Sometimes I continued upstairs, where there was a Xerox machine I could use for free in the library stacks, which, for a time, had plastic sheeting over a whole section, to protect the books from a leak in the roof. The reference room was presided over by a fierce woman of Middle European background whose desk was covered with flowering plants I could not have identified if asked. When I admired them, she responded fiercely, with an unleavened accent, “They say I can make a pencil bloom.”
Then, just as I was settling into my role as the Linnaeus of comestible roots and leaves, Alan uprooted me from the soft bed of economic botany and sent me on the road, like one of those potted mangoes, to hunt down American regional foods, old-fashioned dishes threatened with extinction, like the black-footed ferret. I would spend two years doing it.
We both assumed that corporate agriculture, Big Ag, and all the other soul-crushing juggernauts of modern American life were smothering the last vital signs of regional food. But in almost every case, we found a dynamic revival of foodways, a supposedly vanished dish or abandoned ingredient that ought to have died out from neglect.
I say “we” because I had a partner in those travels, Adelaide de Menil, a photographer who worked much harder than I did, lugging equipment and getting down in the dirt to capture the morels in Michigan and roughing it in the Colorado high desert north of Rifle to record a sheep drive.
When we started out, I thought the way to find endangered foods was to flip through sources like my former colleague Jean Hewitt’s The New York Times Heritage Cookbook and then make a blizzard of phone calls to the region, to find practitioners of the vanishing dish and set up appointments with them. This turned out to be a waste of everybody’s time. There were sources you could find that way, but precisely because you could connect with a Pennsylvania Dutch flannel-cake vendor from your desk in New York, it almost guaranteed that she was an inauthentic exploiter of a pioneer dish whose only nexus to its colorful past was cash.
We quickly learned that winging it was the surest way to find the folks we wanted to find. Most of them did not advertise in the Yellow Pages or feel comfortable making appointments. Since a great many of them were either active farmers or close to the land, on arrival we would check in first with the local county agent. These emissaries of the federal Department of Agriculture know everything about their bailiwick. They know who grows what crops and, through their work with families in the still great 4-H program, they know who cooks seriously in the old way, or who continues to cultivate crops or grow fruit that’s too old-fashioned and unsalable even to get mentioned in the Ag Department’s statistical publications.
After a while, we would just fly in to a place known, or usually formerly known, for a regional food and drift around the landscape until we found someone eager to cook it for us or show us his carefully tended plants.
These were not media-savvy people, but once we found them, they invariably turned out to be great interviewees, because we were often the first people who’d ever asked them about a passion that filled them with joy—and gave them an outlet for a missionary zeal for keeping alive a message that had all but lost its original audience.
Helen Sekaquaptewa, the mother of the Hopi tribal chairman, queenly at the wheel of a brand-new pickup, took me to her ranch house in New Oraibi, Arizona, to show me how to make pö-vö-pi-ki, or blue marbles, an “easy” Hopi breakfast dish. She stirred together a straightforward dough of blue cornmeal and boiling water and rolled it into small blue orbs, which she then poached. Getting the texture right is a matter of exquisite knack, a tour de main she learned as a girl in a traditional household.
Part of that same training taught Mrs. Sekaquaptewa how to make piki, the apex of Hopi blue-corn cookery. She told me how, having returned from a missionary school in 1910, she learned to make a stone piki griddle, starting with a granite slab and polishing it smooth, by hand, with pebbles. She also ground blue corn into flour, working it between two stones, one held in the hand, until she produced a very fine blue flour, much finer than the meal for sale in a nearby grocery.
“We have electric mills now,” she told me. “It was hard work in my time, with stones, but good exercise. No one had a big stomach.”
But the Hopi ritual calendar had kept piki alive among the eight thousand ethnic Hopis—that and their isolation in the high mesas of northeastern Arizona. I saw this in action at the Niman dance. Kachina dancers at Shungopavi, on Second Mesa, moved slowly with the precision of Rockettes, chanting, elaborately masked and feathered, sashed and buskined, consecrating the ground of the plaza with cornmeal, while an eagle chained to a nearby rooftop flapped its wings. When the kachina dancers disappeared into underground kivas, Hopi children passed out rolls of crisp blue paper-thin piki, translucent sheets of blue cornmeal that had started out as a film of dough on a stone griddle.
