GA Blue Stem Collard, Wormsloe Plantation
What Are the Signature Local Foods of Georgia?
What is local food? The simple minded answer is that it is the food grown around here. But since the particular vegetables and grains grown around here tend to be the same as any grower plants with the same climate and water resources, given the national market for seeds, there is a sense that a vegetable’s being local is something of an accident. There is, of course, nothing distinguished about being the local version of what a lot of people have in other places. It is hard to brand ‘more of the same.’ You can insist on the freshness of the near by or pass on the savings for not having to transport it any great distance. Sometimes ingenious marketers can sell the way a common vegetable responds to local soil conditions. The way the standard sweet onion of the United States—the Yellow Granex, an improvement of the classic Texas Grano—responded to the low Sulphur soils of Toombs County (now 20 counties) was sufficiently distinctive to command a price premium as “The Vidalia Onion.”. Thus one of the rare cases in which terroir—the response of a cultivar to growing conditions and methods—made locality bankable. (The Limestone Bibb lettuce of Kentucky is another one).
Growers, breeders, and marketers in some regions have realized that something more markedly local must be offered to excite popular demand. Oregon State University and the USDA in 1956 released a tart lustrously purple blackberry grown in Marion county as “The Marionberry”. Its depth of flavor (in the 1980s the phrase the cabernet of blackberries) gave it immediate recognizability. It was promoted everywhere—dairies (the Tilmanook group) incorporated it into ice cream, Marionberry pie became a fixture on every restaurant and bed and breakfast menu, and in 2000 the legislature made it the official berry of Oregon. This is the textbook modern example of the invention of a signature product for a place.
Is the Marionberry any more sumptuous than the Navajo and Arapaho blackberries, the first erect thornless kinds, released by Dr. James Moore of the University of Arkansas in 1988 and 1993. No. Did Arkansas do anything to market these extraordinary plants? Not really. Now these masterworks of modern breeding just appear as the plump sumptuous berries at your produce stand or grocery, with none of the price premium that the Marionberry enjoys and none of the consumer recognition and demand. There’s a problem there. A lack of imagination at least.
Creating and marketing a signature local food from scratch is a challenge. But must we always go through the effort of creating new signature foods. There is another path. At one time the South was renowned for its ingredients and food. It abounded in signature foods, items that were gradually expunged from fields and gardens for reasons of economy, disease resistance, or their inefficiency under mechanized planting and harvesting. These were famous foods, enduring favorites cherished for their taste. Why not bring the best of these back?
For the past decade I have been involved in the effort to revive Carolina Gold Rice, the Carolina African Runner Peanut, Purple Ribbon Sugar Cane, the Sea Island Red Pea, the Bradford Watermelon, Purple Straw Wheat, Seashore Black Seed Rye. For all their lesser productivity than modern bred cultivars, for all their greater vulnerability to diseases, these items had the right taste—the flavors upon which the classic recipes that made up the repertoire of Lowcountry cuisine were made. When they were brought back, chefs such as Linton Hopkins and Sean Brock, realized that they were building blocks upon which the Southern culinary revival would be built. Southern food would not only taste different than cosmopolitan American restaurant fare; it would taste intrinsically better, deeper, more resonant.
So how do you sell a flavorful 40 pound GA Rattlesnake Watermelon when simplicity and convenience have marginalized the old seed picnic melon for the seedless round refrigerator melon? This was the question that confronted Nat Bradford 8 years ago when family’s famous Bradford melon was revived. He realized that the produce market should not monopolize his efforts. Good flavor tells in a host of preparations. History informed him where the flavor was originally deployed: in watermelon molasses, in rind pickles, watermelon beer, and in watermelon brandy. These value added products could be sold year round; and one didn’t have to worry about unsold melons rotting in a warehouse.
There is a process to these revivals: first research what the key items were; determine whether they still exist; obtain and get the into cultivation if they do; educate chefs on how to use them; publicize their stories; explore their potentialities.
