Why Appalachia may be the source of big American cuisine
‘IT’S WAY easier to get drugs than a good greasy bean,” Travis Milton says, taking a deep drag on his cigarette. And that causes the chef a lot of headaches. For one, greasies are his favourite beans, whether you cook them old-school, stewing them within an inch of their lives, or use a more modern technique such as steaming to show off the sweet, fat kernels inside.
But the elusiveness of greasies (named for their slick appearance, not their taste) is more than just a personal problem for Milton. Later this year he will open Shovel and Pick, an Appalachian restaurant, in Bristol, Tennessee. To turn out elevated versions of the dishes he grew up with – mulefoot pork with candied beets, root vegetables tossed in butter-bean miso - Milton needs traditional ingredients, like greasy beans, that are not easy to come by.
And so this spring, Milton is sowing 10 acres with greasies and other heirloom beans, cowpeas, creasy greens (a type of field cress), Candy Roaster squash, goosefoot (an Appalachian cousin of quinoa), blackberries, huckleberries and more. What he doesn’t use at his restaurant he will pickle and preserve, or share with other chefs who also are committed to promoting Appalachian cuisine. It’s all part of Milton’s grand plan to use food to ignite economic development in the region and end, once and for all, the pervasive stereotype of Appalachians as a bunch of toothless hillbillies.
No small feat, especially when the response to the term “Appalachian cuisine” is either “huh?” or an exaggerated eyeroll at the idea of another cadre of chefs trying to cash in on a regional cooking fad. In fact, Appalachian food has at least as much of a claim on “cuisine” as California (which no one would dare challenge). The foods of central Appalachia - a region that stretches from southern Ohio and West Virginia to Tennessee - constitute America’s own cucina povera, as rich and unexplored in the American culinary scene as Tuscan food was in the 1980s. William Dissen, a native West Virginian and owner of the Market Place restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina, calls it the “backbone of Southern cooking.”
It’s a scrappy, intelligent way of cooking that, out of necessity, embraced preserving, canning, fermenting and using every part of the animal long before all that was trendy. There are leather britches, beans that are strung up whole to dry, then brought back to life with water and a smoky ham hock. There is vinegar pie, a mountain version of the South’s lemon chess pie, with vinegar providing the acid in place of expensive or hard-tofind citrus. “There’s real beauty in these dishes,” says Milton. “They yield amazing flavours, the flavours of a subsistence culture. A humble pole bean tastes like a pot roast. You work with what you have because you have to eat.”
The idea is catching on. Last fall, scholars, chefs and activists hosted an Appalachian food summit in Abingdon, Virginia, to examine how the region’s food heritage can boost local economies. In February, the James Beard Foundation hosted its first-ever salon for Appalachian chefs. (Full disclosure: This reporter served as a moderator at the event.) A few weeks later, the Blind Pig, an Asheville supper club, hosted Milton and five other chefs for a dinner called Appalachian Storytellers. Milton served smoked venison, drizzled with a sauce made of malted sassafras and black birch syrup, and smoked collard greens. Edward Lee, a chef in Louisville who also owns Succotash at the National Harbour, made pork schnitzel, a nod to the German presence in the region, that he coated with salt bread, a poor-man’s loaf that relies on natural leaveners in the air. The event hosted 140 people and sold out in a day.
Ask most people what they think Appalachian food is, and their answer - if they have any idea at all - will probably be corn bread and pinto beans. Food that is cheap enough to fill a belly before a day in the coal mines and bland enough to suit the tastes of the Scotch-Irish who settled the area. That, says Ronni Lundy, author of the forthcoming book “Victuals: An Appalachian Journey, With Recipes” (Clarkson Potter, August 2016), betrays a gross misapprehension about the region and its food, which is far more complex.
The Cherokee originally inhabited the area. Freed slaves congregated there because it was one of the few places they were permitted to live. The English and Germans arrived along with the Scotch-Irish in the early 1800s, and Hungarians and Italians came after the Civil War to work in the mines. Some stayed for a generation or two and moved on, while some settled permanently. “Appalachia is more of a melting pot,” says Lundy. “That’s visible in our foodways.”
Take corn. It was first grown in Appalachia by the Cherokee; the tribe taught new settlers how to soak the kernels in water mixed with ash, then grind it to make a dough. Leather britches, also known as shuck beans, are also thought by many to be the product of a Native American drying technique, though Lundy says the method might have been brought over by the Germans, along with their passion for fermenting. Sauerkraut is common in many Appalachian households, but fermentation also was used on native beans and to make sour corn, a much-loved dish. “You take an old technique, add a new ingredient and you get a totally original food,” Lundy says.