For me, piki was the most unadulterated example of all threatened American regional foods, enmeshed in the same civilization that had invented it centuries before Columbus. That culture had survived under constant threat, first from the Hopis’ Navajo neighbors, then from white settlers, and, by the time I came to their mesa villages, from electric flour mills and supermarket blue cornmeal. But piki, because of the difficulty of making it, would never be the centerpiece of a Hopi-themed fast-food chain.
You might think that other First American foods would be just as difficult to assimilate into the American way of life, but the recent history of Navajo fry bread teaches a different lesson, as I learned in Salt Lake City. I hadn’t intended to investigate Navajo food in the capital of Mormonism. Indeed, I went to some trouble to get invited to lunch at the official cafeteria in the headquarters of the Church of Latter-day Saints in the Lion House, once the home of the early Mormon leader Brigham Young.
In Lion House Recipes, the cookbook I acquired there, I found almost no purely local dishes, just an unreconstructed expression of mainstream middle-American food: Jell-O salad, pies, meats and potatoes. The sole exception was the anomalous Utah scone, a deep-fried bread fashioned from a sweet yeast dough cut in two-inch squares. They were nothing like the muffiny scones of Britain, which are usually baked and never deep-fried.
It was not hard to sample homegrown scones in Salt Lake City. Usually served with butter and honey, they popped up on breakfast menus and at a fast-food chain called Sconecutter. But where did they come from? They had clearly not arrived with the Mormon emigration. No, these New World scones reminded me of puffy deep-fried Navajo fry bread and even more of New Mexican sopaipillas, which are similar to fry bread but are also usually served with honey, like the Utah scones.
Lacking any hard evidence for their origin, I speculated in Natural History that the archetype for all these fried breads was a sopaipilla documented by Diana Kennedy, the English-born authority on Mexican food, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, which shares a border with New Mexico. This primordial sopaipilla lacked yeast, a sign of its earliness. Mormon women, I argued, likely adopted this bread and assimilated it to their baking style with yeast and other raising agents, sugar and eggs, and further appropriated it with an English name.
I backed into yet another Anglo variation on First American food traditions at a convention of wild-rice growers in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Wild rice, which is not a rice but a native grass that springs up in northern lakes, used to be very expensive because it had to be hand-harvested in the immemorial method devised by Ojibwas, who would bend it over a canoe with a paddle and whack it until the seeds fell into the hull.
That picturesque harvesting method was about to disappear almost completely. Horticulturists had finally succeeded in hybridizing a nonshattering variety of wild rice that could be grown in paddies and harvested by combines, just like real rice and other grains. As excited lecturers pointed out at the Grand Rapids conference, wild rice had until then been left genetically unaltered by human ingenuity. Its seeds, maturing at different rates, would then fall off the seed heads into the lakes where the plants w
ere growing, and therefore couldn’t be harvested all at once. The Ojibwa method accommodated this naturally erratic biology: paddlers knocked down the mature seeds, which were about to fall of their own biological momentum into the lake. The unripe seeds clung to their grass tops and continued maturing. Paddlers had to keep returning for them until they had whacked down the whole crop.
The jubilant horticulturists at Grand Rapids had searched and found strains of wild rice that didn’t shatter, didn’t drop their seeds whenever they separately ripened. The nonshattering seeds clung to the plant so that they could all be harvested in one sweep. This made it possible to collect them like wheat or sorghum seeds.
Prescientific grain farmers had gone through a similar process of selection with rice and wheat and all the other grains in the dawn of human life, making way for an efficient harvest, the single most basic requirement of agriculture and for the settled form of life we call civilization. Now modern science had performed the same miracle with wild rice.
