Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the Heart of Manhattan Rockefeller Center, New York City News Stand Studios. Joined as usual with John, how you doing? Doing great, thanks. Yeah?
Great. Got Joe Hazen rocking the panels. What's up? Hello and welcome to the show. Nice.
We got a full house tonight. Upper left-hand corner, we got Quinn. How you doing? Hey, I'm good. Good.
And holding down Los Angeles, we have not only Jackie Molecules. How you doing, Jack? Yep. Good. Hopefully with further tales of uh of dishes he he ate while he was abroad.
And of course, not least, Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing? I know she was here. And while we're waiting for Anastasia to get back, uh our special guest uh on on the phone today, so I can't, you know, I can't give the squinty eye, which I'll have to give John the squinty eye instead when I'm doing stuff, is uh Michael Twitty, whose new book, The American South, is out today, available on Kitchen Arts and Letters with a discount for uh cooking issues Patreon members. How you doing?
Welcome to the show. I'm doing okay. How are you? Uh I will remind you, which you've probably forgotten because I would forgot, that the um I met you first. Uh there was a huge meeting for the Museum of Food and Drink.
I mean, sorry, yeah, huge meeting to try to figure out what the uh exhibition we were gonna do that uh Jessica Harris uh curated, and that was a crazy room full of people. And you you were there at that meeting. That's the first time I made you. That was a that was quite the meeting, was it not? Yeah, I think that was at uh Pierre Chom's like uh fast casual.
Well, the first meeting, the very first meeting was somehow near the Andas in Midtown. Remember? It was some weird place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a weird room somewhere in midtown, as all midtown rooms are.
You know what I mean? And I don't remember why we were there or how we got there. I I think it was maybe like one of like Peter's friends from Pinterest or something got us a room or something like this. But it was uh likely. Yeah.
All I remember is like being in that room, and I was like, whole first of all, holy crap, like like a serious group of people in that in that room. Remember, this is pre-pandemic times when people still like showed up to meetings. You know what I'm saying? And uh, that's right. Yeah.
And uh I was like going into that meeting thinking, how the hell will this museum get any sort of unified story out of such like a large group of people and Jessica made it happen somehow. Anyway. Yeah. No. I mean, in other words, like uh I mean, well, listen, here's the thing here's the thing.
As the museum guy, right? Because that's my job is like, you know, the founder of the museum, like my job is to try to help the curatorial team be in a position where uh not everyone maybe will be happy, but they've had enough of a voice that they're also not gonna be mad, at least not publicly, right? So yeah, no matter what no matter what subject you're taking on, right? Some are more or less contentious than others, you always have to try to bring enough stakeholders in that no one can say to you, you didn't at least try. You know what I mean?
It's it's a tough uh it's a tough, it's tough. Anyway, uh so this is the portion of the show where we discuss uh things that have happened to us in the uh prior week food or unrelated. So, you know, Michael, you had a book come out, but you have any uh interesting uh food uh food occurrences from the past week. You know, I was able to cook for um a photographer and a journalist working with NPR. They came to my home and I made them several recipes from recipes from the American South, including um okra soup and the red rice and my grandmother's green beans, and almost all of the basics for the meal came out of my garden.
Huh. Now, the recipe for your grandma's recipe for green beans, is it the one in the book that's cooked for 45 minutes in the stock? Yes. Now, I am not used to beans. Now, this we're going out of order, so we're gonna go, don't worry.
Everyone's also gonna have a chance to say what they did. But like, so the recipe for green beans, you know how like everyone grows up cooking things a certain way, right? So I'm a fast cook man on my green beans. So when I saw a recipe that was like a 45 minute simmer of the green beans in like, you know, a flavorful meat stock, right? I was like, oh, 45 minutes.
But then at the end of the recipe, there is a note, and the note says, Don't overcook the beans. So my question to you, Michael, is he's just coughing. He's not my question to you like, oh my goodness, John, you're just all over the place here. I'm now getting spilled on in the studio. So what is what is the perfect place for a bean that is cooked long but not overcooked?
What is that? Like uh talk to me? So we're talking about uh green beans, pole beans, bush beans. We're not talking about um, you know, dried kidney beans and something like that. Right.
I mean, you could do that. It's not uh it's not a problem if that's what how you want to digest them. But the issue is that normally um greasy beans, polled beans, bush beans were cooked for much longer than 45 minutes. My trick is is that you make the you utilize an already prepared um pot liquor. And so you're not so usually what you would do is you would cook them both at the same time, which meant that was double, even triple the time, and they'd be mush.
These are soft, but they're not mush. And they're gently boiled, they're not boiled to death. Right. Because a lot of us uh with Southern Heritage grew up with very mushy green beans, is why people don't mind the stuff that comes out of the can. Well, but the the like uh what how long do you have to cook them before they they take on?
And I wish Ariel was here to tell us because I always forget what it is. There's a very specific canned green bean uh aroma chemical. I can never remember what it is, but but these don't take these don't take that on, or they do take that on. Is that looked for or not looked for? No, you want you want to be able to still see plenty of green.
You need to make sure, I mean, I'm sure there's some technique or some trick. I don't abide by it. I just do what was my grandmother and my mother and their mothers did before them. So the bottom line for me is just have that stock ready to go, that pot liquor ready to go, have whatever you're gonna use and snap them up, pop them in first hard, then slow, and then 45 minutes, you're gonna have a really good soft, digestible but not mushy green bean. All right, I will I will attempt it at some point.
I'll attempt it. Uh all right, so what else you guys got this week? What do you got? By the way, who was it from NPR? Someone we know?
Were they cool? Um, I'm not I you know what not at liberty at this point. I'm kinda I'm kinda b yeah, I'm not a liberty. I'm kinda blanking out, but I'm not at a liberty also. So do that.
All right, okay. Uh all right, so what do you guys what do you guys got from the week? Uh quick quick one from Taipei, Dave, that I totally forgot to mention on the previous shows. But I I went into this cocktail bar called Under Lab and they do all kinds of like seasonal sort of, you know, high-end cocktails and stuff and liquid nitrogen and yada yada. But which is but seems to be a really big thing in Taipei, right?
