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Dear Friends,
The
Southern Food and Beverage Museum has spent the last week traveling to
other states and countries, while making some important changes and
additions at home in New Orleans.
Elizabeth Pearce, Senior Curator, and I spent about a week in Florida at Epcot International Food and Wine Festival. We participated in a temporary exhibit called "My Louisiana".
It was a cool rendition of Louisiana, complete with a Creole Kitchen, a
stage fashioned from a mardi Gras float that looked like a steamboat,
and an Acadian cabin with activities for kids. Each day we introduced
hundreds of people from around the world and around the United States
to the Southern Food and Beverage Museum and made some valuable
connections in our days in the Florida sun. The New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau
arranged week one of the experience and did a fantastic job of bringing
New Orleans to Orlando. As Treme Brass Band played, one visitor asked
skeptically, "Is this the real
Treme Brass Band?" Yes, it was. We were so pleased to be a part of
what Forbes magazine describes as one of the top food and wine
festivals in the United States.
Liz Williams, president of SoFAB, spent the week in France continuing
our relationship with the Institute of Taste. She guided young French
culinarians in cooking traditional New Orleans cuisine. She noticed
how much we do not convey in a recipe, things we assume the reader
knows. For example, the culinarians interpreted gumbo as something
that may be served on a plate. The experience was educational for
everyone involved.
We would also like to welcome Chris Smith, our new Director of Collections, to our team
at SoFAB. Chris Smith earned a masters degree in Liberal Arts at the
University of Chicago and is completing a second masters degree in Arts
Administration from the University of New Orleans. He will aid the
museum in procuring and preserving artifacts and in grant-writing . He
is also the mind behind our upcoming Banana Exhibit.
An obvious
change we have made appears in this newsletter. We will now send out
one content-rich newsletter a week, rather than a monthly newsletter
and numerous weekly "reminder" emails. This week, we feature "Eating
Alabama" by Rashmi Becker Grace and the monthly musings of Susannah
Albert-Chandhok in her column, "Teen Table." Lastly, for those of you
who are able to attend our events, the information is still there each
week, in "This Week at SoFAB." Please direct submissions, information
on submissions, and editorial correspondence to
stephanie@southernfood.org. Do not reply to this email.
Cheers,
Stephanie Carter
Editorial Director
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Eating Alabama
by Rashmi Becker Grace
 "Eating
with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on
ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with
the world".
-Wendell Berry
Last April, my husband and I
embarked on a curious gastronomical project. "What if we tried to eat
only food from Alabama for an entire season?", he asked me over
breakfast one morning. It was an interesting proposition. "But what
would we eat?", I said almost immediately. After all, it was winter,
and my husband was suggesting a start-date of early spring. I didn't
really know what I could expect to eat in the spring, besides lots and
lots of greens. I feared hunger and inconvenience, breakfasts devoid
of cereal, and lunches without sandwiches and chips. Yet, the
possibility of such an eating challenge excited me. We had both been
peripherally aware of the "local food movement" in other parts of the
country, but we'd not seen much written or discussed about such
ventures in the South. This would be a great opportunity to
reconstruct the way we thought about food, to explore our southern
foodways and to reconnect with the land around us.
So armed
with little more than the internet, the connections and camaraderie of
a few friends, and a subscription to a weekly share in our local CSA
(community-supported-agriculture), we set out. We threw out all our
processed foods, cleaned the fridge of preservative-laden items, and
made way for fresh Alabama-grown vegetables and meats. We made some
exceptions - like leavening agents, oil, salt and tea, but by and large
our kitchen stock was rendered useless in our new diet. We traveled to
meet our local farmers, and discovered what bounty we had at our hands
- there were hydroponic growers, scores of pastured meat farms, a
dairy, and cheesemakers. The 60 lbs of gifted deer meet was the first
to land in the freezer. It was soon followed by broccoli, which we
blanched and cut up ourselves, fresh-picked strawberries, and anything
else we could get our hands on in the dead of spring. Our refrigerator
had never seen such a variety of fresh produce, and overflowed with
foods such as cabbage, carrots, turnips, and beets.
