ISSUE 93, REFLECTIONS, Part 1: The South and Xtreme Flavors
ISSUE 93, REFLECTIONS, Part 1: The South and Xtreme Flavors
THE SOUTH AND XTREME FLAVORS
A talk delivered at the “Sensing the South" Symposium at Mississippi State University 4/192019
For the past dozen years I have labored against the degradation of flavor in American and particularly southern cookery.[1] As the Chair of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation I have directed the work of a community of farmers, scientists, millers and chefs restoring the landrace grains of the region—Carolina Gold Rice, Seashore Blackseed Rye, Tennessee Winter Barley, Purple Straw Wheat, White Barley Oats, Timilia Durum Wheat, Jim Red Corn, Sea Island White Flint Corn—and heirloom vegetables.[2] About 40 ingredients all told have been brought back and many embraced as central elements of the recent revival of southern cookery. The grains all of which were planted and used for over a century during they heydays were all cherished for wholesomeness. Behind that innocuous word lay an immense depth of significance. So I will ask you to divorce yourself from your usual associations with the word wholesome--your indignation at the innocuousness of the family channel—your search for Japanese manga suitable for your ten year old daughter. . .
In 2018 at the annual symposium of the International Society Neurogastronomy, I asked why research fixated upon flavor sensations—sour, bitter, savory, sweet, umami, and heat—rather than more gradual effects of ingestion such as satiety, getting high, the sense of wholesomeness.[3] Wholesome was the taste ideal of the farmer consumers who shaped the world’s grain landraces over thousands of plant generations of seed saving and planting.
Several qualities characterize wholesomeness across cultures over time: a modesty of flavor that permits consumption day after day without cloying, a bloom of starch that gives an agreeable mouthfeel when chewed, a relatively quick sense of satiety after being swallowed, a tendency to sweeten in the mouth as saliva breaks down starch, and perhaps a trace of nuttiness. Grain flavor quality was judged in simple porridges; less often by chewing on the ripe wheat berries in the field with no baking. How meal from milled grain behaved when baked, how grain fermented, how they excited the taste of livestock, the quality of their straw, and millability mattered greatly and increasingly in the 19th century.[4]
Wholesome grain can be placed in total contrast with Xtreme tasting foods. But the story of grain breeding since the rise of professional grain breeders in the 19th century has not been the amping up of flavor to sensational levels, but rather its elimination. Grain breeding in the last quarter of the 19th century turned away from flavor to agronomic desiderata: pest and pathogen resistance, productivity, quickness to maturity, and awnless grain.[5] The marginalization of flavor was exacerbated by several developments—roller milling which deconstructed the wheat and extracted much of its nutrition and taste[6]—also the theorization of tastelessness as a positive virtue in foodstuffs by David Wesson in the 1890s on the grounds
of its universal adoptability as an ingredient in composite preparations.[7] The evacuation of flavor from 20th century grain also meant the evacuation of nutritional value. The truth of this can be readily registered in the headings of any University Wheat Performance Trial . What matters? Yield in Bushels per Acre, Weight in lbs per bushel, spike incidence of awns, lodging, flowering date, plant height, grain moisture at harvest, susceptibility to powdery mildew, leaf rust, cold injury, leaf blotch, Cephasporium stripe, Wheat streak mosaic virus, black point, barley yellow dwarf, millability it terms of protein %, softness of flour, lactic acid, and cookie diameter (spread). This was a 2017 test.[8]
At this juncture we can intrude Mark Schatzker’s jeremiad concerning industrial food in America, The Dorito Effect, in which he charges American food companies with reducing the nutritional component of foods—the grain element—to render it a flavorless carrier for salt, fat, spice, & heat.[9] And let us double down with Robert Lustig’s crusade against the sugaring of America, drawn from his studies of childhood obesity that ballooned in the 1980s.[10] For every Dorito there was a Kit-Kat bar. Children grew fat because of the free pass given to sugar in the first U. S. government Dietary Guidelines (1980). There was even a shunned prophet who foretold the health crisis to come, the Australian scientist John Yudkin, whose Pure, White, and Deadly (1972) suggested an equivalence of fructose with heroin. Sugar did not just saturate soft drinks and candies, but began appearing in tomato sauce, orange juice, indeed all fruit juices, in canned vegetables. Since sugar was a drug, a chemical that induced cravings for more, the food industry obliged and injected sugar wherever it might inspire repeat purchase of a product.