So anyway, having having a few drinks and um chatting with the bartender, uh girl who goes by the name of Green, right? And she's giving us recommendations like places to eat, and she goes, Oh, let me uh, you know, here give me your phone and I'll follow you on Instagram to keep in touch. And then she looks at my Instagram and she goes, Oh, the master's following you. I was like, What? She's like, Dave Arnold.
You know him? Apparently a huge fan of your work, as are a lot of bartenders in Taipei, because I guess uh liquid intelligence was just translated into uh there in Taiwan and released pretty recently. Yeah, that's true. And I did uh I did a uh that's nice to know. That's very gratifying.
But I did a uh a stint over there like uh a week uh prior to the pandemic, uh at and went around to some of the bars too. I mean, uh I I I wish I could go back. Taipei is crazy fun. I love that place. You know what I mean?
Yeah, it really was, man. And so much good beef noodle soup. I know we said this yesterday. The fruit game in Taiwan is first rate. Their fruit game is on point.
You know what I mean? I mean, they have some super expensive that was the place where I was like, they brought me case after case of fresh Sudachis. And I'm used to a Sudachi being like worth like, you know, you could bank that so expensive. You know what I mean? It's like some super expensive citrus.
And we were using it like it was nothing. Like it was nothing. Like it was a lime. And I was like, oh my God, why do I live in New York? Why do I live here?
You know what I mean? I mean, uh uh, be honest, I don't like tropical paradises or nice things in general. But like I could use the fruit, you know what I mean? Anyway. Uh what about you what what about you, Stas?
What do you got? Uh nothing. I was with uh uh Nick, olive oil Nick last night. That's something I thought I thought you might bring it up. Nick Coleman, friend of the show, bass player, olive oil maven, right?
Uh a Bansouri specialist. Uh are you allowed to say who you were cooking with or no? I don't think so. That's no. All right.
Anyway, I was like, oh my god, from my childhood, but I can't tell you. So I just brought something up. I just tea which I hate doing. Anyway, all right. And uh Quinn, I know you got some crap for me.
What do you got this week in the in the life of Quinn? Uh let's see. We did a a nice uh bison uh little strip steak. We found a new source for that in our area. That was pretty good.
All right, how'd you cook it? How'd you cook it? You know what I'm gonna ask. How what how? Yeah, yeah.
Uh almost black and blue. It was a pre-packaged steak. Really quite thin. So we just you know, get it hard. Heard to you know, beat that.
Yeah. So, like how how like super duper lean or no? Uh yeah, pretty lean, but very tender, not like super gamey or metallic, but just a good, like beefy, slightly mineral. So it was raised for meat, and so it was slaughtered at a young enough age that it had not yet taken on that like hardcore, like blood metallic note. Presumably, yeah.
Yeah. Although I have to say, I've said this before, I apologize for repeating myself. The one metallic note meat that I absolutely love is yak. Yak is delicious. But uh as I've been told, need that high altitude yak.
Don't try to don't try to eat a low land yak. That is not that is not a real yak. If you're if you think you're eating yak, you're eating low land yak. That's just incorrect. Uh um, what's a bayou yak?
I don't that'll be interesting. What is a bayou yak? Is that a thing? Is that like the uh I'm just saying, like, I ain't never heard no bayou yak. I heard of yak who live in the mountains, but I never heard no bayou yak.
No, I'm not saying I don't know where you get a low altitude yak. Oh, a low altitude. I see what you're saying. No, but like uh I'm I was I was talking to this uh to a Sherpa and I was talking to him about yak meat because you know, as is my habit when someone like grows up like steeped in something that I only have like you know, passing knowledge of, I'm like, oh yeah, yak. I was like, I love yak.
What talk to me about yak, you know what I mean? And he's like, you know what? The yak that unless you get yak that's grown way up in the mountains. If you're like dealing with some like someone who l just happens to be like live on the plains, and like they're like I could I could do cows, I could do yak. He's like, don't eat that yak.
He's like, that yak is not the yak. You need yak that like was raised above I forget how many thousand feet he said. And I was like, I'm gonna go. I'm like, I have to take your word for it, man. You know what I mean?
It's like, who am I? You know what I mean? I mean, you know, our mountains to him are hills. You know what I'm saying? Unless you're like anyway.
Um, uh you know, what did I do this week? Oh, uh well, I brought so last week I talked about main fish sauce, main garham company. I brought some for John to taste, so it wouldn't just be my word, but he informs me that this beautiful little bottle is $45. But you know what though? It's delicious.
It goes along. So he's gonna taste that later. And not food related, but I saw Deltron 3030 yesterday. They're on their 25th anniversary tour. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. And I'm gonna wrap it back to food. They're the only group I know of that in one album talks about carbonation, not once, but twice. Carbonation comes up in two separate songs. And I was like, you know what?
Dell, if you're like pro carbonation, I'm pro, I'm pro Deltron. You know what I'm saying? But I also like, you know, uh, I I happen to be friends with uh the producer Dan the Automator, who's on it. But uh yeah, it's a good show. You know, I made some iced tea.
Joe, iced tea. What do you got? Honey, iced tea. Oh, sugar. Sugar, honey, ice tea.
You just have this ready to go at any moment, Joe. Iced tea. It's any moment, Joe, you can just bust that out. I just made I made it last week for you. Uh huh.
I like it. Sugar. So I made some. I made some iced tea. Oh, sweet.
I love it. We'll get into it by the way, because I'm assuming I read that I read it, but I didn't actually read the recipe for sweet tea because it's the one beverage that everybody loves in southern cuisine that I just cannot wrap my head around. But I'm gonna let Nastasi go first before Michael responds to that. Nastasi, what do you what do you what do you got for me? What do artists put out that are circular discs?
Oh wait, you're gonna make me say whether it's like a record or if I say vinyl, or if I say an LP. Is that what you're trying? Are we trying to get Are you trying to get like the terminology that I use? No, say album. Allabum.
No, I say album. How do you how do you use how am I supposed to say it? You kept saying you just said album. I don't understand. Album.
Listen, you are the you are the talking police for everything. You know what I mean? It's like, what the hell? It's like, listen, get used to it. I say coupon.
