What we eat helps us understand history, cultures, traditions and each other, say two Carolina experts.
We enjoy gathering at a table filled with our family’s favorite foods. We remember specific dishes and the people who prepared them, special occasions and meaningful traditions.
Scholars who study food do too. They also look for insights beyond a single family.
“Food is a powerful portal into understanding the human experience across time,” said folklorist Michelle Lanier, a doctoral student in Carolina’s geography department who earned a master’s degree in folklore here. Lanier knows Southern food. She grew up in Columbia and Hilton Head in South Carolina. Her parents are from North Carolina.
“When I think about how we understand the South, the Black South and people in general, I turn to the phrase ‘We carry home in our mouth.’ I think about our language, our words, our songs. I think about the flavors we crave and that home is transportable because it can be laid out on plates and eaten,” Lanier said.
For example, Lanier remembers barbecue representing family in two states. “Barbecue is a big deal for Black families in the summer because of family reunions or when you’re visiting a grandparent or an aunt. Going between Columbia and Raleigh, where I had kin in both, I’d eat mustard-based barbecue sandwiches in South Carolina and within a day have vinegar based-barbecue from Cooper’s in Raleigh.”
Another Southern food scholar, Elizabeth Engelhardt, is Kenan Eminent Professor of Southern Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences’ American studies department. Her ancestors settled in Transylvania and Henderson counties in the North Carolina mountains. She grew up in Hendersonville.
Her book, “Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food,” explores the relationship between food and women in the South between 1870 and 1930 with a focus on poor whites, farm families, and middle- and working-class African Americans.
With her family’s origins and food in mind, Engelhardt sees a table with dishes that “have a deep, long history in a place. Some use ingredients in the place, but with cooking techniques and traditions and flavors that have traveled, that are influenced by folks who have come here and folks who want to be here,” she said. ‘Mountain families pickled or fermented local ramps, sassafras or wild ginger. They pan-fried chicken and okra grown in their yards or gardens. The ingredients were local. The techniques were learned from Indigenous, German, West African and northern European practices.”
Food enriches history
Lanier, who is director of the N.C. Division of State Historic Sites, said that talking about food sometimes reminds her of stories like that of abolitionist and author Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813-1897). After escaping enslavement, Jacobs hid for seven years in a crawlspace at her grandmother Molly Horniblow’s house in Edenton, North Carolina. Lanier has no doubt that Horniblow, known for her baked goods and preserves, passed plates of food, including preserves made from local figs, through a trapdoor, to sustain Jacobs.
Jacobs eventually fled to the North in 1842.
“When Jacobs was a free woman running a boarding house in Washington, D.C., she was known for creating holiday gatherings for formerly enslaved black women. She invited them into her home and set a table with grand finery, lace tablecloth, porcelain dishes and beautiful offerings of food, cakes, chicken salads and elegant foods. She recognized that they had a shared experience of being formerly enslaved and now living lives as free women,” Lanier said.
Serving that find food was an act of resistance, said Lanier. It provided elegance and luxury that had previously been denied to the women.
“Without food, her life would be an interesting story, but not as rich,” Lanier said.
Lanier’s family favorites
Besides barbecue, Lanier’s family history involves foods and traditions, particularly during the summer. “We had a love affair with produce in the summer,” she said. Other family favorites include:
Sun-ripened red tomatoes, sliced and on a plate. “One of my grandfathers loved fresh summer tomatoes so much that he would bite them like apples.”
Fresh sliced and peeled cucumbers, dressed in white vinegar with salt and pepper. “We had them alongside barbecue sandwiches.”
Peaches. “Finding that just-right bushel of peaches that are so tender and sweet, not too fuzzy, don’t cling too much to the pit, is almost like finding a pot of gold.”
Scuppernong grapes. “Another summer treat from both Carolinas, often at roadside stands.”
Boiled peanuts, also from roadside stands. “Late summer. Labor Day is nearing. We’d go on road trips or to the beach and see signs for hot, boiled peanuts. A brown paper bag with boiled peanuts that are salted, brined well, then knowing that trick of putting them in your mouth and finding the crease to bite and get that burst of salt.”
The table as a complicated, important space
Engelhardt, also senior associate dean for fine arts and humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences and co-director of pan-University initiative Southern Futures, studies food because it helps determine who defines the South and how.
“If you ask my family where we are from, the first answer is likely to be ‘the mountains of North Carolina.’ The Appalachian Mountains have shaped who we are. Depending on who we are fortunate to encounter, that those mountains are in North Carolina, in the South and in the United States becomes important for the communities we might wish to build together,” Engelhardt said.
She shares Lanier’s take on food as a connection to the past, while emphasizing its future effects.
“What’s interesting is the places where food makes space for us to talk to each other, to use our hands, use our family stories, use a table to talk about things that we wouldn’t otherwise talk about,” Engelhardt said.
Food gives some people power, she added. Some people have enough; others don’t. Some people are cooking, while others are being served. Some people’s recipes and innovations get remembered and celebrated; some are erased. “Too often the everyday food of working people gets ‘discovered’ and suddenly the people who preserved it can no longer afford to eat it,” Engelhardt said. “In North Carolina, we’ve seen that with ramps in the mountains and oysters or shrimp and grits on the coast.
“The table is a complicated space, so I don’t want to romanticize it, but it can help us think about who are we today, how we got to this place and where do we want to go? And the question of where we want to go, I think more and more has to start with how are we going together? So the table is important. It means we take the time,” she said.
Engelhardt’s family favorites
Engelhardt’s family favorites reflect a reliance on family who maintained gardens and canned food.
Fried apple pies. “Made with local apples, passed down through stories of which tree produces the best cooking fruit, fried apple pies are made with dried apples, not much sugar and a light dough. They are made to carry with you.”
Green beans. “Local chef Sheri Castle and I share a devotion to half runners, a bean you can only get in the mountains. Picked and snapped earlier in the day for eating that evening and the rest of the week. Honestly, when I get half runners, I eat them three meals a day.”
Silver Queen corn. As with the beans, “almost always from Uncle Jerry and Aunt Betty’s garden.”
Fried chicken. “Piled high, hot from the cast-iron skillet. Lightly battered, pan fried and juicy.”
Biscuits with homemade apple jelly or blackberry jam. “Canned by my grandmother, Uncle Joe, or Uncle Jesse, the jellies and jams always had handmade labels.”
Potato salad and slaw. Her family was particular about the slaw’s dressing — Duke’s mayonnaise, vinegar, milk, salt, sugar and pepper.
By Scott Jared, The Well