by Holly Hughes
Salt is also a defining ingredient in the foodways of the southern mountains. At some point in the ancient processing of carcasses in the salt/hunting regions, the flesh came in contact with the mineral and magic was born. Not exactly the immortality of the Fountain of Youth that the early Spanish explorers came here seeking in the 1500s, but an alchemical extension of viability. Salt curing was the way that early hunter/gatherers prolonged the edibility of meat to get through the winter. Salt curing is what fueled the industry created by the colonists who came later to make their fortunes by shipping salt downriver to the meat-packers in Cincinnati, Louisville, Knoxville, Nashville, and as far away as New Orleans.
Is it any wonder that salt came to define many of the core foods of the region? Lip-puckering country ham and salt-cured pork. Sour corn and pickle beans. Melon served always with a sprinkle of salt. The ubiquitous Cheese Nabs in the glove box that no mountain trucker leaves home without. Salty slow-simmered kale and pinto beans. Jerky, kraut, and pickles of all kinds. Salt is the element that enabled life and nourishment through the harsh, stark winters of the mountains, winters that helped create a cuisine that was in one sense distinctly Southern and at the same time distinctly its own.
Much to chew on as I make my way to the museum gift shop, so no wonder that what I gravitate toward is a spiral-bound volume with a soft yellow paper cover amid the many “official” histories. It’s the Saltville Centennial Cookbook. I am most intrigued by the evocative names of the more savory, salt-laced dishes, and the stories they conjure up: Dead Man’s Soup, Bert’s (Big Mama’s) Cat Head Biscuits, Brain Croquettes, Parsnip Skillet, Dr. Finne’s Baked Doves, Hungarian Soup (Hunky Soup), Paprika’s (sic) Csirke (Chicken), Hunter’s Goulash, Chicken and Dumplings (two versions), Heirloom Scalded Lettuce, Old Fashioned Hash. Clearly there is history here as well. Delightfully, the children, grandchildren, and friends tell a good bit of that history as this cookbook is studded with old black-and-white photographs and laced with memories of the women, and a few men, who turned these dishes out, day after day.
“There are few people in the Town of Saltville who have never eaten any of Granny Blackwell’s cooking,” I read.
“After retiring from Olin with 42 years of service, Ralph enjoyed fishing as often as possible.”
“She was a generous person and worried over people who were in need. She liked to travel and ride the bus.”
Such fragments remind me of summer evenings as a child. Lying on the grass down in Corbin with my cousins, lightning bugs flashing in the dark around us, we caught such pieces of the conversation my parents, aunts, and uncles were having on the porch above. From them we formed imagined pictures and stories of the past, our people.
We were all—my father, mother, sister, me—born in Corbin, Kentucky. But when I was about a year old and my sister twelve, my father got word of work in the distilleries in Louisville and we moved. My parents lived in the city the rest of their lives, but they never fully left the mountains. Like most members of the various hillbilly diasporas of the 20th century, we went “up home” whenever we could. My father worked in the boiler rooms, a fireman and oiler, hard labor but it suited his athlete’s need for a physical challenge. (He’d been a boxer as a young man. The folks in Corbin said he’d been a good one.)
He worked swing shift, and “on call,” and picked up overtime when he could to compensate for the layoffs that were a part of the distillery process then. Whenever a stretch of more than two days off came up, we’d make the four-hour winding drive to “see the folks.” We spent every summer vacation of my growing up in those hills. The steeper and more winding the road became, the easier my father seemed to sit in his skin, to smile from someplace deep.
Summers up home were not lazy. There was always a little time on the lake for reading and cards, swimming and fishing, but there were also things to do and my parents were always willing to do them. My mother cooked with her aunts for the passels of cousins who showed up every night to visit and remember. She helped with the canning, strung beans and then threaded them up for shuck beans, cleaned and mopped and hung out wet clothes just as she did at home.