I say nuclear. And and I say album. It's better than vinyls. Vinyls. I like the vinyls.
Uh all right. All right. All right. So back to sweet tea, Michael. Yeah.
I can't get around it. It's so sweet, dude. Like. Oh, it does. Well, it depends on it.
It really depends on it's colloquial and discretionary. It depends on the family and the people you're dealing with. It doesn't have to be hurt. It doesn't have to hurt your teeth. It really doesn't.
Um, it doesn't have to, we didn't have more, we have maybe about eight cups of eight to ten cups of water and maybe uh one cup of sugar, which I know for a lot of people outside the south is already like too much. I don't do that anymore, but I know people who do way more sugar, and part of it's because it was an energy drink. It starts off as an elite punch, like tea punch. It's like a non-alcoholic tea punch. Those were actually fairly common in the colonial period.
And then, you know, ice is of course was a luxury. And then to serve it to guests was even more a a something. Um, but that's just I think it's just kind of like for a lot of people forget we didn't have a lot of candy in processed desserts at one point in history. We didn't have those things. And by the way, if you were to make a very sweet tea punch with ice, that was a lot of work in and of itself, like just scraping off the sugar from the cone.
Yeah, yeah. Um, and then the minute people got that sugar in a bag, it was over. You know, it was like, oh, this is the cheapest it's ever been. It's liberally used. So we're talking probably about after 1930, when some more people moved away from the farm, had access to sorghum and other things they put in their coffee or their desserts, and that white domino sugar and other brands became very uh common.
But yeah, iced tea is like every single day of my life. Yeah. Every single day of my life. A lot of times I don't put sugar in it, or I put a little bit of sugar and something else in it, and that's just that's just our house wine. Right.
Well, that was my uh my grandpa was o like the only thing that ever went into his body other than bourbon was iced tea. But it was like it wasn't sweet, you know what I mean? It was just like all day, it was an all-day affair. You know what I'm saying? Yes.
Yeah. Yeah, giant pitchers all day, big cups, napkin wrapped around the cup, working outside. You know what I'm saying? Anyway, uh exactly sugar honey ice it beats the hell out of switchell. Ooh, they uh vinegar switch well.
Yeah, but see, the switchel to to northern people, haymaker switchel was one thing, but there was another type of switchel that was in the South, which is basically it was very similar, but didn't have any spices in it. And it was just, you know, at more than likely apple cider vinegar with um well well water, spring water, and a little, you know, jill of molasses. And I told the I talked to kids about this because it's easy to read some talking about food history, and say, well, if you were enslaved or you were uh working on a farm in a South free person of color or dentured service, this would have been the best you got. This would have been your Kool-Aid, your Gatorade, and uh, and put a little salt in it, and then some half the kids will always love it, and the kids will alre will always spit it out immediately. Yeah.
Well, you know, some people are trained to spit out what is different. You know, sometimes you can't help it. I I never thought I would have picky kids, but you know, that's the way life goes. Uh going on to well, starting at the back of the book, I guess, beverages. I see you also uh do a sumac lemonade.
Now here's my question to you. I love sumac. I make it every year, and Astasia's brought it to me when she finds it. I love sumac northern, which is staghorn, so similar, although you I think you said there's a separate uh species down there. I have never found commercially available sumac that was good for anything other than savory food cooking.
I've never found a sumac I could buy that was worth like spit when it comes to making drinks compared to getting sumac off of a staghorn sumac. You know what I mean? Give you do you have a source? No, because some of these things are absolutely meant to be forged. Um anytime across all the work that I've done, I really do intend for if I have an adventurous reader or fan, for them to learn how to forage, learn how to grow heirlooms, learn how to wildcraft.
I want them to go out there. I don't want them to always think I can get off something off of Amazon or order in for it. No, I mean uh there's a there's a beauty and a value to having mail order things, but there's also a beauty and a value to starting your own journey. We were gonna put sassafras tea in there. I had a whole recipe ready to go.
The problem is it's because there's a tinge of controversy over sassafras. Yeah, saffron and cancer that w Yeah, that was whole scrap. Uh listen, I have my grandmother, a blessed memory, my father's mother lived to be ninety-five, and I remember every year collecting the sassafras roots and gerana with her. And my grandfather lived to be ninety nine on the verge of a hundred. Both of them, not every single day, but when they felt a knee for it, they drank that sassafras tea.
Unfortunately, I couldn't put it in there. Um I wanted to put Plant Us Punch in there, but I kind of ran out of steam 'cause I was like, oh Lord, if I mess this one up, let me just tell the kids to go find it somewhere else. Well, so since you left it out of the book, let's talk about it now, because here's a curious thing, and I've asked many people this, right? In the South, so for those of you that don't know, I mean, I don't know, sassafras, the tree, is a uh uh an awesome like sc usually scrubby. I've seen big ones, and they're cool and they're immediately recognizable because their leaves aren't all the same shape, but they all have kind of a mitteny, they're sometimes they're just oblong things, but they also have a mittenies kind of situation.
The leaves are a classic thickener in southern f called philae, right? And then the the roots are used to make, you know, sassafras flavored like beverages. Now, why we have that stuff growing also like weed up here in the north, and yet I don't know whether and and you know, like Michael says, like uh I forget exactly when it happened, but all use of commercial use of real sassafras was wiped out by government intervention because of uh probably flawed cancer research. I forget what what the date was, right? So I have no idea whether there was a northern history of using it at or not, but I know that we don't have a history of using the leaves in the same way.
It's always been curious because it's here in our larder, and you know, I walk around and chew on leaves because I love the weird slippery feeling, and I love the like faint sassafras flavor you get. But we've never I've never harvested. So when you're harvesting sassafras, are you harvesting like the like the young saplings that are growing up and getting the thin roots, or what do you do? How how how do you do that? Exactly.
So you want for philae, um, which is endemic to the Gulf Coast, Southern Louisiana. Um, you use you gather the leaves when they're really small, small and a little bit furry. You dry them, the whole branches. Then you once they've dry on the branch, you strip them off, you um macerate them, and then you sip you put them through a sieve until you get the finest powder possible, which is a lot of work. That's why the traditional filet was very expensive, it was not cheap.
