heritage Foods Appalachian Storybank at appalachianfoodstorybank.com.

48

“There was nothing quick about this kind of food preparation, and maybe that aroma created an anticipation that made the meal even more appealing.”

— Elaine Irwin Meyer, president of the Museum of Appalachia

garden, general store, school, church, post office, and grist mill were generally within two miles of home. Corn was milled in small batches because it turned bad quickly. Seeds from the garden were saved and handed down for the next year’s crops. The region’s topographic diversity is reflected in seeds’ adaptations to microclimates, helping develop unique varieties.

“A food that reflects the place,” Swell said.

“It’s not just about what’s on your plate, but who you are eating it with. It’s a sense of place.”

Today’s grocery store vegetables are not the same as those enjoyed by our ancestors, but with increased interest in home gardens, farmer’s markets and farm to fork dining, SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

heirloom varieties are becoming more readily available.

At the Heritage Foods Appalachian Storybank, women in their twenties and thirties are collecting stories from previous generations and recording them as oral histories. Discussions focus on gardening, saving seeds, preparing and preserving.

Reconnecting with agricultural and cultural history has resulted in a growing interest in serving regional foods in local restaurants. Harvest Table Restaurant in Meadowview, Va. has its own farm and sources from more than 50 Appalachian region farmers, gardeners and ranchers.

Magpie’s Bakery in Knoxville, Tenn is best known for its stunning wedding cakes and delightfully decadent cupcakes, however, their seasonal menu includes some of the desserts for which the region is known including dried apple stack cake and a threenut (native walnuts, pecans and hazelnuts) cranberry pie.

But to many, connecting with Appalachia is about more than the food on the table. It’s about connecting family, friends, history and traditions. It’s the joy of generations sharing a meal and recipes—for cornbread, soup, chowchow, beans and jams. The food is tangible, but it’s the intangible wonder of the traditions that truly keep today’s Appalachian kitchens at the heart of the home.

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Your server has everything under control (barely) B Y PA U L C L A R K

Top: Luke Broussard hustles condiments to a table during brunch at Early Girl Eatery. Above left: Ali Caulfield glazes maple-bacon doughnuts at DOUGH. Above right: Charles Whalen, left, Travis Dray, right, at Early Girl Eatery have to

move quickly to keep ahead of brunch orders at Early Girl Eatery.

Facing page: Philip Hamilton, a line cook at Bouchon, has to do several things at once to stay ahead. PAUL CLARK PHOTOS

PHILIP HAMILTON has been a line cook at the popular downtown Asheville restaurant Bouchon for nearly three years. He’d never worked in a kitchen before he got the job. Now, his hands and forearms bear the burns and scars of moving quickly to prepare as many as 200 plates a night. Hamilton loves the intensity of the work.

“It begins the moment you walk in the door to get your station ready,” he said. “You’re scrambling to get all your stuff together. Half the battle is having everything in front of you.”

But no matter how well one is prepared, something breaks down.

Years ago, soon after Laurey Masterton started her Asheville catering business, a man called to book a surprise anniversary party for his wife. The five-course supper for about 30 people was to be a made-from-scratch experience that replicated one he and his wife had had in Italy 25 years ago.

The task was simple enough for Masterton who had helped her parents run an inn in Vermont and knew lots about preparing food for large groups of people. About a month before the dinner, the man called to change the day to a Tuesday. Masterton moved the paperwork in her calendar. Then he called again to say, no, he wanted to have it on Monday after all. On the day of the party, the man called to ask what time she was coming.

“I put him on hold,” Masterton said. That’s when the panic set in—she realized she’d forgotten to move the paperwork back a day. She did a quick inventory. The fresh

trout wasn’t scheduled to be delivered until the next day. The cooking staff for the event wasn’t expected until morning. Masterton exhaled and walked into her catering kitchen. She got everyone’s attention, told them they had a crisis on their hands and that no one could go home.

She picked up the phone again and told the man she’d be there at 6 p.m. Over the next four hours, she and her crew scrambled to get everything they needed together and prepared. Masterson and crew arrived at the party with only minutes to spare. She cooked the last few ingredients just before the party sat down to eat. The meal came off beautifully, she said.

“None of the guests had a clue,” she said. “It was, like, terrifying.”

One night in early January, Hamilton was cooking in Bouchon’s narrow kitchen when one of the oven doors fell off. Having constantly suffered opening and slamming shut as kitchen staff fire meals of cordon bleu or roasted half duck, the door’s hinges couldn’t take it anymore.

Diner’s orders began piling up as even more people streamed in.

Fortunately the kitchen had more than one oven, so the three-person kitchen crew changed their cooking choreography and kept moving.

“Anything can happen like that,” Hamilton said. “You have to be calm.”

It takes a certain kind of person to work in the food industry, someone who can kick it up a notch when they have more things to do than fingers on which to count them. Like emergency room docs and racecar drivers, servers and kitchen staff thrive on the busiest moments of the night.

“Pressure, pressure, pressure—we all feed off that. I don’t know any food and beverage professional that doesn’t love that,” said Stacy Strong, a server at Bouchon who has worked in restaurants for more than 20 years. “We all want to be Mach 4 with our hair on fire.”

The best in the industry are able to shut out distractions. They have one job to do at this one moment—get that second glass of wine to table six— and then they’re off to the next crisis. Food service professionals can out-prioritize, out-organize and out-categorize nearly anyone in the dining room. There’s an oft-used expression—“in the weeds”—to describe the feeling of being overwhelmed. “There’s no better expression,” Strong said.

“You’re just surrounded, and you have to figure your way out.” She remembers a night long ago when she was working in a restaurant on Hilton Head Island. “I was so busy and people were being so mean,” she said. “I’m also very sensitive. The next thing I knew, I was in the walk-in, in tears.” The restaurant’s owner was incredulous that Strong chose the refrigerator as a place for a meltdown and told Strong to get it together.

You can do this, she told Strong. “And I — Philip Hamilton, went out there and I did it,” Strong said.

Bouchon line cook “Everybody has bad days.”

The Green Sage Coffeehouse & Café in south Asheville sells a lot of omelets—for which there are only two burners in the kitchen. Sunday brunch can be brutal. Cooks at different stations are working quickly, talking rapidly, even curtly. “We all have thick skin here,” said Ed Cohen, general manager. “You can’t break down or freak out. All that does is slow all those tickets down.”