What
followed in the months to come was a total conversion. Every meal that
we cooked was carefully planned and prepared with foods received from
growers we knew. Eating and cooking became a meditative process. We
discovered what it meant to eat seasonally. In the spring, we ate
every type of green you could imagine - collard, turnip, mustard, kale,
and salad- and waited patiently for summer's first tomatoes, squash,
okra, and eggplant. We saw the progression of fruits, from
strawberries in April, to blackberries, then blueberries, peaches,
apples and pears. We were forced to be creative in the kitchen,
experimenting sometimes with limited ingredients. Our menus evolved to
include dishes like deerloaf, goat cheese pizza, sweet potato soup, and
fried green tomatoes and basil-shrimp on a bed of coleslaw -our
signature gourmet dish. We made our own mayonnaise, breads, and
pasta. We learned what it was like to be connected to our food and in
the process became much better cooks!
As southerners we value
our regional cuisines. It's one of the things we point to when asked
what makes us special and different - the meat and three sopped up with
a slice of cornbread, red beans and rice with a hunk of andouille,
fried okra and pecan pies. But the truth is, in the age when most
things come in a box or travel hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles
to get to our plates, we often don't experience traditional foods in
the same way we did generations ago. You can make Jambalaya from a
boxed mix in a little under an hour. Black-eyed peas come in a can. A
once laborious, intense process of cooking supper has now been reduced
to a matter of minutes. We rarely get our produce fresh, or
seasonally. Instead, it's trucked in from all over the world and
during all times of the year.
In this modern age of eating,
how do we return to our roots? And why should we want to for that
matter? I can offer you this: these last five months of local eating
have totally changed me. I have discovered what it means to be a part
of a food community - to know and see where my food comes from, who
grows it, and how. I've enjoyed the best meals of my life,
experiencing tastes that my palate never knew. And I've been healthier
and happier because of it all. I would encourage anyone to do the
same. It's easier than you might think. Visit your farmer's market,
or a join a CSA. You'll be glad you did. After all, you are where you
eat!
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Rashmi
Becker Grace lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. She and three friends
started started eating locally in April, 2008. What started as a
season has turned into a full year of eating locally. Their goal is
"to focus on sustainable agriculture and to make a case for the
revitalization of [Alabama's] rural economy." To read their blog,
enjoy their recipes and photos, and to use the Alabama farm locator,
visit Eating Alabama.
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The Teen Table
by Susannah Albert-Chandhok
Ask any high school student what their favorite subject is and I
guarantee you most of them will say, "Lunch." Bounding down the four
flights of stairs a few days ago, I was heading for my cozy eating
area, a grassy carpet that is a hundred degrees in the shade under a
weeping willow tree. I arrived at my lunch "table" and as my legs
stretched out along the grass, I knew I was in my favorite class. I
took a deep meditative sigh as I relaxed against my ligneous back rest.
I reached deep into my backpack and under all my forgotten permission
slips and hall passes, I found my lunch. I peeled the plastic off of my
squashed sandwich. I took a big bite of the whole wheat bread and . . .
The bread laid in my mouth as I searched for some savory taste of roast
beef or a sweet taste of blackberry jam. However, I could only sense a
bitter bread that was slowly dissolving as my teeth forgot to chew. I
opened my sandwich and was horrified to see that there was no filling
on my sandwich! Had my life become so besieged by activities and
classes that I could not remember how to make a sandwich? I searched in
my brown paper bag again and found, sadly, that my two humble slices of
bread were my lunch. Is there hope to be found in meals at school, from
home or from the cafeteria?
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Susannah
Albert-Chandhok is a high school student living in New Orleans,
Louisiana. She writes the monthly column, "Teen Table" for the
Southern Food and Beverage Museum.
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The Week at SoFAB
(More Events)
Cinq a Sept at SoFAB
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
5 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Non-member cost: $10 museum admission
Member cost: no charge
Join us as we continue our after-work music series. This week will feature the live music of Marc Stone, "a true blues diamond in the rough" according to Where Y'At Magazine. Savvy Gourmet provides a cash wine bar and Copeland's Cheesecake Bistro provides complimentary hors d'oeuvres.
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Book on a Plate: The Food in "To Kill a Mockingbird"
Saturday, October 11
2 p.m.
Help us encourage literacy through the celebration of our culinary
heritage by reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" with us as a part of the Big
Read. Chris Smith presents this compelling discussion.
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