It was against this sugaring and spicing and exciting of flavor—and the degradation of taste that it entailed—that the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation organized in 2004. We would recover the oldest landrace grains and vegetables—those varieties that had been shaped by farmer-consumers who sought wholesomeness in their seed selection and grain nurturing.[11] It should be no surprise that the persons who responded to our restoration of Carolina Gold Rice, of Purple Straw Wheat, of Seashore Black Seed Rye were those people whose tastes had been least degraded, the culinary professionals who ran fine dining restaurants in the South.[12] And they advocated strongly for those ingredients to their customers, stimulating sufficient demand for Carolina Gold, benne, and other of the restored ingredients to become retail commodities.
There are satisfactions to eating your work. And there are satisfactions with having a bowl of grits alive with flavor. But we were aware there was a problem lurking around our project. The mission of our Foundation was to revive the cuisines of the Lowcountry, of tidewater, of Louisiana, and we knew that a cuisine is an expression of an entire growing system, and the growing system that had emerged in the South was a peculiar mixture of the traditional grain-centered systems of the pre-modern world, and the global exchanges of the early modern world.
Wolfgang Shivelbusch in his classic Tastes of Paradise traced the emergence of the first global market around caffeine (coffee and tea), capsicum (hot peppers), theobromine (chocolate and ilex cassini), nicotine, spice, alcohol, and sugar in the 16th and 17th centuries.[13] These were truly drugs—non-nutritive, addictive, and all producing a somatic effect. The English Acts of Trade and Navigation of 1651 shaped England’s empire into a mercantilist closed marked of colonies and motherland. It enumerated those commodities that rival empires produced and that White Hall wished established in the English colonies.[14] Sugar, wine, tobacco were on the projectors’ short list of what to cultivate in newly branded staple colonies. In many a newspaper meditation in the 1800s South Carolinians congratulated the colony for having had rice and indigo as staples, rather than Virginia and Maryland’s sot-weed or the sugar and rum of Barbados and Jamaica. The boosters neglected to note that prior to the Civil War South Carolina had attempted to cultivate the entire battery of world drugs.
Tobacco became a money crop for back country farmers in the 1760s.[15] Hot pepper seed became an item of commerce in 1820 when Thomas Thornton advertised cayenne.[16] Carolinians planted sugar in 1828 and sorghum in 1855.[17] Tea was first brought to South Carolina by Francois Andre Michaux in 1799.[18] Dr. Junius Smith of Golden Grove plantation in Greenville grew tea from 1848 until his murder in 1853. In 1888 Dr. Charles U. Shepard founded Pinehurst tea plantation, a successful commercial venture who plant materials survives in the present Charleston Tea Plantation and was used in Lipton’s experimental station in the 1960s.[19] Experiments in planting both coffee and cacao took places in the 1830s under the auspices of the Charleston horticultural society. Both failed. But the lowcountry grew a native source of theobromine, the Ilex cassini, the source of the Native Americans’ famous “black drink.”[20] Failed attempts were made to grow clove, nutmeg (Dr. Henry Perrine got it to grow in Indian Key Florida in 1838), vanilla (again Perrine on the Florida keys) cinnamon, black pepper, and . Gardeners successfully grew allspice, cardamom, coriander, cumin, caraway, fenugreek, ginger, mustard, poppy, turmeric or the world spices. My point: historically Carolina’s growers bought into the world drug system as enthusiastically as farmers in 2019 jostle for marijuana allotments.
So as we revive the landrace grains and tout the return of flavor and nutrition, we simultaneously revive the sugar canes, the sorghums, the hot peppers that would capture the tongues of consumers. No our dream is not to fashion the Super Dorito: the grain base with maximum flavor and nutrition coated with the most piquant heat, sugar, spice and flat on the planet. When I became aware of curious disparity between the ancient cultivation of wholesomeness in flavor and the embrace of global taste sensations in the formative period of southern agriculture and food, I comforted myself with an equipoise model. The consoling picture went something like this: in the early 19th century a mash up of European, Native, and African ingredients became in the hands of experimental enslaved African cooks and European bakers a cuisine—indeed three different cuisines in the tidewater, the lowcountry, and Louisiana. These somehow managed to secure a balance in the food that endured from the 1820s to the 1940s, created a repertoire of classic dishes in three regions of the South that won international praise, local reverence, and a balance between urbane professional technique and country vernacular cookery.
