Christmas In Dry Valley

The view of Rich Mountain from parent's front porch.

My Mom, Dad and brothers moved to the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Townsend, Tennessee about a year after I started college. My mother's side of the family is from this area, in fact she was born here. Her parents, my Nana and Grandfather, moved to the suburbs of Detroit in the early 1950's to find work in the auto industry when she was one year old, as did many out of work Southerners. East Tennessee in the 1950's was poor and rural, and Detroit was a boom town. Many of these Appalachian expats didn't end up finding any manner of real happiness in Detroit. Some stayed. Some actually moved to the Copper Mountains in the Upper Peninsula because they somewhat resemble the Smokies. Many returned to the mountains they loved. Poverty, it seems, is a more easily accepted lifestyle when you are in a place you have very real love for deep in your bones. My Grandfather drank himself to death in the chair he sat in every day after work in the suburban Detroit home where he raised my mother and uncle. I couldn't tell you if it was because he missed the mountains. He died just a few short months before I was born.

So it wasn't much of a surprise that, after Nana died, my family decided to move south with the help of a bit of money she left them. They have struggled, as most people in east Tennessee seem to, but I think they are very happy to be there. And I have been very happy to visit. We started visiting Tennessee when I was very young and I have spent almost every Christmas there since they moved. Even though I have never lived there,  Tennessee is very much a part of me. Many of my relatives have heavy southern accents and I have great aunts named Bobby and Gladys and Phyllis, most of whom kept extravagant beehives or similar fashionable hairdos most of their lives. My mother cooked things like biscuits and gravy and fried chicken when we were growing up, just like Nana and her sisters would when we visited.

I love the food of the American South, especially the food and food traditions of Appalachia. In the South, where racial divides have historically run very deep, it can be hard to tell where the line between soul food and southern comfort food is. This is what I love about the dinner table. It is truly a harbinger for commonality, equality and democracy. Not so long ago in Townsend it wouldn't be unusual to find smoky country ham, hominy or fine grits, beans baked with ham hocks, wild watercress wilted in bacon fat, or greens in pot liquor on local stoves. Today, the small town of Maryville, the closest metropolis, is surrounded by malls and chain restaurants. My mother and I were talking about how strange it seems to both of us that you can't find a local restaurant that makes a home made biscuit. You are hard pressed to find anything more than typical commodity products on grocery store shelves, barbecue joints are few and far between (though there are a couple of good ones), and you are unlikely to find someone under the age of 50 who has ever tasted wild watercress. But this is still a very, very good place for food.

The renowned Inn at Blackberry Farm is here, where John Fleer got people thinking about the fine food traditions of the foothills and paying good money to experience it. My mother owns a bakery, Wild Mountain Rose Bakery, where she makes delicious, hand made bread from her wood fired oven. The Market in Maryville which sells her bread has a really remarkable butcher shop in it.

And then, of course, there is Allan Benton. Allan Benton is a bit of a hero of mine. He has recently become very well known thanks to the likes of David Chang et al. I have been a customer for some time, before the hoopla. Allan is friendly, kind, and gracious. More often than not he is taking orders by phone at his shop in Madisonville and he will happily drop what he's doing to give passers by a tour while telling the story of Benton's, a story that started with his childhood in Virginia: killing, butchering, curing and smoking hogs for the family. He makes ham and bacon the way he was taught in the hills as a child, and this is what makes his products so special. Many country ham producers in the south are changing their hams to suit modern tastes: lessening the salt and smoke, controlling their curing cells to keep the funk at bay. But a Benton's ham is made as it always has been. It is as aggressive and wild and boisterous as the south itself and is probably very much like the hams that were made by the first foothills settlers two centuries ago. Admittedly, it's not for everyone.  In fact, we had to stop putting Benton's bacon in our burger because too many Yankee princesses were complaining that it was too smoky (as it turns out, Allan says even in Tennessee they sell more unsmoked bacon than smoked). But I love love love it. It is an experience not unlike drinking Scotch from Islay, whisky that is peaty and smoky sometimes to the point of becoming medicinal. And once again, some people love it, others don't. This area was settled in large part by Scots, so this comparison seems all too appropriate, as does my appreciation for both, as a Scot descendent myself.

Many years during the Christmas visit we make the trek out to Madisonville to see Benton's. One of the little known gems you can get there is his breakfast sausage. It is a raw pork sausage studded with nutmeg and sage packed in to a sleeve of burlap and cold smoked. It is without a doubt the best breakfast sausage on earth. I am very proud of my own, but it falls very short of Mr. Benton's. Having breakfast sausage on hand in the Millar house means biscuits and gravy will follow. I have been working on perfecting my own biscuit recipe and am always excited to make them for Mom to see what she thinks of version ?.0. My mother puts Pet brand evaporated milk in her gravy. I never knew this and when she told me I was a little suspect. As it turns out, a lot of people in East Tennessee cooked with cans of evaporated milk. There was a Pet production facility here so it was inexpensive, and it kept well without refrigeration. This was pretty important in a part of the country that was economically depressed and that sees raging heat and humidity in the summer months. Some of these hollers and mountain communities didn't see electricity (and therefore refrigeration) until the 1970's. So if you didn't have a cow, you had no milk unless you had Pet.

I have always loved my mother's biscuits and gravy above all others, so as I was making gravy this morning, I did as she suggested and used a can of evaporated milk. And the lights suddenly went on. I have never been able to make it myself as well as she could, and now I know why. Evaporating the milk concentrates and faintly caramelizes the lactose, milk's natural sugar, which gives the gravy that same subtle dairy sweetness, and turns good into great.

This is one of the reasons I love to cook with my Mom. I constantly pester her with questions, and sometimes I am blindsided by some little nugget of wisdom that I never thought to ask about and she never thought to share. She taught me to cook and she is still teaching me. My personal history is wrapped up in the things she learned to cook from her mother, right along side the history of the people of this region, all those good things to eat, and the wonderful stories that get passed around our home. Stories about great grandmother Rose who cooked most of her life on a wood stove and could tell with a pass of the hand if the fire was ready for baking a pie. Or how she taught them the hard but necessary truth about where chicken comes from when she went into the yard and wrung a bird's neck to make dinner one night. Or what it is like to go without so your children will have something to eat that day in school. Or, perhaps, a story or two about the great abundance of both food and joy around the table on Christmas night, now that the days of living on the edge of hunger are at least for now a memory for my family. It is quite often a story about something simple, a piece of candy her mother gave her, maybe, that will cause her to pause and remember Nana, her sweet and giving mother, who she lost too soon, who stayed connected with the tall, rocky hills of Townsend, and kept them alive for her daughter, who kept them alive for me. Cooking and eating are one of our great cultural archives, but also one of our most fragile. Writing about food helps, but it does not replace the acts of cooking and eating. If we don't take a little time to preserve the foods that are so central to our personal histories by bringing them to life in the kitchen and the dining room, they will be lost and unrecoverable. This yearly sojourn to Tennessee brings things to life that I may never cook in a restaurant. But they remind me who I am, and put my feet firmly in the red clay of Tennessee, if only for a moment.