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Southern Farmers Vanquish the Clichés
By Julia Moskin
Published December 27, 2011
IT’S not hard to get Emile DeFelice riled up. Just mention Paula Deen, the so-called queen of Southern food, who cooks with canned fruit and Crisco. Or say something like “You don’t look like a Southern pig farmer.” He’ll practically hit the ceiling of his Prius.
Because there are a few things about Southern food that the man just can’t stand: its hayseed image, the insiders who feed that image and the ignorant outsiders who believe in it.
“Just because I’m a farmer doesn’t mean I spend all my time feeding pigs,” said Mr. DeFelice, a natty, voluble fellow who raises 200 pigs here at Caw Caw Creek Farm in the softly forested hills north of Charleston, S.C. “That’s an absurd proposition.”
Mr. DeFelice’s pork is coveted by chefs around the country, but his ambitions are much bigger than bacon. In 2004, he started a local-only farmers’ market because he was so outraged that produce from California and Chile was allowed at the state-run farmers’ market nearby. He hopes to run for state agriculture commissioner in 2014.
And he is part of a thriving movement of idealistic Southern food producers who have a grander plan than just farm-to-table cuisine. They want to reclaim the agrarian roots of Southern cooking, restore its lost traditions and dignity, and if all goes according to plan, completely redefine American cuisine for a global audience.
Their work is being encouraged, and sponsored, by a new generation of chefs who have pushed Southern cooking into the vanguard of world cuisine — and who depend on these small producers to literally flesh out their ambitions. “In the next five years we should be dominating the world in charcuterie, because we have the best pigs and the most skills,” said Craig Diehl, the chef at Cypress, in Charleston, who makes an extraordinary headcheese and about 25 other remarkable cured meats from Mr. DeFelice’s pork.
Like California in the 1970s — when Alice Waters collaborated with farmers, foragers and cheesemakers on the food at Chez Panisse — the South today has just the right combination of climate, culinary skill, regional chic and receptive audience.
Even Hurricane Katrina played a key role in reviving interest in the region’s food traditions. “It came just as the farm-to-table movement was really taking hold,” said Randy Fertel, a New Orleans native and food writer. “The storm hit us over the head with the truth: that we could lose the whole tradition, and we’d better take care of it.”
Pork is still the definitive ingredient of Southern cooking, past and present. But the “lardcore” trend has now become a bigger movement embracing the entire Southern pantry.
“As an obsessive person, you realize that there is a better version of everything out there,” said Sean Brock, the Charleston chef whose restaurant Husk serves only food produced south of the Mason-Dixon line, from Georgia olive oil to Tennessee chocolate to capers made from locally foraged elderberries. Many Southern chefs are working along similar lines — Frank Stitt, Mike Lata, Andrea Reusing and Linton Hopkins are just a few — but Mr. Brock’s rigor has redefined what it means to cook like a Southerner today. Young chefs are joining in, learning butchery and fermentation, putting up chowchow and piccalilli, experimenting with wood ash to make their own hominy.
Perhaps most important, they are paying (and charging) big-city prices for down-home ingredients: money that is keeping food traditions, and small producers, alive.
Jason Powell, a nurseryman in Jemison, Ala., grew heirloom roses until a decade ago, when he took a basket of overflow from his family’s fig trees to the back door of a restaurant in Birmingham.
“I never felt like a rock star in my life until I went into a restaurant kitchen with a load of fruit,” he said. “All those hands, reaching out to touch your stuff.” Now he raises old strains of blackberries, muscadines and scuppernongs (“grapes with a twang,” he calls them). They are traditionally used for jelly, but the region’s chefs are churning them into sorbet or serving them pickled.
Around Charleston, the relationships between chefs and producers are particularly intimate. “The guys who taught me how to mill are stuck in their ways,” said Greg Johnsman, the owner of Geechie Boy Mill on Edisto Island, who drives around the region collecting antique machines used to preserve the particular bran-oil-starch ratio of his cornmeal and grits. “These days, the food comes from factories, and only the chefs care about how things taste.”
He started out as a “tie-boy” at age 8, sewing up sacks, and accumulated vast knowledge about Southern grains.
A few weeks ago, he was shouting encouragement over the clanking of his 1945 grist mill to Mr. Brock, who had persuaded him to allow a vat of liquid nitrogen into the mill. The two are trying to determine whether dried corn makes tastier cornmeal when it is flash-frozen before grinding, and didn’t seem fazed by the billows of vapor that soon covered the floor. “Heat is the enemy,” Mr. Johnsman said; farmers used to line up at mills at sunrise to use the machines before they heated up and changed the flavor of the grain.