As downtown Asheville becomes increasingly known for its culinary scene, more and more patrons come to town looking for a table at a local hot-spot and a dining experience to go with it.

Early Girl Eatery on Wall Street in Asheville is known as a “highvolume, turn-and-burn” kind of place, says server Kristina Costa.

There’s almost always a wait to get a table, even more so for Sunday brunch. Like a buffet, diners offer up a little bit of everything—they’re hungry, happy, hung over, out with friends or trying to impress the family. And some are keeping tabs.

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“Anything can happen ...

You have to be calm.”

53

Servers at The Lobster Trap in Asheville, N.C. shared a few of their diners’ more entertaining comments, kept in a well-worn notebook.

Costa was in the Early Girl kitchen filling a drink order when the host seated two pairs of diners, two men and two women, in her section. Costa took drink orders from both tables, dropped off the women’s drinks first and then moved on to the men’s table. “It takes no time to take a two-top’s order and I didn’t know who was seated first, so when I dropped off the men’s drinks, I took their order,” she said. “As I was walking to the kitchen, one of the women storms up to me and says, ‘do you realize we were seated first?’”

Costa didn’t intend any slight. She put the men’s order in and returned to take the women’s order. They demanded to know if their food would come out first. “They were rolling their eyes at me,” Costa said. “What’s forgotten when people go out to eat is that the server is a person too. You wouldn’t treat your doctor like that.”

The attitude is a reflection of the common assumption that restaurant workers haven’t done much with their lives, Strong said. More than once, diners have been talking about their European vacations and tell Strong she should go too—which she has, several times.

“So the shrimp bowl, is that like a bowl of shrimp?”

“Is your grilled salmon grilled?”

“Do you have any eggs?

Well then, do you have any omelets?”

“Why didn’t you tell me those shots of Patron I ordered were $10?”

“We’re across the street. How do we get to your restaurant?”

“My GPS told me this was Red Lobster.”

“Do you serve lobster here?”

“Are these lobsters free-range?”

“No local seafood?”

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Stacy Strong (background) will walk several miles while serving diners in Bouchon's small dining room. PAUL CLARK PHOTO

Strong and her fellow servers are more interested in a different kind of tip—cash.

Servers in North Carolina only make $2.13 an hour in wages.

At Early Girl, servers pool their tips, which spreads the joy of big tips and evens out the pain of small ones. While one memorable diner handed out $20 bills to all the staff, another family that Costa helped get oriented to town, even drawing them a map, left only a few coins on the table. Brandon Cremisio has been a server and bartender at The Lobster Trap, a fresh seafood restaurant in downtown Asheville, for about three years. He’s an energetic young man who enjoys interacting with his patrons and providing good service.

But his positive attitude doesn’t always keep him out of the red. One table left him $2 on a $70 check with a note saying that everything was wonderful but that they were broke.

“I guess that’s better than leaving me to think I did something wrong,” Cremisio said.

That same night another couple was seated, boasting a hearty appetite, Cremisio said. “I thought, awesome—not only am I going to get a higher check average, but when people have that kind of attitude, I like it. I mean, sweet, you’re here to get down. I can help you with that.”

The couple ordered a large meal, had a wonderful time, and upon receiving the check, left cash on the table and walked out.

They left $125.70 for their $125 bill. Cremisio actually lost money on the deal because he had to pay out a percentage of the ticket to

“You just have to perform. There’s no not doing it. You don’t want the guest to be unhappy.”

— Ed Cohen, Green Sage Coffeehouse & Café general manager

his bussers and hostess.

Part of the culture of restaurant work is trading war stories like these. Lots of restaurant people hang out in restaurants when they’re not working. The culture and the ambience are reasons they’re attracted to the industry, so they like going out as patrons as well as professionals. One morning over coffee, the bartender at downtown’s Aloft hotel shared a story with Strong from Bouchon.

The hotel’s restaurant makes its own sausage. Paprika is one of ingredients, and as paprika tends to do, it gives the sausage a reddish color. When a diner cut into her sausage and saw red, she insisted it was undercooked. The bartender explained about the paprika, but the diner wouldn’t hear it and insisted that the bartender take the sausage back to the kitchen. He did. The second piece that came out looked burned, he said, but the diner still saw red. So once again he took it back. This time the cook deep-fried the sausage—there wasn’t a trace of any color WWW.SMLIV.COM

other than brown, and with that, the diner was happy. “Some people can get really mean, but you can’t take it personally,” the bartender said with a smile on his movie star face.

There’s something to that cliché about servers being out-of-work actors looking for a role. The best servers are able to turn grumpy tables into happy tables. Good improvisational skills are imperative to the job. Masterton’s previous work as a theater stage manager and lighting designer was good training for catering, she said.

“At 8 p.m., the show happens, no matter what. You have to be ready,” she said.

Each table is different and calls for a different approach.

“You just have to perform,” said Cohen of the Green Sage. “There’s no not doing it. You don’t want the guest to be unhappy.”

Bartenders, servers and hosts are tableside sociologists, observing and cataloguing human behavior.

“You see everything—people that talk to themselves, or to friends that are not there,” Strong said. There was a lawyer on Hilton Head who would come into Strong’s restaurant every day and order the same thing.

Every time he’d ask if it came with a Caesar salad, which it did, every time.

Brian Ross owns DOUGH, a new prepared food market and bakery/café in north Asheville along the lines of Foster’s Market in Durham, N.C. or a Dean & Deluca in New York. Ross is the chef and 55

I wanted to hang out and chat teaches cooking classes. with everybody,â&#x20AC;? she said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Now â&#x20AC;&#x153;So my stepfather is our biggest I want to go home to my dog.â&#x20AC;? investor. In the beginning, he Bouchonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hamilton said that used to perch himself in the front maturing has its advantages. He of the counter and watch. And he doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get as upset when things said, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t believe how much break down. Heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s learned how you guys walk. You just donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stop to work around the surprises moving. Your feet must be killing that come up every night. He you,â&#x20AC;&#x2122;â&#x20AC;? Ross said. As a gift, Ross savors the experience now, he received a pedometer. Each dayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s said. As the orders fly in and the automatically set goal was 10,000 plates fly out and the pressure steps. After one of his teaching seems unrelenting, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more days that started at 6 a.m. and present with his work, more ended at 10 p.m., Ross had logged focused and yet more detached, 21,000 stepsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;15 miles. knowing that heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a part of a The physical toll of walking, Lucas Taylor's smile at DOUGH in Asheville demonstrates the power of providing system that runs best when turning, and lifting so much gives positive customer service. PAUL CLARK PHOTO patrons donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t notice it at all.

