food history
Celebrate Black History Month with Dinner at Indigo House
Celebrate Black History Month this year with a Southern Sunday Supper on a Saturday Night. On Saturday, February 24th, 2018 this dinner for eight will feature iconic African-American and Southern dishes. After a 1st course of “Pot Likker” soup accompanied…
Monticello Hearth Cooking at the Heritage Harvest Festival 2016
This coming Friday (Sept 9th) culinary historian Michael Twitty will join me at the Monticello kitchen hearth for a celebration of enslaved cooks Edith Fossett and Frances Hern; their skills and their lives. We will prepare a menu of recipes…
Taking care of ourselves and each other: Learning and doing in the Piedmont
To top off settling in a new place shortly after I got here I decided to go to college for an endless number of years sometimes living far from home to do the history thing I have been doing as…
Where are we today?
Today rather than judge ourselves by some illusory benchmark of historical rural American self ‘sufficiency’ we might do better for each of us to make the effort to be more self-reliant. By self-reliant I mean making the goal to do…
Self–reliance versus Self-sufficiency: An ongoing series of meditations
None of us are self-sufficient. We all need somebody! Despite the often nostalgic retro-interpretations (our national idealization of Little House on the Prairie comes to mind!) Americans weren’t self-sufficient in the Colonial past, the Revolutionary Era nor the long 19th…
Split Pea Soup – Winter’s Comfort Food
My Split Pea Soup was inspired by Andersen’s Restaurant, Solvang, California, c. 1952 When I was a little girl in the early 1950s it took almost 18 hours to drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco on Highway 101. My…