Um the roots, yes. You you go around getting the saplings that set out in the spring when this because sassafras is a colonizing uh species. So it's the kind of thing that will grow in a field once everything else has been cut down. Sassafrass will find its way, and then that's what you really want. That's kind of like edge of the field in the forest kind of thing, or in the or standalone.
So that's what you want. And they'll set out new plants, and then you just kind of like wait for them to get a little body to them a year or two, and then you dig them up and get those roots, and then you screw you wash them, you scrape them, you dry them, and then you set them aside. I will try well, I don't have I used to have a some land with sassel over it, then I don't have it anymore. So there you go. Uh but I'll try it someday.
Someday, uh God willing, I'll try it. Uh I had another one for you that I didn't see in the book. I could have just missed missed it, but I would be remiss not to ask. Something I've always wanted to try, never have. Do you do any poke?
You do a poke salad, or you do any of that stuff or no? Oh, that'd be that'd be worse. I really wanted to do that in the book. That'd have been worse. I mean, this is an internal sort of like, nah.
And I'm just kind of like, I really want to go there. I was just like, we already have possum and sweet potatoes in this book. I was gonna ask you about the possum, yeah. But like, okay, so let's talk about uh apparently. Look, I was always told not to touch that stuff growing up, right?
Because it also not only grows like a weed, is in fact a weed, right? And it my whole life growing up, you'd wait for those things, they'd shoot up, and you're like, no, that's poison. So I never tried it. You know what I mean? And now I don't have access to it anymore.
Because you kind of need to know where it comes up, right? You need to not only have it around, you need to know where it comes up before it's already up. So you need at least a year in advance if you don't already know where they are. You know what I mean? So you need to know how yeah, you know how many dogs have peed on it too.
Yeah, well, you know, I wouldn't. I have foraged stuff in New York City, but only things that are above the pea zone. You know what I mean? I've never foraged low low-line stuff here, yeah. Is poke the purple uh buried um plant?
Correct. Yes. Yeah. That's the one that Dolly Parton used to sit tell a story about how when she was growing up, they didn't have any, they couldn't just like buy a lipstick. So when they were little, they used to play house by dabbing poke berry just in the lips, which by the way, I think would have been have been a murderous idea.
One time I just tried to dive poke when I was a boy, um, and my hands ached from the toxins in the berries. So that's a thing. But okay, let's okay, two things. Quick. One is that the berries, some I've been told this, I ain't never tried it because I don't have no no wish for the other side right now.
But somebody told me that if you steep them in like like uh Everclear or some kind of like moonshine hard liquor, it's a really good cough syrup. I bet it is a good cough syrup because it'll kill you. Yeah, exactly. That's one that's one way to cure it. But there, but that that was I've seen that multiple places, and I'm not gonna try it.
Yeah. But Virginia grandmother always said if there's the little red streaks in it, um, you may be too late, but if they're faint, you good you're good, but you gotta cook it several times. And the funny thing is it'll retain its nutritional integrity. And it will keep the it's a purge purgative. You don't just eat it because you want to eat it.
You eat it because way back when all of our ancestors who lived in early America and up to the Civil War and beyond had worms. Oh, so they can avoid it, especially if you deworming it. The vermifuge. All right, yeah. Oh, that's a great word.
That's why you had it. So says the frass and pokeweed are both vermifuges. Vermifuge. Like that like would be a good, if I was 18, that's my band would be called. Vermifuge.
Anyway. Okay. So is it from a taste perspective? So this is one of the there's not that many things I have super food food FOMO on. You know what I mean?
But that's one of them. Is the taste like really good? Like am I missing out, or is it just more of like a cultural thing that it's like it's good to have had it? Can I just be real with you? Yeah.
It's the bacon and onions. Mmm. Because those are delicious things. Grease and onions. Yes, bacon and ramps and onions and bacon grease.
There's a good smell and a good taste. Yeah. All right. Fair enough. Oh, uh I'm going to uh because we're already almost half over.
I have a we have a question in directly for you from Morgan R. So I will read that. Uh question intended from Michael Tweedy, but open to others as well. Over the past few years, I've been increasingly interested in historical foods. Uh the menu archive from the New York Public Library, which by the way is a good archive if you've never been people.
Uh has been a great place to kick uh kick off rabbit holes on why certain time periods so heavily feature some dishes or ingredients. I watched the videos from Tasting History with Max Miller uh or Townsend frequently. Uh and I've recently come across a few modern copies of cookbooks from the 15th century through the 19th century. I'll also go through book sales to find old community cookbooks and see how people talked about food and what they ate in different regions of the U.S. And with these general efforts uh to learn about food and history, I often feel like I'm uh taking in someone's interpretation of history without knowing how accurate it is.
And when I'm working on my own, I try to make old recipes. I often find them to have minimal instructions. So uh I do it as a modern cook would do, and often has me wondering if I've made the historical recipe or just a version as I would prefer it to be. This is a classic problem, P. S.
Um, as a two-part question, do you have recommendations uh as an amateur on how to better find access and interpret primary sources as it pertains to historical documents? And how do you approach translating cookery to modern applications? Honestly, it's all about feeling and intuition. Um first of all, I'm gonna get through our fake heads that there is no such thing as replicating the past. None in any situation.
Because we the minute you have different chemicals in the air and in the water, the minute you have different temperatures, the minute you have different climate patterns, you can approximate it, and that's fine. You can approximate it, and there's no shame in that. Um the next thing is think through that person's process in their day. Okay. If you know, it doesn't make sense until you look at the recipe in context of a series of actions.
You know, uh how how much energy do did I have to expend on other tasks? How valuable are these ingredients to me? Um that's the special part. That's where the magic happens. It's not in the, hey, it looks like something in the picture.
It's not, hey, it tastes old timey. It's wow. I have the feeling like I was in Abruzzo. I was in ancient Rome, I was in the Mali Kingdom, I was in Whitechapel in London. I was in Salem, Massachusetts.