Ross a sore back. His pastry chef, care for their bodies, CaulďŹ eld and Ross go to â&#x20AC;&#x153;The moment you slow down or hesitate, Ali CaulďŹ eld, who starts making pastries at 4 the same chiropractor. Ross wears orthotics you lose momentum,â&#x20AC;? Hamilton said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll a.m. each day, developed hip problems. Ross and takes enzymes. have a board full of like 20 tickets, and youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll tends to forget to eat. While he tastes his food Getting older in a business that calls for hear that printer printing out more, and youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re to make sure things are coming out like he strength and stamina, Strong isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t feeling as thinking, how in the hell am I going to get all wants them to, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s too busy to sit down for a stout as she used to feel. She can still work, this food out? And an hour later, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re done meal. CaulďŹ eld has to remind herself to drink and do it well, she said, but only because sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re like, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what just water. â&#x20AC;&#x153;You forget to go to the bathroom,â&#x20AC;? learned to do it more efficiently. At the end of happened, which is funâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;I like that. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nice Ross said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;And then you remember, and all the day, sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ready to clock out. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Used to be, to escape into that.â&#x20AC;? you can do is just stand there.â&#x20AC;? In an effort to

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SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 â&#x20AC;˘ ISSUE 2

If we don't have it. You probably don't need it.

Chef Laurey Masterton taught others to seize life’s joys

O

ne day years ago, chef Laurey Masterton sat down on the sidewalk next to employee Monroe Moore to watch the sun set.

Laurey’s Catering and Gourmet To Go was moving. Though just across the street, Laurey’s new location was miles from where it had begun. Masterton remarked how the move—so small, yet so large—felt like a metaphor for life.

“This is a story I heard her tell as well,” Moore said. “She’d say that moment of us sitting on the sidewalk that day was about the importance of being present. And that that happens especially when you stop what you are doing.”

A widely admired pioneer whose motto, “Don’t Postpone Joy,” could be seen on bumper stickers throughout town, Masterton was a key figure in downtown Asheville, N.C.’s renaissance. In 2010, her work teaching children about culinary gardening led to her selection to help Michelle Obama launch the Chefs Move to Schools project, part of the Let’s Move initiative to end childhood obesity.

A three-time cancer survivor, Masterton was undergoing treatment and making plans for a video to accompany a new book when she died this February at age 59. To many friends and the community at large, her death seemed sudden.

Masterton moved to the area in 1987 to

Laurey Masterton, photographed in her Asheville restaurant in 2009, while helping raise funds for one of her employees whose child was battling a severe illness. Masterton always was a source of inspiration to those who knew her. PHOTO COURTESY OF JASON SANDFORD

work with the N.C. Outward Bound School but came to realize a love for food. She started a catering business in 1990, cooking out of the kitchen in her tiny walkup apartment until she opened Laurey’s, as the business affectionately was known, on Biltmore Avenue. At the time, the major thoroughfare into downtown lacked cache; however, Masterton was convinced that good food and a warm place to gather would attract good people.

“Certainly her establishment has been the stopping point for friends, family and students and just about everyone I know in the artistic and food worlds,” said Susi Gott Séguret, who directs the Seasonal School of Culinary Arts in Asheville, Sonoma, C.A., Ithaca, N.Y., and Paris, France. “It was impossible to live in Asheville and not know her.”

Masterton often taught at the culinary school. “Each time she brought an element of simplicity and warmth that was really priceless,” Séguret said. “In this world where so many egos abound, it’s rare to run across a person so positively approachable.”

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Her dedication earned her the respect of her peers.

“You never went to a Laurey’s event where you didn’t leave feeling better than you arrived,” said Mark Rosenstein, former owner of The Market Place, another pioneer of Asheville’s daring and welldeveloped food scene. Though Rosenstein and Masterton never cooked together, he attended many events she catered. “You couldn’t do a better job,” he said. “The quality of the food, the creativity in presenting it, the professionalism of the staff—she was totally committed.”

Masterton similarly was dedicated to her community, working with students, such as those at Isaac Dickson Elementary School in Asheville, helping them harvest vegetables from the school garden to discover the joy of fresh food well prepared. After Masterton went to Washington, D.C. in support of the Let’s Move initiative to end childhood obesity, some three dozen local chefs signed on to the initiative as well.

Masterton learned to cook at an early age, helping her mother Elise in the kitchen of the inn her parents ran in Vermont’s Green Mountains. She hoped to run the inn one day, but both her parents died of cancer when she was 12. She shuttled from one household to another until she went to live with her oldest sister.

Her disrupted childhood taught her about the preciousness of each moment.

Masterton was an avid advocate for cancer awareness and fitness enthusiast.

She biked 3,100 miles across the country in 2009 on behalf of the Ovarian Cancer Foundation and later founded, JOY!Ride, a nonprofit that supports Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG program through the local YMCA. The specialized program helps individuals who have undergone radiation and chemotherapy treatments work with trained Y staff members to begin to rebuild physical and emotional health. She would later find out she had colon cancer.

“The last time I saw her,” Séguret said, “I passed her in the street in front of her shop. She was in a hurry, but she stopped to show me her head. It was bereft of hair, but that didn’t seem to bother her. She was as glowing as ever and seemed invincible. The lesson that goes along with that is, do whatever it is you want to do now. What on earth are we waiting for?”

The second annual JOY!Ride will be held May 17, 2014 in Carrier Park in Asheville. For more information or to contribute, visit letjoyride.com.

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Cookbooks

Kitchen Lore in Condensed Form

BY ANNA OAKES

Perhaps the most famous name in cookbooks.

ANNA OAKES PHOTO

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alfway between my college years and spinsterhood, my mother and aunt pooled their collective kitchen knowledge together in a book of family recipes, gifted to me in a burgundy, leather-bound photo album, filled with four-by-six recipe guides.

Some were typed, and some were cherished, handwritten artifacts like those time-honored recipes scrawled in my Grandma Leone’s shaky cursive. She died in 1996, but when I see her handwriting, I at once hear her voice, which quivered like her pen. I recall her no-nonsense scowl, and I can almost detect the scent of her homemade dresses, as well. The woman never wore pants, the lone exception being when she worked her gardens in a pair of denim overalls.