Since coastal Georgia was part of the Lowcountry that was the initial focus of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, certain of our restorations have touched on Georgia farming and culinary heritage. When Cornelia Bailey, the matriarch of Sapelo Island, contacted the foundation seeking aid in reviving the island’s agricultural heritage in the effort to counter the efforts of developers to tax the African American island residents off of their land, her request was to help find a revenue producing crop to supplement the Sapelo Red Peas that SICARS was marketing. We went, examined the abandoned cane fields and ruined sugar mill, there. We knew that Sapelo had been the first major production hub of refined sugar on the east coast of the United States in the 1810s. But what cane were they refining? You have to know what has been lost before you can find it. Our research indicated that there were two that built Sapelo’s central place in the story of American sweetness: a Tahitian cane, Otaheite, that has been extinct globally for over 70 years, the other, purple ribbon, because of its cold tolerance and quality, became the standard field cane in the U. S. until the 1910s when certain of its offspring, Louisiana Purple, Blue Ribbon took its place. Jerome Dixon Sr, a Sapelo descendent, and Dr. William Thomas spearheaded the effort. We could not find purple ribbon in any cane collection in the U.S. So cane geneticist Steve Kresovich volunteered to back breed it into existence. He collected all of the ancient canes maintained by syrup brewers across the South—but no purple ribbon. While this effort was underway, I discovered that a grower in southern Mississippi had maintained the variety. From this stock Kresovich, Clemson students, Doc Bill and Jerome Dixon grew two plantings of cane—on Sapelo Island with Maurice Bailey and at Townsend. At Dixon & Thomas’s Georgia Coastal Gourmet Farm. In November of 2018 the juice of those canes were rendered into the first batch of syrup—all of which was purchased by chef Linton Hopkins for his restaurants in Atlanta and Sean Brock for the newly opened Husk Restaurant in Atlanta. Now the cane that the slaves on the Spaulding plantation grew enables the descendents of those slaves to keep their lands and homes on Sapelo.
Superlative cultivar + story + expert handling means that a signature food of GA has been restored.
I want to talk about another Georgia project. The Carolina Gold Rice Foundation is all about landrace grains. During the colonial era the greatest millers and bread makers in the southern colonies were the Salzburgers, who in the 1740s settled around Ebenezer Georgia. This Pietist sect were brilliant conceptualists and realized they should not plant the wheat of their Austrian homeland, but seek cereal in the warm regions of the same latitude as GA. They secured hard durum wheat from Sicily. When Angelo Santi introduced macaroni and cheese to our region at the end of the 18th century, he needed durum to make his pasta. Nowadays all of the durum that goes into southern mac & cheese comes from North and South Dakota, Wisconsin, Montana, and Arizona. Why can’t we grow macaroni wheat and make our own macaroni? There is no reason. The Carolina Gold Rice Foundation has secured landrace Timilia Wheat from Sicily and will revive a crop that made the Salzburgers the byword of early American milling and baking.
You may think listening to these vignettes that rather deep research into agricultural and culinary history has to take place before any meaningful initiative takes place in consolidating signature ingredients and preparations. And it must be said knowledge is good. For Georgia, however, the task of identifying signatures is easier than for any other state, because of the multitude of Georgia local products campaign menus prepared in 1913, that I have reproduced in Part 1 of this issue.
Consider the menu proposed by the Mayor of Macon: in every aspect it is informative. Consider the nuts: even though this menu was written nine years after Chestnut blight had been introduced into the United States, it had not yet reached Georgia and the sweet bonanza of American chestnuts and small chinquapins could still be sampled in November. Pecans in 1913 were orchard trees, and had been since 1876 in Georgia; the walnuts, hickories, and scaly bark hickories may have been foraged. Pinders were another name for peanuts. A glance at the N. C Willet seed catalogue from Augusta for 1913 indicates that the white Spanish and Valencia were used to feed hogs primarily, the Carolina was esteemed for oil, the Virginia and Jumbo were the roasting peanuts, and probably the ones indicated here. Willet also provides an interesting commentary on chufas (what some call nut sedge). Cyperus Esculentus were called ground almonds or more commonly hog nuts, and were a subterranean grass nut introduced extensively at the end of the 19th century for fattening hogs. But farmers developed a taste for them, and they became a favorite snack. I wonder how long it has been since the culinary potentials of the chufa were explored in the South.
