Food is central to family and culture

When we would drive the 10 or so hours from Southern Illinois to visit my maternal grandmother in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, she had ready for us in the kitchen a skillet of Hunter’s Delight. An ironic name, Hunter’s Delight does not contain the meat of an animal that has been hunted, unless somewhere they’re still hunting pigs. It consists of, if I’m remembering this correctly, slabs of ham, corn, thinly sliced potatoes, and stewed tomatoes. At some point during the visit, my mother will ask Grandma to make a (vegetarian) dish called “Brunette beans,” which has been handed down the matriarchal line for many generations. These are brown beans that have been baked for hours in a sort of secret marinade that is both sweet and tart. It is served at the table with salt, pepper, and a cruet of white vinegar, which you can pour over the beans to your liking. My mother insists that she cannot replicate the dish the way Grandma makes it, no matter how closely she follows her instructions. This is a very old, learned deference that I have heard in other Southern families.

Grandma grew up one of 13 children on a sharecropping farm in Texas. I have extended family I’ve never met spreading throughout the Southern states of Kentucky, Tennessee and Texas. Family lore insists there is a blood tie to Jim Bowie, of the Bowie knife. The first time I flipped through James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which chronicles the lives of sharecroppers during the Great Depression, I had the distinct feeling I was gazing at photos of my ancestors. There is one woman in particular—her picture is the 39^th photo in the sequence—who is the spitting image of my grandmother as a young woman, and maybe even me, as everyone says I look like my grandmother—the same high cheekbones and rounded noses. The poverty my grandmother knew as a child is well reflected in the photos and text created by Agee and Walker Evans. They render the story of these people with unabashed humanity; I think this is one of the best books ever published in America and taught it many times to my students.

via xroads.virginia.edu

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