My homemade cookbook is so much more than an instruction manual. It preserves my family’s traditions.

THE BASICS— AND BEYOND Most cookbooks feature typical categories of food, cleverly titled or not—the appetizers, the breads, vegetable dishes, meat dishes and other entrees, desserts, and so on. Sections on cooking and cleaning tips, quantities for serving a large number of people, and conversions and substitutions also are common. And then there are the deviations, the additions, the unique ways each family, each church, each woman’s club makes the book its own—from stories and jokes to pictures and quotes.

Elaine Maisner is senior executive editor and acquiring editor for cookbooks at The University of North Carolina Press.

“While a variety of non-recipe material is found in cookbooks these days, some of the most interesting and most popular additional sorts of information tend to be, in UNC Press cookbooks, personal food histories and family stories related to food experiences,” Elaine said. “In our books, you will see wonderful cooks regaling readers with stories both humorous and poignant about how a particular dish came to be, or how a seasonal food was celebrated within a family’s or community’s life.

Also, in my experience, cookbooks today may often feature a lot more information about the cultivation and best-practice procuring of foodstuffs, compared to cookbooks of the past.”

The Bride’s Cook Book, published by West Virginia’s Rose City Press in 1934, contains a page on “Invalid Cookery,” which provides tips on cooking for the infirm. Food for the sick, the book advises, can be classified in four ways: liquid diet (broths and soups), soft diet (eggs and custards), soft-solid diet (tender

chicken, gelatin dishes) and “special diet,” which is one ordered specifically by a doctor.

The author suggests that serving the patient’s favorite dishes in “an especially attractive manner” will aid in stimulating the appetite: “The tray for the invalid should be carefully arranged—always dainty and attractive. The dishes and the linen used should be the best in the house. A single flower or even a cluster of leaves often makes the tray attractive. If the contents of the tray can be sent into the sick room as a surprise it will often tempt the appetite of the patient who otherwise might not eat if he knew what was coming.”

Several recipes for wine are featured in The Wytheville (Va.) Cook Book, compiled and edited for a Baptist Church benefit in 1932.

Among them is dandelion wine, produced with four quarts of dandelion blossoms (those dastardly weeds my grandma diligently plucked from her yard), water, oranges, lemons, and sugar. And there’s advice on keeping eggs fresh: “three gallons water, one pint lime, one

“Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fatted ox and hatred.”

—Proverbs 15:17

or two pints salt, wash eggs and drop in fresh.

Will keep indefinitely.”

Plenty of humor finds its way into these collections. In the 2001 cookbook of the Kingsport, Tenn., Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, wedged between recipes for cakes and casseroles, is a prescription for Elephant Stew.

“One elephant, two rabbits (optional), and salt and pepper to taste,” it directs. “Cut elephant into bite-sized pieces. This should take about two months. Add enough gravy to cover. Cook over kerosene fire for about four weeks at 450 degrees. This will serve 3,000 people.”

The Steelesburg Extension Homemakers Club of Blacksburg, Va., incorporated a second hobby, quilting, in its Appalachian Heritage Cookbook. “Our club is best known for two abilities: cooking and quilt making,” the club members explain, and on each section’s cover page is a pattern for a quilt square, including the Rolling Stone, Bow Tie, Rocky Road, Water Wheel and Flying Geese.

Some sprinkle inspirational quotes, cheerful WWW.SMLIV.COM

poems, and scripture in the forewords and throughout. “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fatted ox and hatred,” writes the pastor of the Fountain City United Methodist Church in Knoxville, Tenn., in the 1975 Bazaar Cookbook. In its foreword, The Wytheville Cook Book refers to itself, rather eloquently, as a “choice collection of kitchen lore in condensed form.”

THE COOKS To view the rows and rows of cookbooks archived on the shelves of the Appalachian Collection at Appalachian State University, it would seem no organization is immune to the urge to impart its collective culinary wisdom with the world. Families compile them as Christmas gifts; churches, school groups, and service organizations sell them as a fundraiser for special projects. There are cookbooks from homemakers’ clubs, Boy Scout troops, college clubs, fall festival committees, a local Republican Party, inns, banks, restaurants, and many others.

For its inventory, UNC Press selects proposed books that connect well with others in its collection and that have the potential to attract a large audience, Maisner said.

“Our main, time-honored interests are in books that connect to the food cultures of the American South,” she said. Maisner notes that “farm-to-table cookbooks are very popular right now, and naturally publication in the spring season is advisable, so that readers can plan for the growing season. We are also seeing increased popularity of single-subject cookbooks.” UNC Press is following that trend with its own “Savor the South” cookbooks series, with volumes including Biscuits, Buttermilk, Bourbon, Tomatoes, and more of the South’s favorite foods.

The Mississippi-based Southern Foodways Alliance documents, studies, and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South.

SFA’s sixth-volume Cornbread Nation series is a compilation of Southern food writing, while the Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook, with plastic comb binding, is ready to go to work in the kitchen. “We put out a call…to get recipes from the mountains to the Gulf Coast. We were looking at a diversity of dishes and of contributors when we put that together,” said Managing Editor Sara Camp Arnold. “We wanted things that a home cook could make.” Arnold said there are two types of cookbooks—those that are fun to read and flip through pictures as part of an imaginary experience, “but you’re not necessarily going to cook everything,” and those with less focus on visuals and more focus on use. Community Cookbook belongs to the latter group, she 61

said. And, all of the recipes were tested, so “you know the recipes are going to work,” she said.

Mildred Howell Thomason’s work on her church’s cookbook committee evidently was a source of immortal pride, as it merited a mention in her May 2012 obituary. “Another of her most accomplished activities included being co-chairman of the Bethel Cookbook Committee; the cookbook Better ‘n Love was so successful that it went into several printings,” read the obit of the Union, S.C., native.

When the members of the Second Presbyterian Church of Roanoke, Va., realized their congregation had never published a cookbook, “we just decided that it was time that we had one,” said Kathy Gilchrist, co-chair of the Second Serving Cookbook Committee. Tying the book together from front to back are works by the congregation’s talented photographers and artists, including an ink and watercolor painting of the church exterior by Eric Fitzpatrick commissioned especially for the cover. Church members’ glossy photographs of the church’s ornate architectural features adorn the dividers for each section, and many recipes come with a personal note from its submitter: “My go-to recipe for the fall” or “My favorite as a child.”

Rows and rows of cookbooks occupy an aisle in the Appalachian Collection at Appalachian State University’s Belk Library.

