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By Shirley Fong-Torres Contact
Shirley at wokwiz@aol.com and visit her site
at www.wokwiz.com The first race begins in the starting gate for your flight into the Bluegrass State. If you travel with carry-on luggage, use every early boarding privilege you can claim or beg. Otherwise, you will find all the overhead space filled with designer hatboxes. The Derby is a serious fashion event, even in Lexington, where record crowds show up, fully attired, to watch the race on TV, from Louisville. But I was on quite a different mission. I had come to Kentucky to visit the source of some of the most resourceful cooking in American history. As the youngest daughter of immigrant chefs, I learned that the true art of cooking is revealed on the lower rungs of the food chain, by taking pieces of food that rich people don't want and turning them into tender morsels fit for an emperor's table. Some of the mountain foods of southern and eastern Kentucky are odd notions of word to many of us from the coasts: poke; ramps; huckleberries; squirrel; big mouth; paw paws; smoked sliced shoulder; persimmon; corn cakes. But Chef Bill Ware of the Pine Mountain State Resort, (www.state.ky.us) who grew up in the hills, explains to me, "For several people working here, at one time or another in their lives, a fried corn cake WAS dinner." Bill tells me that the traditional foods of Appalachia are getting lost in 21st century America. "People have been changed by the fast food culture," he says. "They still go for the huckleberries, fried chicken, corncakes and pinto beans, but mostly just the older folk care about them. "You can't get kids to eat poke or ramps. It's just too difficult to find squirrel and opossum, or bear. Wild turkeys are plentiful now because their natural predators are gone - coyotes and wildcats. "I am one of the only people working here who even knows where our paw paw trees are; they are a tricky fruit. If they aren't picked at the exact right time, they aren't good. If they are picked at the right time, you have to fend off wild animals to get them. But come August, they are worth looking for." Bill was able to find poke, a wild weed that can grow eight feet high in the mountains, but are best to eat in early spring, before they are three feet tall. Prepared with ham hocks and bacon, they were the most intensely flavored cooked greens imaginable. Chef Ware also explained the most famous food of the region: "Fried chicken is the food of this region for micro economic reasons -- anyone could have a chicken running around in hard times. It's no coincidence that Harlan came from this area. Chickens were the most efficient pre-refrigeration food. "Fry it in lard, if there are leftovers, pull them off the bone, boil the bones down, add the gravy made from the drippings from the fried chicken, and drop in a little glob of flour for dumplings. "Eggs in dumplings were something for the rich. Chicken and dumplings is the natural food of the hills and of poverty." The "Harlan" he referred to would be Harlan Sanders, the Kentucky Fried Colonel who came from Corbin, where a KFC and Sanders family museum occupies the site of his original family restaurant and motor court. Sanders lost everything when he misjudged the effect an interstate highway would have on his business. So, in his mid-60's, with only his social security check to support him, he built the KFC chain. The museum shows accounting ledgers that suggest Sanders ran his restaurant as a lost leader, to entice people into his motor court. An immaculate motel room was enclosed in glass within the restaurant. In a film at the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame Museum in Renfro Valley, (www.kentuckymusicmuseum.com) Rosemary Clooney observed that this land resembles Ireland, from where so many of the settlers who followed Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap fled for better times. Like the Emerald Isle, farms are disappearing from Kentucky faster than bear and buffalo did after Boone brought gunpowder and long rifles over the mountains. At Snug Hollow Farm & Country Inn, (www.snughollow.com), an idyllic bread and breakfast inn deep in the Red Lick Valley, owner and chef Barbara Napier explained that keeping her working organic farm going, amongst 300 acres of rolling meadows, requires a constant fight with the deer.
(A snug little place to stay at Snug Hollow Farm & Country Inn) She wins enough battles to provide her guests with vegetarian fare good enough to convert meat eaters on the spot.
(Enjoy home cooking at Snug Hollow)
The Cumberland Inn (www.cumberlandcollege.edu) in Williamsburg is an Appalachian hotel that looks like an antebellum mansion, and no, that's not the pokeberry tea talking. The executive chef here is Roy Sexton, a Culinary Institute of America-trained son from a strip-mining family. Roy gave me some great tips: · 'Hickory chickens,' or 'dry land fish,' don't have anything to do with chicken, fish or hickory; they are morel mushrooms growing in apple orchards usually. Just salt wash them to get rid of insects, dust and fry. ·
Ramps, a wild onion that resembles garlic, "come out all over Bell and Harlan
Counties, but they also come out in your sweat glands." Though it isn't common knowledge beyond the Nashville-Indianapolis-Knoxville triangle, Monroe County is the cherished travel destination of culinary adventurers. Population center Thompkinsville is also known as a world marble center -- the game, not the quarries. Men gather every night of the year to play in the town's four marble yards, one of which is domed for bad weather. The Watermelon Festival includes a big marble tourney, and Dumas Walker, of Kentucky Headhunter song fame, is one of the local legends. I was more interested in another - barbecue. There are eight Q's in Monroe County, down from 14 a few years ago, but still perhaps the highest per capita representation west of Lexington, North Carolina. Rather than smoking entire shoulders and pulling the pork off the leg, thirty Q's in a 10 county area of south central Kentucky and north central Tennessee use 12,000 pounds of sliced shoulders a week. And there are strongly divided opinions about just how this should be done. Francis BBQ, in Hestand, uses charcoal and gas, and has drawn praise from music stars John Anderson, T. Graham Brown, Aaron Tippin, and the KY Headhunters, plus a guy named Al Gore. Their extremely sweet, vinegar based sauce is sold by the gallon ($11) and delivered to Louisville and Nashville. They go through 1,100 pounds of pork shoulder a weekend. Ribs, brisket and, of course, chickens, are also grilled here. Behind the R&S, Miss Anita Hamilton starts her hickory fire each day at 4:30 a.m., so she can start shoveling burnt down embers into her smoker at 5. Her sliced pork shoulder, ribs, chicken, pork chop, burger and sausage recipes were handed down through a long family heritage. "My grand daddy, Haskell Evans, brought his grandmother's recipe for sauce here, from the army camp at Horse Cave (KY), in 1950," she says. "The Tooleys had been selling BBQ on the roadside, and in town, where people came to socialize on weekends and see the picture shows." Haskell teamed up with Alex Tooley and did well enough that by the 1960's, they made it into a permanent building. Alex would sell that to Anita and Sam Graves, who died in 2002. The original building burnt down, but Sam and Anita rebuilt. Now she runs it with help from her children. This is one of two African-American BBQ's in the area, drawing an intensely loyal clientele. "We get folks from Nashville, Owensboro, Louisville and Indianapolis every week," says Anita. When asked how her sauce compares to the other places, Miss Anita laughed. "There isn't any secret sauce, no secret recipe," she says. "My sauce has been around so long everyone in town knows the recipe by now. The big secret is treating people right and making them feel at home. That's why they want to come back." Don't bring French hatboxes to Miss Anita's -- large coolers are a better idea. For
information on any of the attractions mentioned in this story, contact: (Click below for more travel stories!)
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