My dad loved any job that required muscle and took him outside. One summer he and my great-uncle Charlie built a garage from the foundation up, the sound of boards slapping and the two men talking and laughing riding like a melody over the rhythm of the locusts. They would come in the house still telling a story, riffing back and forth like jazz hipsters as they got tall iced tea tumblers from the cabinet, then filled them with spring water that came from the faucet. As they turned to go back out, my dad would grab the salt shaker from the table, pour some in his palm and some in Charlie’s, licking it up on his way out the door. “A man needs to keep his minerals balanced,” he told me when I asked why. “Work in the summer, you sweat ’em out, salt puts them back in.” Salt and spring water: Hillbilly Gatorade.
We sweated, too, children playing hard or doing chores, women working in the steaming kitchen. Maybe that’s why I remember salt so clearly as the taste of summer. We put it on our fresh cucumbers and onions, the tomatoes that accompanied every supper. We consumed it ravenously on crisp crackers topped with tangy baloney or Vienna sausages on the deck of the pontoon boat at the lake. My cousins and I poured tiny mountains in our palms and dipped tommy-toes, still warm from the garden, before dropping them into our mouths. My great-aunt Johnnie kept a saltshaker next to her as she sat on the porch slicing tart June apples to dry, for use that winter in stack cake and fried pies. The drying sweetened them, she told me, and I knew that to be true. So did salt, she said, as she sprinkled some on a crisp sour slice and popped it in her mouth, then made one for me. I wasn’t so sure about that, but there was a mingling of flavor there that was both sharp and haunting.
Even dessert in the summer needed some salt. After supper I’d ride into town with Daddy and Charlie to a grocery store that stayed open late; it seemed just to sell the dark green melons they kept in the back in long tin tubs filled with ice water. We rushed home to slice the melon while it was still deep chilled, perfect half-moons of vermillion laid on yellowed plates with sweet flowers and tiny age veins around the edges. Nobody plunged in until the saltshaker made the rounds.
My cousin David ate cinnamon Red Hots on saltine crackers; we poured salted peanuts into our glass-bottled Cokes. Even ice cream, that pure sweet blend of milk and sugar, required salt. Not in it, but in the old crank freezer that Charlie and my dad would take turns turning. The ice had to be crushed just right, then layered with a handful of rock salt. Inevitably in the process, one of the women would caution, “Don’t let that salt get high enough to seep into the cream,” and then someone would tell the story of the time that happened. And then another story, and another one, as we sat patiently on the screened back porch and waited for the cream to ripen, just a little anxious that the first bite should be a sweet, not salty, one.
When these visits ended—summer vacations, long weekends—there would be a sadness in the leaving. Tears—salt again—were shed by the women and children. The men cleared throats, mopped sweaty foreheads with handkerchiefs that just managed to slip by their eyes. Someone would say, “Going back to the salt mines, Pap?” My dad would laugh and we’d drive away.
I don’t know where my child’s image of “the salt mines” came from. A cartoon? A book I’d read? In my imagination, they were far, far away, part of an exotic desert world of swirling sand and spices. I did not know then that salt had been “mined” just one county over from Corbin.
Swing Shift Steak
Serves 2
My dad worked swing shift most of my life, and my mother, like many salt, railroad, coal, mill, and factory wives, adjusted our household schedule around his. When he worked 7 to 3, we gathered of an evening at the round oak table in the dining room, and platters of vegetables, hot cornbread, and meat would appear. On other shift days, supper and breakfast might merge into a meal that was a bit of both.
On
e of the fundamental building blocks in my mother’s repertoire for such revolving mealtimes was the inexpensive and quick-cooking eye of round steak. She would pound the steaks with her heavy metal waffle-faced potato masher, then season and quick-fry them, keeping them surprisingly juicy even though well done. (Yes, they have a little chew to them, but we were a family of ruminators in more ways than one.) She would serve them with potatoes, biscuits, and vegetables for dinner, or with eggs in the morning.
My favorite of these meals was served to my dad and me late at night, before he picked up his lunch sack, kissed “his girls” goodbye, and went off in the dark to work. For those supper/breakfasts, my mother would fry the steaks and make a quick gravy that she served over soft rye bread laid to the side. She rarely joined us at the table in the kitchen where these meals were served, preferring to stand next to the stove, sipping coffee, smoking, and smiling.
(You may increase to serve four, though, you won’t need to increase the flour for the gravy.)