ANNA OAKES PHOTO

The deviled eggs recipe from Gerald Carter elicits a chuckle, as it seems the cook was a wee bit hesitant about sharing his famous formula.

He dutifully coughs up the ingredients, but with “no exact measurements, because Gerald doesn’t want anyone to outdo HIS deviled eggs!” the recipe states. “Don’t expect them to taste as good as mine the first time,” Gerald adds. “You will get the right touch with the additions after several years.”

“We wanted it to be more than just a cookbook. This cookbook for us is just beautiful—

Cookbooks for the Kitchen, or the Coffee Table Located in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains about a half-hour from Knoxville, Tenn., is the renowned, 2,400-acre luxury resort of Blackberry Farm, featuring cottages and estate rooms, gardens, and the award-winning restaurant The Barn. The resort describes its farm-to-table bounty as “Foothills Cuisine,” which, according to Marketing Coordinator Mallorie Mendence, is “a term derived from our location, where one ridgeline separates the country mountain cooking to our south from the haute cuisine of the city to our north. Our Foothills Cuisine is a perfect amalgam of these two culinary worlds—a blend of old and new, rural and urban, rustic and refined.”

The resort has published two cookbooks—The Blackberry Farm Cookbook and The Foothills Cuisine of Blackberry Farm—each beautifully illustrated with full-color photographs. Everything from the sophisticated presentation of the dishes themselves to the stunning surrounds of the mountain farm is artfully depicted—and oh, there are recipes, too. In Foothills Cuisine, the recipes are organized by eight natural times or seasons of the farm. In “Come Grass Time,” when the first fragile green shoots appear, the farm explains, “you’ll find a menu of Skillet Corn Bread, Beans and Greens with Pepper Vinegar, and Peanut Butter Pie.” Other seasons are Plantin’ Time, Lay-by Time, Harvest Time, Puttin’-Up Time, Hog-Killin’ Time, Huntin’ Time, and Restin’ Time.

While these Appalachian-inspired recipes are meant to be used in the kitchen, these fashionable books are equally at home on the living room coffee table.

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I sat down for two hours and read it from front to back,” Gilchrist said. “Hopefully, if someone wants to join our church, they could see what we were about by reading the book.” The book has raised about $15,000 for the church’s Presbyterian Community Center.

Judy Fannin of Ashland, Ky., describes herself as “not a great cook, but an innovative cook.”

Fannin said she honed her skills as a hostess of supper clubs and themed dinner parties. “When all of us were young couples in Ashland, we didn’t have any very good restaurants,” she said.

Truly Southern Waffles ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖

1 c gluten-free oat flour 1/3 c brown rice flour 1/3 c stone-ground corn flour 1/3 c buckwheat flour 2 tsp baking powder ½ tsp baking soda 1 tsp kosher salt 2 large eggs, separated, at room temperature 2 ½ c buttermilk, at room temperature 10 tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled ¼ c sorghum, maple syrup, or honey moonshine cherries, for serving Makes about 12 waffles 1. Preheat a waffle iron.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together the oat flours, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.

3. Place the egg yolks in a medium bowl. Add the buttermilk, butter, and sorghum and whisk to combine.

4. Place the egg whites in another medium mixing bowl and whisk or beat with an electric mixer until soft peaks form.

5. Make a well in the center of the dry mixture. Pour in the egg yolk mixture and mix only until combined.

6. Gently fold the egg whites into the batter. Pour a spoonful of batter into the center of the waffle iron and cook until golden brown. (If the first one or two waffles are softer than you’d like, use less batter and cook a little longer, until nicely browned, for a crisper result.)

7. Place a waffle on a warm plate. Top with a spoonful of moonshine cherries and drizzle with sorghum. Serve warm.

From The Foothills Cuisine of Blackberry Farm

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

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Can’t Find the Words? Say it with Casserole There’s something about consoling friends and family with casserole, a certain translation of death and loss to green beans and French’s fried onions, tuna and noodles, broccoli and crumbled cheddar crackers.

Whenever someone in our community passed, we would stand in the long receiving lines at the funeral home to shake hands or give a formal hug, and the next day attend the funeral ceremony at the Baptist church and burial at the cemetery. It was then that all the women deployed their casserole dishes and insulated carriers.

“It’s definitely something that’s passed down in Southern families.

Everybody needs to eat, whether they feel like cooking or not,” says Sara Camp Arnold, managing editor of the Southern Foodways Alliance. “It’s a way to express care for somebody without having to have the exact right words.”

There would be as many cars as possible parked in the yard, and we’d file into the kitchen, wedging our casseroles and cold salads wherever they would fit between buckets of fried chicken, plates of deli meats, rows of two-liter sodas, fresh pies and pound cakes. With paper plates in hand, we crowded around, standing in clusters or taking a seat on any available surface—sofa arms, the floor, a sturdy end table—and chatting until it seemed an appropriate time to leave. It was the custom of kindness that Will D. Campbell sums up beautifully in the novel Brother to a Dragonfly.

“Somehow in rural Southern culture, food is always the first thought of neighbors when there is trouble,” Campbell writes. “That is something they can do and not feel uncomfortable. It means, ‘I love you. And I am sorry for what you are going through and I will share as much of your burden as I can.’ And maybe potato salad is a better way of saying it.”

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Second Presbyterian Church members, from left, Lynda Starr, Stacy Potter, and Kathy Gilchrist wrap copies of Second Serving as Christmas gifts. DONATED PHOTO

“The reason I think so many of our friends are such good cooks and entertain so beautifully is we had to entertain each other for years.”

She and her husband owned about fifteen Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants until they sold them a decade ago, and the retirees now spend winters in Nokomis, Fla. Fannin penned a letter to some 300 friends and family members in January 2001, inviting them to submit recipes for the book by mid-March. “Not known for procrastination, recently unemployed, and sometimes real bored, I’ve found a project!” she declared.

What was supposed to be a Christmas gift for family and friends became quite the undertaking and resulted in selling thousands of spiralbound, inch-thick volumes—with a second edition of Fannin Family and Friends Favorite Foods: Often Fabulous! Always Fun! spread over two books. All told, the three books contain 2,200 recipes, and Fannin is now in her seventeenth or eighteenth printing.

“It’s just taken off,” Fannin said. “I don’t make any money off mine—it costs more to publish.

I’m not in it for that.”