But the more you know the more you realize that maybe Southern food was not so much the victim or the sugaring, spicing, and drugging that has led to the degradation of the popular palate. Rather it may have been the chief contributor to the excesses of heat, sugar, and spice. Let facts be submitted to a candid world. But before I present my selective histories of sugar and spice in the South, let me gesture at one argument that I will not be making but is I think consequential in the larger story. The reason why flavors had to be revived in the past decade was because plant breeding had marginalized flavor for agronomic qualities in crops (pest and pathogen resistance, quick conversion of petroleum based fertilizer into organic matter, productivity) necessitated by monocropping.[21] Large scale cropping of staples originated in the plantation cultures of the Western hemisphere. In the South however, the experience of soil exhaustion because of extractive planting of cotton led to the embrace of and later dependence upon guano and the notion that agriculture required extensive chemical supplementation of the soil’s fertility. This led agriculture away from tilth building in soil to the notion of annual plantings with chemical supplementation of fields. Midwest grain farming mirrored southern practice, albeit with great scientific rigor.
The Sugaring: The South made several desultory attempts to mimic the sugar planting of the West Indies in the 18th century in Florida and Louisiana. Much has been made of the 1750s plantings of Creole Cane in Louisiana and the first mill erected by Claude-Joseph Dubreuil de Villars in New Orleans. But sugar production remained insignificant until the 1820s when production by the Thomas Spalding Mill on Sapelo Island GA and mills in Louisiana pushed the price of white loaf sugar down to that of a modestly priced commodity.[22] The price drop was occasioned by the cultivation of a new variety—purple ribbon sugar cane obtained from St. Eustacius by the King family of St. Simon’s Island, GA, in 1814 by and conveyed to Joseph Coiron of Louisiana in 1817.[23] This sturdy cold tolerant cane proved reliable in the field and highly productive of juice. The 1820s saw the output from Georgia and Louisiana force the import price of refined sugar down markedly.[24] Fruit and berry harvests, for the first time, did not have to suffer the waste and loss of transportation to the produce market and the possibility of non-sale during times of seasonal glut. Sugar could preserve the entire harvest, and so began the great heyday of American jams, jellies, and preserves. These preparations, once valuable and rare, the mark of an upper class pantry, became common farmhouse fare. 1823 was the year when newspapers exploded with jelly recipes. What is interesting is how early on the idea emerged that sugaring fruits improved their quality over their fresh state. (Surely the first step in the sugaring of America). An anecdote from 1833: “A little girl asked her father to tell her the meaning of the word evangelize.” “It means, to make better,” said the father. The child remembered the definition, incomplete as it was. Soon after this while sitting at the table where there were some excellent peach preserves, she asked her father to help her to some of those “evangelized Peaches.”[25]
While the marriage of sucrose with the fructose in jellies, jams, and preserves gave one drug a double charge in the pantries of free southerners, there was one place sugar met up with many of the other tastes of paradise in a swap meet of early southern drugs: the punch bowl. Originally the refreshment of urbane gentlemen’s clubs in the port cities of the 18th-century English Atlantic, punches mingled spirits, citrus, and sugar at a minimum.[26] In Savannah and Charleston they elaborated into wondrous concoctions. Sarah Rutledge records the formula for one of the more austere of the popular Carolina bowls—“Regent’s punch”—“To two quarts of green tea add half a pint of currant jelly, a little champagne, and the juice of four lemons. Sweeten with loaf-sugar, and add old spirits of brandy, to your taste”[27] (The Carolina Housewife, 148). Fancier punches—Charleston Light Dragoons Punch, Chatham Artillery Punch or St. Cecilia’s Punch—added ratafia, pineapple, and perhaps spices such as cinnamon and cloves. All of these concoctions remained elite beverages, but there was a demotic drink that would emerge after the Civil War that was basically punch without the alcohol: sweet tea. It had the green tea (black would only predominate in the mixture after the 1890s), the sugar, the lemon, and occasionally a cinnamon stick.
One of the fanciful excercises of southern municipalities is to imagine itself the birthplace of sweet tea. Summerville, SC lays claim to an 1890 origin (and at least it had a southern tea plantation within the town limits). St. Louis had its moments as well, with the 1904 World’s Fair being claimed as the founding event. But the historical record marshals an array of desultory facts that suggest the beverage appeared first in the North, was popular in summer circles in New York in 1868.[28] It is first mentioned in a southern setting in the Virginia Springs in 1871.[29] 1874 was its break-out year with widespread sales and mention from Dallas to Cincinnati to Richmond. It was a summertime drink exclusively until the 1970s when the great boom in sweet tea took place.[30] Since that time one could get it year round at any restaurant at any price point in the South from Rodney Scott’s Barbecue in Hemenway SC to the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond.