I was in that space, and there's like 20, 30 things that go along with every recipe from the past. You know, it's not just one element, it's many elements. I'll just give a quick example. It's like the boar's head that the that the Tudor Kings would eat. It was all dressed up for them.
You know, you have to understand there was a hunt, and the animal was cornered and it was fired a certain way, and it was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it came down to a song and a recipe that was even in the English hymn though. The boar's head, I understand, is the rarest dish in all the land. Um, may we have the boar's head with mustard. Okay, there's some details there, and the other details you can find, but you gotta take it slow.
You can't just like rack up a bunch of historic recipes. You have to take them very slow and look at each one in its context, read all you can about it, and when you have the right taste, you will know it in your mind, your heart, and your mouth, and your stomach. I'll add one more, but this is because I'm old, right? Uh I don't think people think this way anymore, but it used to be so you need to especially be wary of people who interpreted old recipes uh back in the day, is because there is an inherent underlying assumption that you should always avoid that people in the past were stupid, or that people in the past. Yeah, or that people in the past somehow didn't eat good food, or that poor people didn't eat good tasting food.
So there's all these assumptions. Right. You know what I mean? That are I think 100% wrong. So I think uh the the most interesting thing for me, and when I'm reading cookbooks, even modern cookbooks, when I see a recipe that doesn't fit with my intuition, my assumption isn't that that cook is an idiot.
My assumption is that there is something I need to learn here, and as Michael said, go slow, because it's not like uh you want to steamroll over what someone else is doing and just assume that the way that you know is better. You're there to learn something different or new to you. Anyway, so um and if I can add on one more thing, too. It's you know, coming there's I always think of this uh article on paintings I read back when I was studying art history of the genetic evolution of watermelons from early Renaissance paintings until now, like genetically, just everything has changed so much, you know, even in the last hundred years that and cattle and chickens and all that stuff too, you know, just used to be such different animals and plants and all that stuff before, not in a good or bad way, just we've just been selectively breeding differently since then, and that results in a big change of flavor. Well, you know, that's an interesting point to go back to what um Michael was saying earlier.
So something you don't think about, I guess, with foraging, because I don't think the foraging most of the people I know in the foraging movement don't have this take on it, but that is a more direct connection to ingredients that were exactly what you could have had. True. You know what I mean? Um, which is an interesting point I never thought about. Yeah.
Well, if you think about the number of eggs in a recipe for a pound cake, and they're like 40 eggs. Well, oh my God, what wait a minute. Then you realize the eggs were smaller. Or this type of breed of poultry did not taste quite as tender and purdue ready as stuff people used to eating today. All those things matter and they factor it.
Uh, here's a question for you. But here's one I haven't been able to wrap my head around historical recipes. You're you're the person to ask. Uh so uh, and you know, so we'll we'll talk a little bit more. We should do that actually now, because otherwise I could sit here, you can't see it, but your book here is peppered with post-it notes of questions that uh want to ask something.
You know, some I'm like, for instance, I'll give you one right now before I go on what I'm supposed to talk about. So my I uh like you know, my wife's family spent uh a lot of time when my wife was growing up in uh in Louisiana, some of it on the Cane River in Nacadish. And for those of you that are keeping track and trying to look stuff up, it's not written Nacadish, you can't find it that way. It's like Natchatochis, you have to look up differently. Anyways, they're famous for their meat pies and their dirty rice.
Like that's one of their they have a lot. Kane River, look up the Kane River cookbook, great book. Anyway, uh I mean, I don't know if it's great, it was great when I read it, you know, 25 years ago, 30 years ago. Point being, you do a dirty rice in here, but you take out the liver. You it literally says liver free.
You don't like the liver in it, or you just think the average schmo won't like the liver in it. Uh both. I mean, I have I mean, I know that Oful is many times can be better for you or great for you. I personally cannot have that kind of thing because it um inspires gout in my body. Uh yeah, fair enough.
So that's one element. The other element is that no, I don't think that people who are a lot of people just ain't into liver and all that stuff. So people who are more adventurous or more, you know, non-plussed about it, sure. But I also wanted recipes that I think more people would try. I think more people would try dirty rice if they're like freaked out.
If I I mean, I am a blend of an adventurous eater and a picky eater. Right. So for I I ain't gonna lie. A lot of the recipes in this book are recipes that I know how to make, or I wouldn't have a problem eating. Right, right.
But not, you know, not everything, you know. So, but like everything has been in an and I'm so like it's interesting. I'm glad to hear the way the way you're talking about it, but everything has been delivered in the world, right? So, like scrapples been delivered, everything's been delivered. And I don't know, you know.
I feel like they were eats delivered. Or they can delivered. Uh oh, wait. And also before I go, because I'm gonna forget. So uh grew up in Maryland, correct?
Maryland area. I grew up in DC in Merlin, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so I have never Maryland, Merlin. Merlin.
Well, so like, well, my my you know, my my dad's family, all that, although they were, you know, a lot of it like Pennsylvania, Virginia, they were, you know, Bal I won't say it the way I'm supposed to, Baltimore. So they you know, he went to Polytech. Anyway, point being that uh uh point being that uh I have never had, nor do I really understand, and there's a recipe in here for fried biscuits to go with it, the Maryland fried chicken. Now, for those of you that don't know, modern chicken was created in like Del Mar area, and so Maryland has like a huge, like uh a huge flag to plant when it comes to the way we whether you like it or hate it, the chicken that we eat now. You know what I'm saying?
So talk to me about Maryland fried chicken. What is it? Because I've never had it. So um a couple different descriptions. That I've given a bunch of variations for fried chicken, including the Maryland fried chicken, we put the gr the cream gravy on the side, or the cream gravy on top.
It's a white cream gravy. Um and then what you do is instead of baking the biscuits to go with the chicken, you fry dough. If fried biscuits go with the chicken. And if you really want to go even further, you can do the the one where we either dust it with Obey or put Obey in the um the brine or the buttermilk. Um you'll notice that with all almost all of my fried recipes, I do not season the flour with anything more than salt, if that if that's the spices and other things tend to burn in the grease, and all it does is mess it up.