Fannin said she wrote 225 of her own recipes based on her own combinations from hundreds of cookbooks over the years. Some required a little kitchen testing before being put to paper: “The year I wrote all my recipes, I gained like twenty pounds that year,” she laughed.

THE COOKBOOK AS HISTORY Embeded throughout cookbooks’ recipes and narratives are telltale hints of sociological, technological, economical and cultural history.

The Kanawha County clerk in West Virginia, SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

for example, saw fit to equip new housewives with a copy of The Bride’s Cook Book.

“Through the courtesy of Mr. J.M. Slack, our county clerk, this book is handed, without obligation, to you on your wedding day. We sincerely hope that in it you will find many valuable helps for cooking and your housework,” states a page at the front featuring Mr. Slack’s photo. Inside the front cover of this particular copy belonging to the Appalachian Collection, the handwritten inscription reads, “Maude Stafford, June 8, 1934—Now learn how to cook!” And nearly all of the women credited with submitting recipes to The Wytheville Cook Book are identified by their husbands’ names—Mrs. M.G. Robinson, Mrs. Geo. H. Miles, Mrs. C. Albert Myers.

Bound with string, the sixty-five-cent Cook Book thanks the businessmen of Wytheville for responding “so generously in giving advertisements, thereby enabling us to sell the book at about one-half its real value.” Advertisements are dispersed throughout the book, suggesting early usage of product placement. Nearly all of the bread recipes specifically call for Queen Patent flour, for instance, and yet another common ingredient used in recipes was Knox Gelatin— which just so happened to be featured in one-line ads at the bottom of every page.

As with clothing and hairstyles, some recipes come into and out of fashion over the years. Returning again to The Bride’s Cook Book, a few sandwich suggestions are unique throwbacks—a plain lettuce with salad dressing sandwich, an orange and cream cheese sandwich, a bacon and peanut butter sandwich. Influences from other countries and ethnicities made their way into the cookbooks of the Southern Appalachians as well. Those in search of jellied

“You will see wonderful cooks regaling readers with stories both humorous and poignant about how a particular dish came to be, or how a seasonal food was celebrated within a family’s or community’s life.”

UNC Press Senior Executive Editor Elaine Maisner

tongue need only check the Marion (Va.) Cook Book of 1921. The 1995 Appalachian Melungeon Heritage Cookbook includes a number of Melungeon favorites, including fried eel, “a Christmas tradition.”

The 1999 cookbook 150 Years of Watauga County (N.C.) Recipes, compiled in celebration of the county’s sesquicentennial, features recipes from the 1800s taken from a book belonging to a Watauga County Extension Homemakers Club member. Among those authentic recipes are turtle stew, southern liver, roast goose, broiled partridges and quail, venison stew, frogs, and Sally Lunn rolls.

“It was such a cool lesson in a generationaltype thing,” Gilchrist said about compiling her church’s cookbook. “We had recipes from women in their 90s, and you could tell when gelatin came to be by the age of the people submitting the recipes. That was just really cool. I like when it tells a story.”

Elaine Maisner is senior executive editor and acquiring editor for cookbooks for The University of North Carolina Press. DONATED PHOTO

ISSUES OPINIONS A&E OUTDOORS & MORE

FOR WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA Smoky Mountain SUBSCRIBE OR READ ONLINE AT

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ACROSS THE MOUNTAIN

Across

1 Seafood served at the Lobster Trap in Asheville 5 Frequently ordered egg dish at the Green Sage Coffeehouse and Cafe in south Asheville 9 Top grades 10 Passport, license, e.g.

12 Salad leaves 14 What a server serves 15 Eating 17 _____house steak 19 Confucian path 21 Dress a turkey 24 Type of restaurant 26 Football lineman 28 “Scarface” star, Pacino 29 New trail along the Blue Ridge Parkway: ____ Mountain 31 New York and Peppercorn 34 Popular downtown Asheville restaurant 36 Had something 38 Neighbor of SC 39 Liqueurs made from alcohol and fruit and sugar 40 Stuff in a muffin

Gabby Macardle serves up coffee and bread at DOUGH in Asheville.

PAUL CLARK PHOTO MARGARET HESTER PHOTO

Down 1 2 3 4 6 7 8 11 13 16 17 18 20 22 23 25 27 28

29 30 32 33 35 37

Caesar, for one Yelp * numbers Philosopher suffix Digital camera output Unleavened bread- crackers “Red” seafood Golf start area Morning rose moisture Big coffee urn Ford model Hawaiian staple Dinner breads Recipe instruction ___ carte (2 words) Sushi offering Eggnog sprinkling Compass pt.

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Hiking trails to the top of Boyd Mountain, volleyball, basketball and badminton, swimming hole in the creek, sledding in the winter. Open every season.

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CABINS AT SEVEN FOXES Five beautifully appointed cabins nestled in the Land of Waterfalls in Lake Toxaway, NC. Guests rated 5 stars on TripAdvisor. Open year ‘round; pet friendly.

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THE SWAG COUNTRY INN Chosen by readers of Conde Nast Traveler magazine as the #2 Best Small Hotel in the Unites States, the secluded hideaway itself consists of 250 private acres. The main lodge and cabins, consisting of 15 rooms, are built of 17th and 18th century hand hewn logs and local field stone. Join us for our 30th season to experience just how remote, rustic, refined and remarkable it can be at 5,000 feet. 3 gourmet meals are served daily, with turn down service each evening.

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OAK HILL ON LOVE LANE BED AND BREAKFAST Awarded Best in the South by BedandBreakfast.com, Oak Hill on Love Lane features “The service and amenities of a fine hotel in the quiet comfort of a B&B.” Each luxuriously appointed room in this historic 19th century home is equipped with hypoallergenic bedding, fine linens, fireplaces, flat screen TVs, private en-suite baths and wireless internet access. Enjoy 24-hour access to the Butler Pantry, daily maid service, nightly turndown service and a full 3-course gourmet breakfast. Within walking distance of historic downtown Waynesville.

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UPCOMING

April Asheville Artisan Bread Bakers’ Festival Disappointed by the same old white and wheat breads languishing on your supermarket’s shelves?

The Asheville Artisan Bread Bakers’ Festival may be able to rise to your expectations. This hidden gem has been bringing bakers together from around the southeast for a decade, and the culinary craftsmen you’ll encounter at the festival will leave your taste buds hankering for more. It’s a one-of-a-kind experience that will not only give you a taste of these edible masterpieces, but there will also be workshops with renowned bakers, lectures, Q&A and more.