Let’s turn to the vegetables: Frost Nipped Collards—what variety? The standard 19th century variety had been the Georgia Blue Stem, a tough hardy variety that had to be long cooked to avoid the texture of a boiled boot. In 1901 the Georgia White Cabbage Collard was introduced to the fields of Georgia. Jasper became the particular locale of this variety which because of its tenderness and handsome configuration. If one wished to feature the best in collards the white cabbage would have received the nod. Does anybody grow them now? In the past 10 years the heirloom yellow cabbage collard of Ayden, North Carolina, has been generally recognized as the best culinary collard in the South.
Turnip Greens with Bacon. By the 1910s a distinct preference had emerged in George of turnip greens over turnips. Sometimes called turnip salad, the greens grew so great in public estimation that vegetable breeders began producing “salad variety” turnips, for greens rather than roots. The most famous of these was the 7 top turnip which had no root. But there was a second category—the winter salad turnip. Depending on the seedsman it sported various names; : Callaway Turnip, Georgia Winter Turnip, Southern Prize, Frost King Turnip. It was valued because it could over-winter without the flesh becoming grainy. It was fine flavored, and kept in better shape longer than any other root loved by livestock. Like other late season turnips, the Georgia Winter Turnip was more productive that early season varieties. The earliest purveyor of seed was Alexander Drug and Seed of August throughout the early 1890s.
“Differing from ‘Seven-Tops’ which simply ‘tops,’ [generates foliage but no bulb] the Southern Prize has large, white tubers growing sometimes from 2 to 3 pounds in weight. The coming turnip for the South. Not Winter-killed. Large white turnp that is excellent, lasting through winter till late Spring, when other turnips are pithy. This turnip’s root is both large and tender, and finely flavored, superior foliage to other white turnips; it also provides foliage or greens as luxuriant and branching as Seven Tops.” (p. 26)
This is a lost turnip. And now when grazing brassicas have become a thing among agronomists, the Callaway seems to have a double desirability. And ideal salad turnip.
Let’s do another of the vegetables—the Houston County Asparagus. In the 1890s all of asparagus culture in the South was imperiled by a pathogenic outbreak. A 1902 article by the Macon Telegraph tells the tale: asparagus culture was succumbing to a bacterial disease called rust. In 1890 John Nix, a vegetable broker, created a somewhat rust resistant heat tolerant variety, with the large stalk of the Conover’s Colossal or the old French Argenteuil. Called the Palmetto, it became the answer to the march of disease, and the variety spread throughout the South, including GA. In 1902 the editor pronounced the Palmetto and the Conover equal to all local needs regarding asparagus. N. C. Willet has some comments about the two varieties in his 1917 catalog. First the Conover’s: [It] is regarded here as a rough, unsightly, and woody asparagus and rather poor quality, but used a good bit north.” The Palmetto: Popular and grown extensively for a generation . . . Possibly more Palmetto is grown than any other asparagus.” So there is little doubt that the Macon product dinner had Palmetto asparagus.
Palmetto is a lost asparagus. It fell victim to a change in public taste in the 1920s when physical culturists. Who equated thin and wiry asparagus with thin bodies by diet conscious diners, made the thick asparagus emblems of human bloat, regardless of their greater tenderness and superiority of flavor. It remained in cultivation in parts of the South until the 1970s, then disappeared. The listing in the USDA Grin has been closed because of the loss of seed viability.