2 eye of round steaks, each about ¾-inch thick
Salt and freshly ground black pepper or lemon pepper
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon sweet smoked Spanish paprika
Vegetable oil or lard
2 pieces soft rye bread
½ cup whole milk
Lay the steaks on a cutting board. Using the tenderizing (pointed) face of a meat mallet, lightly pound each side. You do not want to pound the meat super-thin or to make holes through it. You want to thin it to about ½-inch thickness and make plenty of shallow ridges to hold the seasoning and flour. Flip the steaks over and do the same to the second side, then repeat for each side.
Lightly salt and liberally pepper each steak, and rub them lightly to help the seasoning sink in.
In a wide, shallow bowl or on a plate, blend the flour, paprika, and a generous pinch of salt well. Dredge each steak in the flour, coating both sides and using your fingertips to gently press the flour into the ridges, just to make sure the coating sticks. Reserve the remaining flour.
Set an amply sized, heavy, lidded skillet over high heat and add enough oil to slick the whole pan. (You can use lard, but an oil with a higher smoke point is easier to work with.) When the oil is hot but not smoking, add the steaks and brown them quickly on each side (this takes about 2 minutes per side). Turn the heat down to low, cover the skillet, and let the steaks cook for about 5 minutes, until just cooked through.
Lift each steak, allowing a little of the juices to run back into the skillet, and place it on a warmed plate. (If you would like to serve the steaks on rye toast, this would be the time to put the bread in the toaster.)
Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of the reserved seasoning flour into the skillet, and stir quickly to flavor it with the juices. Scrape the skillet to loosen the crust, and add 2 tablespoons of water to the juices to help scrape up the browned bits. Slowly stir in the milk, using the back of the meat spatula or a wide spoon to flatten any lumps as you do. When the flour is incorporated with no lumps (there will be solid flecks of the meat’s breading, but no large lumps of flour), turn the heat up to medium and bring it to a boil, stirring steadily all the time. When the gravy just begins to thicken, remove it from the heat and add salt to taste.
Place the toast or piece of bread on the plate next to the steak, and cover with the gravy. Serve.
What’s True About Pho
BY RACHEL KHONG
From Lucky Peach
Former Lucky Peach executive editor Rachel Khong, whose debut novel Goodbye Vitamin came out in July 2017, was making a pilgrimage of sorts when she visited Vietnam to learn about pho, the iconic noodle soup. The real surprise is what her trip also revealed to her about America.
When I arrive at my hotel in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, it’s about eleven at night. The day that I’ve lost crossing over the dateline is International Women’s Day. “Just you?” asks the concierge, a my-size, my-age woman—five four, about thirty. It’s just haggard me. She has a neat smile, neat ponytail in contrast. “Happy Women’s Day,” she says, meaningfully.
What I’m leaving behind, in the United States, are the Republican and Democratic primaries, newly under way. Marco Rubio still harbors some hope. Someone on the Internet has photoshopped Donald Trump’s lips where his eyes should be (he turns out to look exactly the same: full of contempt). In my heavily Latino neighborhood in San Francisco, the Trump piñatas are proliferating. This is before President Obama visits Cuba, before the bombing in Belgium. It’s right about when the Supreme Court, minus Justice Scalia, has begun to hear the Texas abortion case; Nancy Reagan has just passed away, at age ninety-four; and in theaters, Zootopia, a movie starring animals and about racism, has just opened.
Here in Vietnam, the enormous turtle that used to live in Hanoi’s Hoan Kiem Lake—Great-Grandfather Turtle, he’s called, an unknown number of years old—has recently died. The New York Times headline about it: “Vietnam’s Sacred Turtle Dies at an Awkward, Some Say Ominous, Time.” There’s been an ongoing territorial dispute with China, which is laying claim to some islands in the South China Sea.
It’s hard not to feel weird about stuff—why things are, and how they got to be the way they are. It’s hard not to wonder what’s relevant. Since the Vietnam War ended (in Vietnam, they call it the “American War”) forty years ago, Americans don’t trust their government the way numbers indicate we used to. In 1958, when the American National Election Study first polled Americans about their trust in the government, 73 percent said they could trust the government “just about always” or “most of the time.” After the war, and after Watergate, that number fell to 36 percent. This past fall, that percentage fell to 19 percent—the lowest of all time. And there’s a sizable contingent of the country that doesn’t even care much about what’s true.