Not long after that meeting, commercial wild-rice paddies were established in California. The retail price of Zizania aquatica plummeted. Wild rice’s future as a normal grain was secure, and only hobbyists and Ojibwa traditionalists continued to gather it in canoes.
By that point in my travels as an inquiring gastroethnographer, I had begun to assume that there would always be surviving examples of a regional food in its historic home, but that I would always be surprised by those foods when I actually saw them in situ. The facts on the ground were almost never what you’d expected as you’d boarded the plane.
In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the seemingly simple pasty, a meat pie brought there originally by Cornish settlers, was a focus of melting-pot controversy. The descendants of miners from Cornwall argued among themselves about whether an authentic pasty had to contain rutabaga, or if the chopped meat was un-Cornish without pork, or how fine to chop that meat. Some folks pulled the crust up from both sides and crimped it together at the top; others pulled it over from one side. These were good-natured arguments among kin. But a preponderance of pasty-proud Cornish-Americans around the pasty mecca of Marquette did not take kindly to late-coming Finnish immigrants and their descendants, who had adopted the pasty as their own in the Upper Peninsula and “mongrelized” it, or so it was said, with features of meat pies they remembered from Finland.
Hunting down the Key lime in south Florida, we drove from Miami to Key West, through a fog of disinformation propagated by hucksters for the indigenous Key lime pie. Very few producing trees of this small, spherical, green-skinned citrus fruit had survived the hurricane of 1926, none of them in commercial groves. And the groves had never been replanted.
So unless you knew someone with a backyard tree, the Key lime pie you were eating in Islamorada or Key Largo or anywhere else in this country, we established, had been made with the juice of the Tahiti or Bearss lime, the lemonlike citrus hybrid (sold green to make it easy for shoppers to distinguish it from true lemons) that is the lime of commerce in the United States.
When you squeeze a lime for a lime rickey or cut a section of a lime for a gin and tonic, it is a Tahiti lime—and, in the terms used by botanists and ordinary people outside this country, it is not a lime at all. The lime we call Key is the lime everyone else on the planet calls a lime, and it is also tastier and limier than the Tahiti.
Key lime pies containing Tahiti juice are, as I demonstrated in a side-by-side bake-off with a genuine Key lime pie, far less deliciously tangy than the real thing. And that real thing, the all-but-vanished Key lime, was in fact, further research showed, not in the remotest danger of disappearing from the planet. Indeed, it was flourishing from Mexico to Asia. Truth to tell, in most places not corrupted by marketing of faux Key lime pies and juice or of Tahiti limes, C. aurantifolia is the only known lime.
Such botanically wrong mislabeling is not exactly criminal, but it is as rife as shoplifting, and I did my best in Natural History to correct the misnomers that filled supermarket aisles.
Don’t get me started about the yam, a large African root vegetable with white flesh, completely unrelated to and unlike the sweet potato, a usually yellow-fleshed Andean native often served on Thanksgiving tables as candied yams.
Similar confusion has helped keep Americans from enjoying one of the great native fruits, the small delectable persimmon that grows on big, hardwood trees of the ebony family from Florida and Texas to Central Park. But a blitzkrieg of marketing has filled market shelves with big sloppy Japanese kaki persimmons, while our superior American persimmons fall to the ground unattended and go smash.
I went to Brown County in southern Indiana, hard by the hamlet of Gnaw Bone, having been alerted to the presence thereabouts of Diospyros virginiana by those fellow stalkers of regional American specialties, Jane and Michael Stern. I roamed until I found the orange fruitlets, some already fallen, others pluckable from low branches, in an abandoned field—abandoned, that is, except by a feral dog, who bit me for intruding on his turf. I even was able to buy the misnamed, brownie-like persimmon pudding, for which Gnaw Bone is modestly renowned.