Around here, the New Year is ushered in with bowls of hoppin’ John, a resilient mix of rice and black-eyed peas that is supposed to bring luck. One food lover in Charleston, when asked if the Lowcountry had any other New Year’s foods, said, “I’m sorry, but all that bandwidth is occupied by hoppin’ John.”
(Others said that hoppin’ John brings the luck, but golden yellow corn bread and greens have to be eaten, too, to bring the money.)
One of the most influential characters in the Southern revival is Glenn Roberts, the owner of Anson Mills in Columbia, S.C., a grower of heirloom grains across the region, and a walking Wikipedia on the agricultural history of the South. The modern hoppin’ John recipe of converted rice and black-eyed peas, he says, is a flavorless facsimile of the real thing. With sadness, he reported: “People taste it and say, ‘Really? That’s the dish that has survived for centuries and represents an entire cuisine?’ ”
In his telling, after the American Revolution, hundreds of varieties of rice flourished in plantations and paddies along the coast of North Carolina and Georgia. The flavor of Carolina rice made it world famous; the finest grains were hand-pounded, barrel-aged and scented with bay leaves. From African slaves, white farmers learned to rotate crops of peas with rice, to replenish the soil; they learned that the two foods, eaten together, could sustain life over many months of winter or hardship.
At harvest, peas — usually flavorful red or cream-colored varieties — were eaten green and fresh, in a dish called “reezy peezy” (a name that shows the influence of the 17th-century Italian engineers who advised local rice planters: “risi e bisi” is a spring specialty in the Veneto). In winter, the dried peas (what Northerners call beans) were the standard for hoppin’ John.
Later, when mechanized farming took hold, black-eyed peas (which Mr. Roberts described as “burpy” and starchy) become dominant because they were easy to grow, with high yields. And machine-milled rice, sprayed with vitamins and pesticides, became the standard. “Machining takes the flavor nuances out,” Mr. Roberts said.
These days, in high-end Southern restaurants, the hoppin’ John is most likely to be made with creamy-textured red peas and heirloom rice, flavored with artisanal bacon fat and fresh herbs grown by the chef — past and present, coming together in delicious new ways.
At Mepkin Abbey, a Cistercian monastery north of Charleston, monks grow huge, lush oyster mushrooms for chefs who turn them into pickles and stews. The young chef Ellis Grossman, whose obsession is healthy alternatives to fast food, recently began working two days a week on a farm, where he buys broccoli rabe and green tomatoes.
Local growers first avoided Jacques Larson, who cooks strictly authentic Italian food at Wild Olive, outside Charleston in Johns Island, but he proved an avid buyer of local pork, tomatoes and greens. “Some farmers around here thought my food was strange at first, but now they drop off escarole on the way to church,” he said.
Many farmers work on a small scale, raising a few cows to make clabbered cream, or prowling abandoned farms for old strains of white peaches to sell to chefs. “I’m still not sure I can make a living on this land,” said Shawn Thackeray, a longtime farmer on Wadmalaw Island, where the farm business was long dominated by tomatoes for supermarkets and fast-food chains.
Wadmalaw, Johns and other barrier islands lie between Charleston and high-end resort islands like Kiawah and Seabrook; many farms here have been sold because the rich dirt is more profitable for raising second homes than vegetables.
But there are holdouts like Mr. Thackeray who are hoping to ride the Southern revival to sustainability, if not wealth, by raising chef-friendly crops like mustard frills, Ragged Jack kale and Bright Lights chard, organic peanuts and watermelon radishes. Celeste Albers, a local legend for her knowledge of traditional agriculture, has dreams of producing buttermilk for sale from her herd of Jersey cows.
The quest for “real” Southern food isn’t new: for decades, food historians and organizations like the Southern Foodways Alliance and Slow Food USA have mourned the extinction of treasures like beaten biscuits and cane syrup.
Today, purists believe, Southern cooking is too often represented by its worst elements: feedlot hams, cheap fried chicken and chains like Cracker Barrel.
“My mother didn’t cook like that, and my grandmother didn’t cook like that,” Mr. DeFelice said. “And if you want to come down here and talk about shrimp and grits, well, we’re tired of that, too. Southern cooking is a lot more interesting than people think.”
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