You don't taste what you're supposed to be tasting, and quite frankly, it just looks utter and unappealing to me. So I tell everybody to put the seasoning in the the brine, the dry rub or the or the batter or the whatever not the batter, but the uh buttermick or whatever. Yeah, I also let the let the coating do its thing. Beyond the the burning, like if it's gonna be in the dip, so I'm trying to remember you take you so you don't do a dry step, you're wet into dry on your chicken, on your standard chicken, right? You're wet to dry.
So there's a big there's a billion ways, so let's not like get into like the the vagaries of it here. But uh I also think that putting the spices in the wet is easier to dose. I think it's almost impossible. Think of all of the flour you throw away when you're doing it to dose all of that stuff into the flour. I think it's just a waste.
You know what I mean? And like not effective. Um day is there anyone is is Maryland fried chicken still the thing you can get out, or is that someone that's made in somebody's house? Someone's house, mostly. I mean, this is also, yeah, this is there, you know, Montgomery County, Merlin, which is, you know, right outside of DC, part of the DMV.
Um, there was a there was a big far there was a big farmer and housewives market the during the you know tens, twenties, thirties, forties. Um, and it was called the fried chicken capital of America. Because all the women made fried chicken dinners and you know, there was all the all the things that you would expect. And I don't mean fried chicken the way other people do it outside of the South. And for those who are going, Maryland's not the South, Maryland's not the South.
Um there's a little thing I want to tell you about called migrations. Where do you think the people in Kentucky came from? Where do you think people in Missouri came from? In Tennessee and beyond. Check those census records, genealogists.
They're all from Maryland and Virginia, and some from North Carolina and Delaware. People, the tobacco wore out the land, and people picked up and they moved. Cities in the state of Maryland developed partly because of the presence of free blacks, because they emancipated us because they couldn't keep us anymore. And so we went to the city and became craftsmen and built up Baltimore into the portrait that it was. But then the German Irish came through.
And part of my theory, which I kind of like tease in this book, but I don't really outright say, is that we have to remember that there was a huge number of German and Irish immigrants that come into the uh country during the 19th century. And where those immigrants went, the flavor of the city and the area turns. There's no grits line, sir. There's no sweet tea line. But there are migration lines, and some of them don't fit the ones that we think about.
If you're from Southern Ohio, Indiana, or Illinois, especially right on, you know, twenty counties, twenty counties above the border, your food is probably southern more than it is Midwestern. And that's because your ancestors were. And don't forget, some people came up from Kentucky and Tennessee and settled into southern Indiana, and some people went down. And that's just history. Not to mention the Great Migration, not to mention the white migration that happened in the 20s and 130s and 40s, not just to the north and northeast, but also to the west coast.
Think about Orange County. So I try not to people. And for God's sakes, the South does not equal the Confederacy. Right. Well, the whole introduction to the book, you know, which, you know, obviously you should read, you should get the book, you should read it, is and I I meant to ask you this, so I'll ask you this now before we I ask you the other question I was gonna ask you.
See, I keep going in circles. Is um it's a it's about a kind of a broadening of what kind of the stock notion of what southern food is, who made it, where it comes from, and kind of like even more of a broadening than has been done generally over the past, you know, I would say 15 or 20 years. But how how much do you think this is how much do people still have like the old like from when I was a kid, like 70s, 80s view of what southern cooking is and who made it, and how much has the average person broadened their mind out more, you know, in line with what you write in the introduction. If I'm gonna say for real, for real, 6040. I think 60, I think people still have the notions.
I mean, I was talking with a you know very well meaning um driver from a car service um from uh North Africa, and I told him that what I write about, and he says, uh he kind of you said, okay, uh, yeah, all fried it in cheese. And I'm just like, oh. And I didn't, I didn't, I wasn't, I wasn't mad about it because I know that's how a lot of people, domestic and foreign, think about southern food. They don't think about seasonality. They don't think about the garden.
I mean, I didn't say food from my garden, as in look at me. I said food from my garden because my grandparents and my mama and daddy wouldn't have it any other kind of way. That's called quality assurance. You know, we when we we can say we raised something up from the ground and made something out of nothing, that's our values. That's not just our uh something to talk about in regards to food.
So our values are implicit in our food. When they're good values, obviously. I I mean I'm not gonna I'm not gonna uh fake the funk on this one. Southerners are a dysfunctional family. We have been that for 400 plus years.
But uh, but also when we get past our boundaries and our bubbles and our boxes, you can clearly see the the the love of the land of nature, the appreciation for seasonality, and also we we well once upon a time, as was said earlier, we had dozens, if not hundreds of varieties of you know livestock and seeds and those things had different flavors. So it's really hard, and also of course, I think the other part is the cultural element. I think that you know Southern amorphous, and I think a lot of times Southern tends to be defined as the white South. And yeah, there's these black people there doing some little black magic in the kitchen or something, and these indigenous people, well, we didn't even talk about them beyond corn bees and squash for most of the writing of Southern food history. And now we have to tell that story because indigenous communities are taking their power back.
Black folks are reclaiming their place, you know, from Tony Tripton Martin to many others in what the Southern Kitchen has come to be. And quite frankly, my role in this is I'm really proud to be the black author of a Southern cookbook that is sweeping, that covers everybody, not just soul food. Not not there's anything wrong with that. Not just my family, not just a state, but the entire breadth of what Southern food can be from Cajun to Kurdish to Salvadoran to uh Scott's Irish to black to Nigerian, everybody is in the family portrait. Um and beyond that, I'm really happy that my work in particular, from the cooking gene, the Southern Discomfort Tour through my trips to West Africa, bringing people, I brought chefs with me, uh of my friend Ad Nago Brown, who who orchestrated these with me, um, to West Africa to have the their first meeting with the food of the continent.
We're talking about Nigeria, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Gambia, Togo, Benin, and Ghana. Uh yeah. So that's that's that's my thing. I'm like, no, we're gonna we're gonna do the leap. We're gonna talk about Jolof rice with red rice.
We're talking about uh uh okro soup with the the gumbo. We're gonna talk about all these different parts, how they differ, how they connect. That's been that's my life work is to make sure that net that connection never gets forgotten ever again. Um and at the end of the day, I think we need this, we need a book like this because we've forgotten who we are. So give me the all of this.