The renown would be much greater if misinformation—really plain old bad science masquerading as folk wisdom—had not kept this fine fruit from finding a market. It is simply not true that the native persimmon remains unacceptably astringent until the first frost, by which time many of the fruits have fallen from the tree, bruised themselves, rotted or been eaten by quadrupedal scavengers or frugivorous birds. Biology has also been, for the fruit of D. virginiana, a hampering destiny. The little orange orbs are overly endowed with seeds. The galumphing, often seedless kaki is much easier to eat.
Misnomer and its evil cousin fraud have also undercut the careers of two celebrated hunters’ ragouts, Brunswick stew and burgoo. I was able to run down a 1907 recipe for Brunswick stew that allegedly preserved a dish invented by a black servant, Jimmy Matthews, on a hunting expedition into the woods of Brunswick County, Virginia, in 1828. Matthews served his white masters a squirrel stew. The heirloom recipe is clear on this point.
But you will basically never get squirrel in Brunswick stew today unless you shoot the squirrels yourself. The same is true of burgoo, an Ohio River valley specialty, whose name, derived from “bulgur,” was originally applied to porridge by sailors who had encountered bulgur on shore leave in the Levant. In Kentucky and southern Indiana and Illinois on the other bank of the Ohio, burgoo once contained squirrel, but hasn’t for many decades.
I tasted the peppery meat (chicken and beef) soup in the plain-faced river town of Owensboro, Kentucky, where serendipity led me to Hardman’s, a very unpretentious restaurant at which burgoo is a sideline. At Hardman’s, as at fifteen other places in a city then claiming fifty thousand inhabitants, mutton barbecue was the draw. Two dressed ewes hung in a cold storage locker in back. The ewes were stand-ins for the bison that had led the menu at Catholic parish barbecues in the region in the nineteenth century. When they ran out, the organizers of Owensboro fund-raising barbecues substituted old ewes, whose flesh is thought to stand up as nicely to open flame as the flesh of American buffalo.
The only other time I’d eaten mutton was as a Times reporter in the cell block at the Brooklyn House of Detention. The slow-cooked, smoky mutton in Owensboro was a huge improvement, although the little restaurant was really a dump, with piles of old newspapers filling a couple of the ten or twelve seats. The dead ewes in the cooler added an eldritch touch, as did a third ovine sizzling away in an open fire, which the place’s sole employee kept under control with a garden hose. A defunct Philco twelve-inch television from the Eisenhower era watched over the scene like an evil eye, lacking only a test pattern or an episode of Kukla, Fran and Ollie or Captain Video to complete the time warp.
Seedy mise-en-scènes were often a backdrop to research into regional American foods. What was the nadir of these expeditions to the hinterland?
It was the coat closet (officially the evidence locker) in the grim
stone jail in Franklin County, Virginia, where I tasted seized moonshine from repurposed plastic soda bottles at the invitation of Sheriff W. Q. Overton. Franklin was said to be the leading bastion, and one of the last, of untaxed hooch distillation in America.
On the basis of this dégustation, I opined that moonshine was a first cousin of grappa, then beginning its rise to chic, with the same distinctive sour flavor, the result of a similarly thrifty, rustic style of production. Unlike manufacturers of politer forms of distilled spirits, grappa makers and moonshiners did not throw out the initial spurt from the still (“the first puke,” in Appalachian argot). This contains aldehydes, chemical components of alcohol that give both drinks, as well as their French (marc) and Spanish (orujo) cousins, their defining taste (“sourheads”).
But moonshine got no respect, while grappa and marc graced fancy menus in Europe and increasingly in the United States.c I lamented this state of affairs and called for a national movement to encourage the legal manufacture and sale of moonshine. I also, unwisely, quoted a local newspaper editor who’d accused the publisher of a rival paper of fronting for the moonshine interests. Perhaps under the influence of the homemade booze in the jailhouse, I’d neglected to give the accused publisher a chance to defend himself. He, a former U.S. attorney in Virginia, sued me and Natural History for libel. The magazine, which carried no libel insurance, settled the case by paying a modest sum to the ex-prosecutor and persuading me (with the threat of leaving me to defend myself in a Virginia court) to sign a humiliating and false retraction published in Natural History.
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