April 12-13, A-B Tech Asheville Campus, Asheville, N.C. 828.683.2902 or ashevillebreadfestival.com.

Outdoor KnoxFest Sometimes city life can get the best of us, so Outdoor KnoxFest is here to give you a weekend of communion with the outdoors, without ever leaving the city. Experience Knoxville in a new way, whether it’s from your perch on a paddleboard or astride a mountain bike or even in a canoe or strapped into a climbing harness. There will be guided hikes, bikes, paddles and more at locations around the city, and it’s a great chance to try your hand at some little known and lesser practiced activities, like sailing on the Tennessee River. The Outdoor Knoxville Adventure Center will serve as the hub of activity, but this festival will take you to every beautiful natural corner of the city.

April 26-27, various locations, Knoxville, Tenn.

865.525.2585 or outdoorknoxville.com.

MERLEFEST It’s almost time again for Merlefest, North Carolina’s flagship bluegrass festival.

Though it was started by bluegrass legend Doc Watson to honor the memory of his late son Merle, it’s another Merle who’s bringing his legendary status to the lineup this year. Country heavyweight Merle Haggard is set to be the headliner, alongside a stable of other acts spanning folk, country and bluegrass, from unknown newbies to household names. It’s a great way to kick the festival season off right.

April 24-27, 2014, Wilkes Community College, Wilkesboro, N.C. merlefest.org or 800.343.7857. SARAH E. KUCHARSKI PHOTO

Traditional Music School All-Stars.

April 26-27, Dahlonga, Ga. 706.348.1370 or bearonthesquare.org.

May 3P BBQ & Auction Cocktails, dinner, both live and silent auctions and the chance to do your part for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park? What more could you ask for on a Friday night. The 3P BBQ & Auction has raised more than $1 million for the park over the years, and it’s back this year with delicious food, good company and a gorgeous setting nestled in the Smokies.

May 16, 506 Emerts Cove Road, Pittman Center, Tenn. 800.845.5665 or friendsofthesmokies.org.

DONATED PHOTO

Mountain Flower Arts Festival

Bear on the Square Where might one find a bear? Check Dahlonga’s downtown square. Professional and amateur musicians flock to this Georgia festival filled with music lovers, people-watchers, and folkways enthusiasts for three days of bluegrass, mountain, and folk music, workshops, auctions, art, dancing, children’s activities, food and shopping in the historic Public Square. A juried artists’ market features oneof-a-kind, handmade items from some of the mountain region’s best artists. Performers include 2012 Telluride Bluegrass Band Competition winner BlueBilly Grit, award-winning songwriter/performer John Lilly, Sons of Bluegrass, Locust Honey String Band, Buzzard Mountain Band, and the Pick & Bow

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The summer is chock full of great festivals, but Dahlonega’s Mountain Flower Arts Festival has an interesting mix of regional juried artists, that festival requirement, music, and unusually, plant vendors. The floral peddlers will be showing off native and unique varieties, so you green thumbs won’t want to miss this unique opportunity. In addition to more than 60 artists and plant sellers, the festival—now in its 27th year—is also a fundraiser by the Dahlonega Arts Council for the Lumpkin County Schools art programs and provides a scholarship for an aspiring art student, so you can do your part for the future of art and maybe even snag some for your wall at the same time.

May 17-18, Dahlonega, Ga. 706.482.8390 or dahlonegaarts.org.

Plumb Alley Day Abingdon’s tiny Plumb Alley gets its annual day in the sun again this spring with Plumb Alley Day, where you can get a taste of some tasty treats, take in some local arts and crafts, hear a plethora of delightful

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

musical offerings—from traditional bagpipes to more rockin’ fare—and feel great that you’re benefiting a good cause in the process, as all proceeds go to support regional charities and charitable organizations. There’s also fun for every age, with face painting and sidewalk chalk competitions scheduled for the young and young at heart alike.

May 24, Plumb Alley, Abingdon, Va. 800.435.3440 or abingdon.com.

Grady the Groundhog Get to know Grady the Groundhog’s woodland friends at Chimney Rock State Park. Animals are the educators in this program that explains the animals’ roles in our ecosystem, how they came to live at the park and lessons on what we can do to help protect wildlife from humans like us. There’s even an opportunity to challenge gravity on a climbing tower.

May 24-25, Chimney Rock State Park, Chimney Rock, N.C. 800.277.9611 or chimneyrockpark.com.

June Tennessee Valley Corridor 2014 National Summit One of the Southeast’s longest running science and technology conferences is coming back to Chattanooga this summer. If science, tech or both are you’re thing, the Tennessee Valley Corridor 2014 National Summit could be just the weekend for you, and since it’s only happened three times since 1995, don’t think you’ll just catch it next year. It’s a meeting of many incredible and influential minds in the region, from government, business, community organizations and world-class research and academic institutions, and in the past these get togethers have helped sculpt the region into a science and tech hub.

June 4-5, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, Tenn. tennvalleycorridor.org.

Appalachian Wine, Jazz and Art Festival If you like sipping your wine on the water, the Appalachian Wine, Jazz and Art Festival is bringing 25-30 wineries to Lake Chatuge, just for you. Spend two days tasting wines from Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee, all the while hearing some good jazz, chowing on tasty food and taking in some local art in a pristine mountain setting. The ticket price includes a glass of wine and a souvenir wine glass, and there will also be music on hand to round out the picture.

June 13-14, Georgia Mountain Fairgrounds, Hiawassee, Ga 706.896.4191 or mountainwinefest.com.

Black Light Tour While underground mines are pretty unusual places to begin with, they hold even more dazzling secrets that can only be found in just the right light. Emerald Village’s Black Light Tour is a really unique opportunity to not only glimpse the otherworldly atmosphere of an underground cavern at night, but the ultraviolet lights expose a delightful array of colors not available to the naked eye. The brilliant coatings in the Bon Ami Mine are largely deposits of Hyalite Opal, and under shortwave ultraviolet light, these coatings fluoresce or glow a vivid lime green.

The tours are only offered on a limited schedule, so reservations are not required but are recommended.

June 14, Emerald Village, Little Switzerland, N.C. 828.765.6563 or emeraldvillage.com.

Crossword answers Puzzle is on page 59.

July ASHLEY T. EVANS PHOTO

Bristol Dragway Street Fights

Appalachian Folk Life Festival An Appalachian lifestyle is something to celebrate in downtown Waynesville, which brings a bevy of booths for traditional crafters and educational displays, demonstrations, and visits with the artists.