Give me the arc, and I know uh I want to get to it now and I'll I will ask I'll ask you my one question first. Because you also did some work early in your career with uh and continuing, right, with the Williams with the folks at at Williamsburg and they like the the historical kitchens there. So I'm this is like not about anything we're talking about. It's just my question. What's with all the nutmeg in those recipes?
Do they really use that much nutmeg? That's one of those things where I'm trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I've never grated a whole nutmeg into anything in my life. Should I try it? It was I I mean if you really want to, if you want to do that old-style nut uh eggnog, show enough.
But you know, you realize that it was so bad that um people from Connecticut were called nutmegs. And one of the the traveling salesmen, the peddler, a lot of them sold fake nutmegs and didn't know it. It was just wood. Well then you can you can grate as much as much as you can. And they would, you know, that that's how that that's how that worked.
I mean, I talk a lot about kitchen pepper. I've kind of popularized it. Now I have two or three chefs that I happen to know who have done their own kitchen pepper. By the way, ladies and gentlemen, spice tribe. I've been working with spice tribe for years now.
Uh they're kind of like on the last leg of of my collection because they're sort of changing their thing. I got kitchen pepper, I got it. It's not just pepper, describe kitchen pepper. It's not just pepper. Kitchen pepper is basically like this the seasonal, the season of salt of of the colonial period and and into the antebellum period.
And it's pepper, the spice that we might consider sweet or warming spices. And honestly, I think it gives the most gorgeous old timey flavor. A lot of times when these cookbooks said pepper, they didn't say black pepper. They didn't say white pepper. They didn't say red pepper.
Sometimes they deliberately say kitchen pepper. And other times, guess what? That's your choice. You can put any of any all any of the above in it, and it'll work. And so that's what what I do here.
I specify cayenne pepper, red pepper, or kitchen pepper or black pepper. I prefer coarse ground black pepper over the powdery stuff. Although that's your choice. So I mean, these are things, but I have a if you don't want to make it, I got some gorgeous kitchen pepper through a spice trial that you might want to try. Yeah, go buy it.
Go buy it. Support uh thank you. Yeah. Uh, do we have any questions from Discord, by the way, before I run out the rest of our time? Nope.
Okay. Um, all right. So let's talk about the journey to this book. Uh I guess from that cooking gene and before Afro Cul uh culinaria and like the whole thing. Why give give us the give us the encapsulated?
But I do want to go pepper you with some speaking of kitchen pepper, I'm gonna pepper the hell out of you with questions if I have any time left over. So cool. So the run down. On one leg, as we say in Judaism, a regular chat. Um, basically, this is my entire life journey.
This is me when I was very small, going to the grocery store with my grandmother and mother in particular, barbecuing with my father when I was a teenager, watching all kinds of cooking shows. Great chefs in New Orleans. Um cooking with Justin Wilson. Oh how was that Nelly Depree? How was that?
So every all of our stuff was on PBS back then. Oh I mean cooking with like watching him not like actually going and like hanging out because yeah yeah oh that man that man was gone long gone but um I got to cooking yeah like out I don't know where I was an adult. What are you what was he always used to say ooh we was he the one that always said ooh we ooh was that him yeah don't don't say yeah you don't want to say that too loud these days that think you rail on a bullet um but you know they they the I'm sorry but I'm a Gen X or I don't know I didn't know what ooh woo meant or ooh we I don't know that so the point being is that he had these wonderful catchphrases he was not Cajun he he cosplayed that real good Nellie Depree had her new Southern cooking Grace Chef in New Orleans was on um and of course uh the the the the chef who we dare not speak his name um you know New Orleans chef oh yeah oh Jeff oh yeah yeah yeah that fella I watched the hair out of that show though one of my first cookbooks was Jeff Smith and he came to DC and I had we had no clue about the you know what and that and that and my mother would try to to you know get us tickets to go and they said no one under 18 allowed yeah so we we don't leave we don't we don't leave that alone yeah but from there I would you know was already uh you know I live living in the DMV there's a lot of access to historical sites, historical places. A lot of, you know, when they show you the domestic life of people in the past, that got me hooked, especially the cooking and food part. Um, and then of course, growing up.
It's the reunions, it's the you know, church stuff, it's a this, you know, you you learn from your from your people, your story and how it connects to food. And it wasn't just like we ate green beans. Now my mother would go, you know what? Um, I need some Kentucky wonders like when I was a child. And the first thing I did was grab them.
My mother was not well at the time. I grabbed them, I grew them, and oh uh I was just saying I haven't had a a real tomato. And so it was growing my heirlooms, and she was like, Oh, wow, these tomatoes are great. And so it was an interact, constant interaction with everybody in my family, immediate family and way, way, way extended family about those foods and those facts. And of course, reading, reading.
I got 4,000 um 500 books in this house. 2,000 of which are cookbooks. It's a lot of weight. That's a lot of things for me. Believe me.
Yeah, it is. I know. You can't go very far with it. I get it. And and then, of course, southern discomfort happens when I start to forget about some things, and I really want to remember who I am, where I come from.
I did a full genealogical assessment, it did genetic genealogy. Um, got to every state but Oklahoma. Oh. Um, yeah, pretty much, and I don't know if it's a good thing. On purpose?
Skipped it on top of it. On purpose. And that was the whole idea was to go through the South learning about my foods, food, um, food steps. I call them food steps, and the this history that's really uncomfortable and messy, but it's a part of who I am and who all Americans are, and who all so of all Southerners. And it was like, okay, so I'm born to these places where my ancestors were actually enslaved, but I'm also meeting Vietnamese people who are growing, you know, gardens in the ditches in Louisiana, and the Mexican community, Mexican American immigrant community in near Athens, and Mennonites in Tennessee.
So it was really just this thing about meeting, when I say meeting the family, I'm not just talking about black folks. I'm talking about everybody who contributes to this food culture. And then of course, Europe happens in between all of that. And a lot of England, a lot of Ireland, a lot of Scotland, um, and other parts of Europe, different parts of France and Italy and German Europe, and then of course, eight trips to Africa. And so when Emily Takutis was like, hey, I gotta find an author, and I was like, I'm looking for an author, nobody wants to do it.
