Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food

CHAPTER ONE: Moonshine: Drawing a Bead on Southern Food and Gender

22 chapter one the boundaries of society, was perfectly positioned to reveal the tensions and anxieties driving early twentieth-century southern food activism. Moonshine casts a long shadow on southern foodways. While traces of actualmoonshiners ,especiallyfemale,nonwhite,andoneswhoarenotportrayed as mountain hillbillies, are relatively elusive in the historical record, authors during the era busied themselves with fictional portrayals of moonshining. Novels, short stories, and magazine pieces filled the national media of the time; moonshine stories seemed to clutter the pages of every publication, including high-class Harper’s Monthly and the New York Times, dime novel presses like Beadle, technical journals like Scientific American, and religious and philanthropic publishers like the Russell Sage Foundation.2 Tensions and anxieties specifically around women and moonshine clustered into three roughly chronological categories: first, gendered Progressive rhetoric about activists and career women (most apparent in stories between the 1870s and 1910s); second, the invention of the teen girl and resultant struggles over what to do with her (in stories dating from the 1880s to the 1920s); and third, early twentieth-century consumer culture and its failures (applicable in stories written in the 1910s to 1930s). Questions raised by the figure of the Progressive Era’s New Woman in the South animated the beaten biscuits crusade; the unsettling teen girl received attention from the tomato club organizers; and the problems of consumerism in the South drove portraits of food-based disease in southern labor fiction, each a subject of a chapter to follow. Finally, thewildness,hiddensecrets,andsubversivetraditionsofmoonshineingeneral carved out spaces the hidden communities of this book’s final chapter and conclusion also inhabited. Recipes and Reasons All you really need to make moonshine is corn, yeast (which can be captured from the wild), water, heat, and cold. Fundamentally, moonshine requires chemical reactions much like those in baking. Twentieth-century distillers added sugar to the recipe, as well as more or less fancy equipment to facili- moonshine 23 tate the process. From a kitchen batch brewed on stovetop to a giant twelvehundred -gallon operation in the woods, the basics stayed about the same. Moonshiners mixed sugary sprouted ground corn with a little water and yeast, and added heat. Once it activated, they clarified and strengthened it by bubbling the vapors (generally two times) through copper tubing. Cooling the vapors back to liquid condensed and proofed the alcohol. Despite the reputation of moonshining as primitive, the ingredients and equipment could be expensive—refined sugar, copper tubing, commercial yeast, barrels, copper pots, additives to color the product or add to its bead (the bubbles that signal the proof and kick of the liquor). Many suggest that as the century progressed, thehome-brewedliquoroftheSouthbecamenotcornliquoratall,but,rather, sugar liquor with essence of corn—because true corn liquor required patience andsafety.Onestrategytostopmoonshinemadeitillegaltopossesssprouting corn (which, after all, was used almost exclusively for moonshine). This strictureappliedbothtothemoonshinersproutingthecornandtothemillowners grinding it. Thus, many brewers abandoned corn in favor of purchased sugar. Other, more dangerous twentieth-century practices—bubbling the liquor through car radiators instead of clean copper worms; adding everything from chicken excrement to the contents of a spittoon to fake aging; and pouring in oil or soap at the end to add shine and bubbles—all mean that it is still a very good idea to know and trust the moonshiner before tasting his or her wares.3 At its best, moonshine tastes smooth and cool before its warmth hits you. The resurgences of craft and small-batch production today mean that we can sample from a range of top-end versions exhibiting a subtlety well beyond the rotgut of myth and song. Historians give three explanations for why people risked illegal distilling. The first dates back to the 1790s and the United States government’s initial major attempt to tax alcohol. That failed policy culminated in 1794 with the Whiskey Rebellion, in which fifteen thousand troops were called out for the first time against the nation’s own protesting citizens. Prior to then, one could legally brew liquor and sell it in whatever quantities one wished; thus, the argument that “my great-great-grandfather turned his corn into liquor 24 chapter one and no one told him he couldn’t” was often technically true. Even if your ancestor was George Washington, the claim could stand, since Washington broke from Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to establish grapes for wine and instead went straight to brewing whiskey at Mount Vernon. European colonists consumed great amounts of...