Music lovers will enjoy tapping their toes to the music of banjos, fiddles & dulcimers while skilled cloggers and dancers perform. It’s a traditional gathering with family and friends.

June 14, Downtown, Waynesville, N.C. 828.452.3517 or downtownwaynesville.com.

Maybe you’re one of those folks for whom The Fast and the Furious kindled in you a love of street racing.

But if you’re also a law-abiding citizen, that dream is nothing more than a fantasy. Well, with the Bristol Dragway’s Street Fights series, you too can lay the pedal to the metal just like Vin Diesel, because they’re’ bringing street racing to the people. It’s a completely legal venue, and it’s a lot more interesting than just watching the pros chase each other in circles. Amateurs and hobbyists, as well as a few professionals, will be bringing out their souped up rides to race for the ultimate bragworthy prize, and even if you’re not a budding racer, it’s a unique chance to get a real life look into a world that usually exists only in movies.

July 3, Bristol Dragway, Bristol, Tenn.

423.274.7865 or bristoldragway.com.

humble green bean is no exception. Blairsville is staging its fifth annual homage to the haricot vert, that hardworking staple of the traditional Southern diet, to coincide with the town’s sizeable green bean harvest. There will be more than 100 vendors, a 5k, a bike ride, canning tips and recipes, a farmer’s market, live music and, of course, more green beans than you can shake a stick at. And if you’re already a green bean master, you can enter the canning competition and perhaps come away with some green bragging rights of your own.

July 26, Union County Farmers’ Market, Blairsville, Ga. 706.994.4873 or greenbeanfestival.com.

Green Bean Festival These days, it seems like everything’s got a festival of its own, and the

Send us your listing To submit a listing for possible inclusion, email calendar@smliv.com.

MARGARET HESTER PHOTO

CHEROKEE POW WOW Summer in Cherokee is full of authentic Native American experiences, from the acclaimed outdoor drama Unto These Hills to the outdoor bonfires that blaze throughout the warmer months, but none is more steeped in Cherokee pride and tradition than the Pow Wow. Now in its 39th year, it’s a celebration of all things Cherokee, with numerous dancing competitions, Native American drumming, tribal regalia, and quite a lot more. There’s a reason it’s still going strong, four decades on, and it’s a great venue to really see into the rich, centuries-old culture of the Eastern Band of Cherokee.

July 4-6, Acquoni Expo Center, Cherokee, N.C. 828.554.6471 or visitcherokeenc.com.

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d e p a r t m e n t :

MOUNTAIN VIEWS

A health nut’s tasty journey into Gravy Country B Y M AT T PAY N E

H

ad my dining experience in Sevierville, Tenn. been served to me in my obsessively health conscious home state of California, it might have been described as some pretentious variation of the following: A lightly-battered, round steak accompanied by chopped okra and sliced tomatoes each breaded and cooked in oil, served with a cornbread and slowlythickened reduction of the meat’s natural juices. In the great state of Tennessee, however, such a meal’s description is far less manipulative and infinitely more appealing—fried everything, gravy abound.

A healthy person in general, I typically dine on lean meats and steamed veggies, live an active lifestyle and go so far as to wear one of the increasingly popular self-tracking devices on my wrist, which syncs to my phone and keeps tabs on everything from the number of steps I take to the nutritional breakdown of the food I consume. As I arrived in Sevierville, I surrendered my arguably absurd wellness pre-occupations and acquired daily steps. Let go and let gravy, I said.

At my first meal, at Sevierville’s The Diner, there was more gravy in the boat aside my plate than there was surface space on the dish—so much gravy, in fact, that one could argue that my chicken fried steak was a side item to it. I administered an appropriate amount to my chicken fried steak and was amazed when instead of spreading it held its tasty form in a primordial, delicious blob. I spread it, butter-like, and as I took my first bite, I imagined a great gravy tsunami washing over me, setting me adrift on a sea of savory.

The next morning I sat down to breakfast at Applewood Farmhouse Restaurant located at Sevierville’s famed Applewood Farms Apple Orchard. I ordered the Smoky Mountain Biscuit Benedict, which arrives as a giant steaming plate of gravy. I am simultaneously terrified and delighted. Two eggs, two biscuits and some sausage are unseen underneath the artery-clogging blanket of white. They are afterthoughts and go nearly unnoticed, overwhelmed by the pungent, creamy gravy.

Though it was not yet noon, I headed to Ole Smoky Moonshine in Gatlinburg to sample what rapidly is becoming one of America’s favorite libations. As the bartender poured

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tiny flavored samples of this corn based whiskey—blackberry, fruit punch, lemonade—all I could think about was gravy. I wanted gravy on everything. I didn’t need a fitness bracelet to track my steps anymore, just a bracelet to tell me how many steps I was away from gravy. I ate moonshine-soaked cherries that were outstanding and drank apple pie-flavored moonshine equally so. Perhaps my light intoxication would distract me from my obsession. Was Gravy-flavored moonshine going a bridge too far?

I had barbeque at Tony Gore’s and there was gravy; world famous slaw dogs at Frank Allen’s and there was gravy; even among the roller coasters and singalongs at Dolly Parton’s eponymous theme park there was gravy. Having replaced most of the blood in my body with gravy, I felt compelled to try to convince my sister to change my nephew’s first name in its honor.

MANDY NEWHAM-COBB ILLUSTRATION

As I arrived in Sevierville, I surrendered my arguably absurd wellness pre-occupations and acquired daily steps. Let go and let gravy, I said.

On my last day in town, what I needed was a lifetime supply of Lipitor and some broccoli to bring my morbidly unhealthy albeit delicious runaway gravy train to end. What I got was two eggs, two biscuits and a side of sausage—but there was no gravy. When my waitress asked if everything was all right, I felt uneasy. How about a bowl of gravy with a shot of moonshine to wash it down?

Then I caught myself.

Moonshine in the morning? Let’s not be ridiculous. As for another side of gravy? Make it three.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN LIVING VOLUME 14 • ISSUE 2

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Some communities om mmunities have have aacclaimed cclaimed ccourses, ourses,

yours will have a vineyard, too.

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by GOLF Magazine, The Virginian offers the perfect setting for Vineyard Terraces. To learn more about Vineyard Terraces, visit TheVirginian.com. Homes from $750k.

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