The Black Bear Camp Skillet Served with Cherokee Sweet Corn Pone, Fresh Fruits, Cheese Grits, Hunt Camp Potatoes, Cathead Biscuit, Sausage (Sawmill) Gravy, and Thick Griddle Cake with Maple Syrup. A Sizzling Combo of Country or Sugar Cured Ham, Pecan Smoked Bacon, Sausage & 2 Farm Fresh Eggs any style $13.95 I recently spent several … More Eating like a Lumberjack
What to make of the lavish feasts that come after a funeral? When I attended my first funeral, at age 27, I cried a lot, even though I didn’t know the deceased, my sister-in-law’s father. My grandparents all died before I turned 20 and lived 1250 miles away. Living as my family did on a … More Foods for a Funeral and a Farewell
In the culinary world, the equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize or the Oscars comes down to the James Beard Awards. This year, the list of nominees includes a large number of Southern chefs, restaurants, and other food-related entities. What’s so fascinating about this list lies in the evidence of increasing diversity – it’s not all … More The South is Rising Again: The 2013 James Beard Nominees
Pole beans are sort of like cows. If you keep milking a cow, she produces milk. Likewise, if you keep picking pole beans, the plant keeps producing. Pole beans are not like bush beans, which render up a crop and then die back. I call them pole beans, but some people call them flat beans … More Are Pole Beans Like Cows? A Crashing Tale
Not too long ago, before the snow fell and kept falling, I drove down to Critz, Virginia, the homeplace of Virginia tobacco baron, J. R. Reynolds. Reynolds’s parents, Hardin Reynolds and Nancy Jane Cox Reynolds, owned several hundred slaves, who worked the 717-acre Rock Spring plantation. One of these slaves went by the name of … More * “We raise the wheat, they give us the corn” : a reflection on life in antebellum Virginia
After a long fallow period, spent baking (and eating) many Christmas cookies, I have decided to bloom/cook where I am planted, so to speak. Lately I’ve become more intrigued by the cuisine that surrounds me, here in the American South. After all, I’ve basically been a Southerner for over 30 years. Although many cookbook authors … More * Biscuits and Buttermilk: A New Year and New Directions
Southern hospitality is not gone with the wind, at least not in Chatham Virginia. Food writer Patricia Mitchell,* owner of the now-closed Sims-Mitchell House Bed & Breakfast, makes sure of that. And you can’t expect anything less from a woman who called her first 1968 Mustang “Penelope.” You know, after Odysseus’s wife, who kept the home fires burning and the soup bubbling while the hero was off slaying monsters and avoiding Sirens.
Every day Mrs. Mitchell’s guests enjoyed baked concoctions at breakfast that would cause Scarlett O’Hara to swoon, even without tight stays or Rhett Butler lurking around.
CYNTHIA D. BERTELSEN 