Then I looked for a co-author, nobody was really that interested. And then she was just like, you know what? Hold up. I got you sitting right in front of me. You write this book.
Do you want to write this book? I don't know. Then I had to go buy a house. And I need every little bit of coin I could get. And so I was like, you know what?
I'll I'll rank this book. And plus it started during um before right before COVID, then into COVID, then after COVID. Yeah, man. So you are you're researching. People ask me, you know, do I learn anything new and special?
No, but I learned how to edit. I learned how to edit my brain. For somebody who has ADHD, it's very difficult to edit all that stuff floating around in your your crown, and then you gotta put it on paper in a disciplined way. I am familiar with this problem. Yes.
Right, right, right. And then of course, everybody needs to understand something. I've I think people say cookbooks are, oh, I'm gonna jot down grandma's, whatever, or grandpa's whatever, or dad's famous, blah, blah, blah, and it's all done. Oh no, baby. You got these things called copy edits to make sure that everything is on point.
You have people testing, you're testing certain dishes. People are making it, taking pictures, asking questions, um, going through every step of the recipe. I would, I would rather, I would gather that each recipe took between. We're not talking about the rubs, by the way, or some of the sauces, okay? Uh, but the other recipes, like the the baking ones and other that's a that's 18 to 36 hours per recipe.
And no one appreciates honestly, like, unless you make things, no one appreciates making things. It's just it's just true. Uh listen, I'm I'm gonna pepper you with questions because I'm gonna run out of time. Joe's Joe's giving me the stink eye. Let's uh I don't even know where to start.
Let's start with possum. Is possum taste any good or is it bad like raccoon tastes? Um I have heard from those who have partaken that possum is way better than raccoon, partly because back in the old days, you kind of semi-domesticated the possum. You didn't just call a possum. You you the possum live with you like a like a semi-pet for like six to eight weeks.
And then you offered him. Yeah. Yeah. I know what there's a bartender in LA who keeps a possum as a pet. It's kind of crazy.
Anyway, uh also, I'm just gonna say this as an appreciation. I appreciate your love of celery seed. I wish more people love celery seed. Uh hello. That was uh absolutely necessary.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's just a statement. All right, now, uh, should we do should we should we do sauces or uh no? I'm gonna ask you about rice bread, because you say you grew up with rice breads. So for those of you who don't know what's going on here, this is uh a bread made almost, I don't think there's any flour supplement, all with like mashed uh cooked long grain rice and then leaven.
Talk to me about this. Is this is it like uh what does it eat like? And you said you you grew up with this, so clearly this is something that you have. Yeah, a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. Yeah.
It's a it's it's a lighter tasting bread. Sometimes you add a little bit of rice nevercorn meal for like a little bit of filler to bring it together. Right. Sorry, rice, flour. Yeah.
To bring it together. Um, yeah, I I it's just really it's it makes the most suspended stupendous toast. It's really good for those kind of things. And I think it's I think it's a thing to master if you know you're an avid baker or you like to do a little play around and you want to give somebody something different to enjoy. I think rice bread is is what goes with it.
And of course, use it with those recipes that that are from the low country that are from South Carolina. Um I would even say, watch this. You ready for this? All right. So you can't I don't always want to innovate in books.
Rice bread, savory French toast. Oh, all right. Treat it like Welsh rabbit, but but put throw some um some like southern kind of stoop nonsense on the end and go get it. Man, people don't make that anymore. I used to love that the toast with the sauce on it.
All right, hold up. Another one. Uh just a just a statement. Uh I for some reason I haven't made it in like 20 years. When I first got Bill Neal's uh book uh called Spoonbread and blah blah blah, I made spoon bread a couple times.
It's delicious. It needs to come back into my repertoire. Tell people spoon breads uh do you also agree that this should be in more people's repertoire? Yeah. I mean, spoon bread's is like almost like Americ Southern American souffle ish kind of thing.
Not really. It's like hard to describe. Spoon bread is slightly sweet, but it's not really sweet. It's a little savory, but it's not totally there. It's like I call it like the kettle corner bread.
Yeah, yeah. All right, now remember I have to blast. I need to blast through some people because I want to give people the breadth of some of the stuff that's in here. You have dumplings poached in grape juice. Talk to me about this real quick, because I got more things to ask about.
And you know, muscad iron pies and all this like like southern kind of grapes. Give me some. Give me some. Stumperneck and mushadine are both foxy tasting southern grapes. By the way, we went through hours of arguing about the word foxy.
There is no other way to describe these grapes. This is the classic terminology. Wine weasels use. They were like, that's weird. I'm not I'm not hitting on the grape, ma'am.
I am describing it as it is, but that's a very traditional. The Creeks and the Cherokee, the Muskogee and the Cherokee, both um, and others would take cornmeal dumplings and drop them in the juice of the uh grapes. And that's where that recipe comes from. But that's worth a try right now. Yeah, yes, absolutely.
It's it's it's kind of like once you have it, you wish you never learned about it because you want to have it more. All right, talk to me about peanut pie. Peanut pie, you go to Virginia Donna down route, whatever it is, um, in southeastern Virginia, and that will make you a fan. I mean, I can't eat pecan pie because I'm lunch to treanuts. But uh that peanut pie is is is this the stuff.
They didn't invent it. I mean, it's been around for quite some time. But I mean, just I mean, it's worth the alternative. All right, so listen, we're running out of time. I'll just say you need to go buy this book.
It's uh Michael Twitty's new book, The American South. Uh of course, you know, get the other ones. Please, if you can buy from Kitchen Arts and Letters, support, uh, support them, support any local bookshop that you have if it's humanly possible. But uh, you know, in here you'll find recipes that uh were gathered from WPA projects, old recipes, new recipes, some crazy, some crazy sauce recipes. They're mayonnaise-based barbecue sauce, which I didn't have time to talk to you about, but I was interested in.
Uh, so you know, come back anytime, Michael. Appreciate having you. This has been Cooking Issues. Thank you.
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