Indeed of all the lost garden vegetables of the South, the Palmetto Asparagus is perhaps the one most avidly sought by farmers.
We’ve looked for the Palmetto asparagus for five years without success. But I’m here with hopeful news today. There is a promising candidate, saved 30 years ago, from a clump of spears on the margin of the overgrown kitchen garden of the vacant Hardy Plantation near Whitemire SC 30 years ago. This Spring we will do the genetic tests to determine whether or not it is what we think.
I could spend the remainder of the afternoon elaborating fine points of the vegetables on this menu: that the Bibb County celery was gold self blanching, that the tomatoes are the most challenging things to determine given the late season, that the yellow Georgia pumpkin yam, the choker, also called the Red Bermuda, had roundish light purple large tubers, prominently veined, and was quite prolific. The Spanish could be the Yam, with oblong tubers, medium size, and dull white flesh; All of these survive. The Irish potato was probably the Mercer, which survives now in Nova Scotia as the blue nose potato. I could speculate on the beans, but I want really to focus on the final things—the field peas: there’s a trinity listed—the lady, the crowder, and the black eyed pea. One of the odder developments of southern agriculture has been its narrowing of pea choices. A farmer usually only grows one kind now—pink eye purple hull, or brown crowder, or knuckle hull. In the 19th century they might grow as many as fifteen. The culinary qualities of cowpeas and field peas are so broadly various that no one pea suffices, not even the pink eyed purple hull, or the California 10 black eyed pea. The Lowcountry had its own Trinity: like Macon it had a white delicate pea, but the Rice Pea in Charleston took the place of Macon’s Lady Pea; instead of the Brown Sugar Crowder, Macon’s hearty meal pea, the Lowcountry looked to the sea island red pea. And the black eyed pea which enjoyed broad popularity in regions away from the coast, did not fare as well as the Whippoorwill in the favor of coastal peoples. I recently recommended that Valambrosa Plantation in Savannah grow four kinds: black crowder, rice pea, red ripper, and whippoorwill. There are approximately 35 extant heirloom cowpeas whose seed is now on the market.
From one menu we’ve encountered a market list of lost tastes, chufas, chinquapins, salad turnips, fat asparagus, white cabbage collards. Let’s hope that the Palmetto asparagus is found. Let us look for the Georgia Winter Turnip. Let’s get seed for the White Cabbage collard and get it into cultivation. And what will be do when the American Chestnut Foundation releases blight resistant saplings in three years? Isn’t it time to start working up our chestnut chops—making chestnut skillet bread with the meal, deviled chestnuts with the whole nuts, and chestnut soufflé from the boiled mashed meats. Two years ago I supplied in the pages of The Chestnut Newsletter, all of the recipes for chestnuts printed prior to the blight outbreak. There is much to ponder there. In particular there is a chestnut soufflé recipe from the 1890s from Augusta and a deviled chestnuts recipe from Dahlonega that deserve particular development.
Georgia has not lacked for distinctive products that were signatures of place, Perhaps a local products campaign would be beneficial in 2021 as it was a century ago. I have not talked about fruits here—but just like the vegetable, GA was nationally famous for its Elberta and Belle of Georgia Peaches, its Yates cider apple, its Ogeechee lime (the fruit of the tupelo tree), Each item has a story. Each item became an agriculture and culinary fixture long on the land and at the table because of distinctive and superior flavor. Many vanished with the rise of industrial agriculture, and the breeding primacy given to productivity, disease resistance, and transportability. Flavor once again commands money and respect. Chefs desire it. The public desires it too when it thinks of the ingredients as part of one’s identity. Consider the case of Carolina Gold Rice. When first restored, it was a specialty crop. Now more than a decade later it is a commodity—a necessary ingredient of southern cookery—the variety a home cooks seeks out to get that old perloo or chicken bog flavor. Once there were two growers. Now they are dozens.