The liquid solution of caffeine and sucrose did not exert an absolute dominion over southern beverage counters since 1874. It had potent rivals—Coca Cola offered three drugs instead of sweet tea’s two: it had sugar; it had caffeine from Kola nuts, in had coca leaves, a narcotic.[31] Befitting its potent constitution, it was originally created by John Stith Pemberton as a patent medicine. Its antecedent, Pemberton’s French Wine Coca nerve tonic had a fourth drug, alcohol. The growing strength of the temperance movement led to the elimination of the alcohol in 1886. In 1903 the coca leaf syrup was eliminated as well, and which time the sugar content was goosed upward. So soft drinks offered the same caffeine and sucrose lift offered by sweet tea, only with carbonation. Pepsi Cola offered much the same. And the other southern soft drink companies—Nehi from Columbus GA, Royal Crown Cola from Columbus GA, Dr. Pepper from Waco, TX. When the American Medical Association first recommended limiting sugar in diets in 1942 it specifically referenced the ingestion of soft drinks as a problem.[32] So in 2019 two out of three adults in the United States and one out of three children are overweight or obese.[33]
Now I realize that some of you in the audience who have grown up under the Xtreme regime of beverages are thinking what’s the next play? How can we push the flavor/sensation envelope. Snapple has already goosed iced tea with a charge of fruit derive fructose. Yoo-hoo (owned by Dr. Pepper) has added theobromine from chocolate into the soda matrix, albeit in trace amounts of approximately 2% of the contents of the bottle. Is there anything an enterprising southern soft drink manufacturer to do, using local ingredients, to up the sensation level, addiction quotient, the bam. After all Red Bull has pushed the caffeine and sugar formula to the Xtreme and added taurine (what used to be called bile, 2-aminoethanesulfonic acid) to up one’s nervous response time.[34] Well it does occur to me there is one play that hasn’t been made: we have not yet seen Carolina Reeper Cola. Capsicum is the one common drug that hasn’t been added to the caffeine/sugar matrix.
The Carolina Reeper pepper was bred this decade by Ed Currie of Rock Hill, South Carolina, and proclaimed the hottest pepper in the world at 1,570,000 Scovil heat units by the Guiness Book of World Records in 2013. It is, in certain respects, the culmination of an impetus to ramp up the fire in peppers that has been a pathology among male plant breeders in the region since the 19th century. The bottle of red pepper sauce has been on the southern table since the 1820s—first the bird pepper sauce (in New Orleans Zo-Zo sauce) from the West Indies—then Noisette’s Cayenne sauce of the 1850s—then the McIlhenney’s Tabasco Sauce from the 1860s—Sam Garner’s “Texas Pete” sauce out of North Carolina in the 1920s. The Cajun boom of the 1980s made the pepper component of entrees emphatic. The artisanal pepper break out of the 1990s began the current Scovil arms race. New irrational frontiers of Xtreme eating are being ventures every month.
The Carolina Gold Rice Foundation has populated southern gardens with West Indian bird peppers and the original form of the Louisiana red cayenne. But of all food fads in the United States in 2019 the Reaper challenge must rank as the most unwholesome. And as for a beverage play for the reaper—soft drinks because of the liability issues connection with child ingestion—is not the bet. Alcohol is the partner drug. Carolina Reaper Triple IPA by the aptly named Brewtality brewing in San Jose, CA. Carolina Reaper Peach IPA by Flying Dog Brewery. Carolina Reeper Red Ale by Fireforge Craft Brewery. O and there’s Carolina Reaper Pepper Vodka by Charleston Distilling Company, guaranteed to burn away the alcohol calories you are imbibing in your cocktail. That parasite problem you’ve been living with—it’ll take care of that too.
I have not come here to rip the bag of doritos out of your hand. I’m not going to tax your coke intake down to a prudential modicum. If you are not alive unless you gut ignites into a capiscium fireball, go ahead and have your dark & stormy with Reaper Vodka and Blenheim’s ginger ale. It used to be you had no alternative to the offerings of an industrial food system smitten with xtreme flavors and effects or null flavor. We have worked to provide an alternative—more modest, more delicate, more complementary to other foods, and more healthful. The choice is yours.
[1]I chronicled this effort in Southern Provision: the Creation and Revival of a Cuisine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
[2] Mission of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation: “The Carolina Gold Rice Foundation is committed to rebuilding the fundamentals of local culinary heritage through scholarship, research, farming, exploration, pro bono rare seed distribution, and good wholesome food.”
http://www.thecarolinagoldricefoundation.org/
[3] David S. Shields, “Rediscovering Heritage Flavors,” Plenary Address 2018 International Society of Neurogastronomy, Lexington, KY, March 22, 2018. Witness the topics of the serial volumes of Developments in Food Science: Vol. 24. Flavors and Off Flavors (1989); Vol. 25, Bitterness in Foods and Beverages (1989); Vol 40, Food Flavors (1997).