“People eat before they learn,” says restaurateur Steven Pham elsewhere in this magazine. It’s a sentence I’m carrying around, reprising in my head. What I know about pho came first by way of my Southern California upbringing. My family’s takeout food of choice was pho from a local shop called Saigon Noodle House. Eating pho as a teenager made me think I knew something about Vietnam. I also grew up with bubble tea and niu rou mian and soup dumplings, which made me think I knew something about Taiwan. Eating tacos made me think I knew something about Mexico. (I knew better than to think pizza taught me much about Italy, but hold that thought.) Say you’re a person who knows Chinese food from Panda Express, or whatever form Panda Express takes in your vicinity. Hopefully at some point down the line, you learn that fortune cookies don’t come from China. You learn that General Tso was a person, but Chinese people in China don’t cherish his chicken.
At the time of this writing, “pho” is a term that, in the U.S., is almost as frequently Googled as “ramen”—they’re neck and neck. In the D.C. metro area, the number of pho restaurants increased by almost a hundred in the past decade (from about 91 in 2003/2004 to about 195 in 2014/2015); Los Angeles shows a similar increase in roughly the same years. And Albuquerque, a city with zero pho restaurants in 2003/2004, had eight in 2014/2015.
In America, pho is at an interesting point: it’s becoming a food that’s familiar to us—that requires no explanation. Think about pizza, about ramen, about tacos—how these things that were once foreign no longer need to be defined. Pho is even becoming gourmandified. (Hand to God, while writing this, I received a PR e-mail about pastrami pho: “The flavorful pastrami provides a salty brininess to the pho that marries well with the other beef parts and flavorful broth. The end result is something that combines the best flavors of a crave-worthy deli pastrami sandwich and a warming Vietnamese pho.”) But even when things get more coverage, we don’t necessarily gain more knowledge.
I’d eaten pho in Los Angeles, in the San Gabriel Valley, in San Jose, in San Francisco. And now I would be eating pho in Vietnam—first in Hanoi, then Saigon. I would be learning about the pho that came before the pho I knew, and about the culture o
f pho in Vietnam: who eats it and who makes it. I wanted to encounter the real thing; I wanted to correct my ignorance.
I am not, by the way, Vietnamese. It seems relevant to mention that. But I don’t not look Vietnamese. In Vietnam, people routinely speak to me in Vietnamese, and persist even when I stare stupidly back at them. At the airport in Hanoi, I notice that my last name, Khong, is everywhere. A sign says: khong duoc vao. Another one says: khong co gi de khai bao. Khong turns out to mean “no.” Do not enter. Nothing to declare. I felt stealthy, though never for long.
The sky in Hanoi doesn’t seem to exist: it’s one color, like a sheet of off-white printer paper. My boyfriend texts me to say that there’s a solar eclipse, but I can’t really deduce where the sun is, or clouds, or normal sky things. The mugginess feels like steam from a shower. Women in conical rice-paddy hats carry jicama and kohlrabi on poles on their shoulders and wear wicker backpacks full of flowers or mini pineapples.
“The visitor to North Vietnam goes up and down on waves of emotion,” wrote a New York Times correspondent in Hanoi in 1972, three years before the war officially ended. “He is gripped by the excitement of the unknown: the streets, the posters, most of all the extraordinary people of this most isolated place.” (In that same article, he also writes, “Why were we doing these things? When historians looked back on this American war in the future, would it not seem as mad in its motivation as the religious wars of the 17th century seem to us now?”)
Hanoi is on the western bank of the Red River, which flows from the Yunnan Province in southern China to the Gulf of Tonkin. During the French colonial period, which spanned from 1883 to 1945, the city and its surrounding region were referred to as Tonkin. It was an important city when the French were in charge, because Hanoi is in the top part of Vietnam’s stretched-out S shape, and the French were interested in expanding their rule to China in the north.