[4] Frederick Accum’s A Treatise on the Art of Making Good and Wholesome Bread of Wheat Oats Rye Barley and other Farinaceous Grains (London, 1821) summarizes the traditional aesthetics of wholesomeness while arguing for a new dimension, purity, in the face of food adulteration for profit.
[5] David S. Shields, “Replenishing the Seeds that Made Southern Cookery,” Seeds: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery, 2018, ed. Mark McWilliams (London: Prospect Books, 2019).
[6] See the critiques summarized by Elizabeth G. Dunn, “A Call to Carbs,” Wall Street Journal (May 21, 2016), “Off Duty-1”.
[7] Shields, Southern Provisions, 300-03.
[8] Lee Siler, et. al., 2017 Michigan State Wheat Performance Trials https://varietytrials.msu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2017-MSU-Wheat-Report-COM-FINAL-07_31_17.pdf
[9] Mark Schatzker, The Dorito Effect, the Surprising New Truth about Food and Flavor (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), particularly Part 1, chapters 2 “The Big Bland” and chapter 3 “The Big Flavor.” See also, John McQuaid, Tasty, The Art and Science of What We Eat (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), chapters 2 and 5.
[10] Robert H. Lustig, Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease (New York: Penguin-Plume, 2013), 117-29.
[11] A term in use in biology since 1908, the current understanding of landrace is summarized in Francesc Casañas, Joan Simó, Joan Casals, and Jaime Prohens, “Toward an Evolved Concept of Landrace,” Frontiers of Plant Science 8, 145 (February 6, 2017): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5296298/ .
[12] Sean Brock was the most vocal of the southern chefs. Burkhard Bilger, “True Grits: In Charleston, a Quest to Revive Authentic Southern Cooking,” New Yorker (October 31, 2011), 40-53.
[13] Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants (New York: Pantheon, 1992).
[14] David Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires; England the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650-1770 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 287-301.
[15] Eldred E. Prince, Robert R. Simpson, Long Green: The Rise and Fall of Tobacco in South Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 7-14.
[16] David Shields, Southern Provisions, 48.
[17] David Shields, Southern Provisions, 254-57, 272-73.
[18] Leonora Beck Ellis, “American Tea-Gardens, Actual and Possible,” The American Monthly Review of Reviews (1901), 315-16.
[19] Charles Upham Shephard, Special Report on Tea-raising in South Carolina, U. S. Department of Agriculture (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1893). “The Charleston Tea Plantation’s History,” https://www.charlestonteaplantation.com/history .
[20] Edwin Moses Hale, Ilex Cassine: The Aboriginal North American Tea, USDA Division of Botany Bulletin #14 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1891).
[21] David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 134-39.
[22] For the consolidation of the Spalding sugar enterprise see, “Spalding Letter on Sugar,” Georgia Journal (January, 9, 1827), 1; Charleston City Gazette (January 13, 1813), 2; Charleston City Gazette (August 17, 1813), 1; Carolina Gazette (October 10, 1813), 2.
[23] J. B. Avequin, The Louisiana Planter (October 24, 1891), 3.
[24] “Wholesale Prices-Sugar-E125, 1800-1970.” The Historical Statistics of the United States2 Vols. (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census, 1975), 209. The price drop began in 1825 and continued until 1840.
[25] “Evangelizing,” Boston Recorder (April 10, 1833), 4.
[26] David Wondrich, Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl (New York: Penguin, 2010), chapter iv “The Age of Punch.”
[27] Sarah Rutledge, “Regent’s Punch,”The Carolina Housewife (Charleston: W. R. Babcock, 1847), 148.
[28] [Iced Tea], New York Tribune (July 27, 1868), 8.
[29] [A Visit to the Virginia Springs], New Orleans Times Picayune (August 27, 1871), 5.
[30] Christine Arp Gang, “Iced Tea gains popularity nationwide as a summer drink,” Marietta Journal (June 30, 1988), 51.
[31] Bartow J. Elmore, Citizen Coke: the Making of Coca Cola Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), 53-118.
[32] American Medical Association Council on Foods and Nutrition, “Some nutritional aspects of sugar, candy, and sweetened carbonated beverages,” Journal of the American Medical Association 120 (1942), 763–765.
[33] Lenny R. Vartanian, et al. “Effects of soft drink consumption on nutrition and health: a systematic review and meta-analysis” American journal of public health vol. 97, 4 (2007): 667-75.
[34] Katherine Zeratsky, “Taurine is an ingredient in many energy drinks. Is taurine safe,” Mayo Clinic: Nutrition and Healthy Eating” https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/expert-answers/taurine/faq-20058177