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11. Foods and Food Traditions
- University Press of Mississippi
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C H A P T E R II Foods and Food Traditions Adding flavor and aroma to Upstate folklife are the foods that typify the region and its people. In fact, these foods play a significant role in numerous social activities in the Piedmont. Whether grown by moon signs in backyard gardens, served at family-based Sunday dinners, or consumed as snacks during storytelling sessions, the types of foods eaten and the context in which consumption occurs are important parts of Piedmont folklife. For Upstate residents, traditional foods, traditional activities, and traditional values remain inseparable. Foodways in General The sights and smells of cornbread cooking in a stove or gravy spread over warm biscuits always create powerful images of days gone by for Upstaters . Even as long ago as 1936, John Wigington waxed nostalgic when describing his own favorite childhood foods: "Poke sallet, hog's jowl, buttermilk and cornbread. What a flood of pleasant memories the mention of such things release. Barefoot days, plowboy days, the rush to get through planting, an appetite 100 plus, and the mid-day meal in which . . . fresh buttermilk from the spring house, and corn bread were the big features." Due to the rural atmosphere of the area today, Tony Whitehead argued, many food traditions persist because residents can still supplement grocery items with food from gardens, hunts, and rivers. In addition, foods also retrieve memories of enjoyable family gatherings, from church and family reunions to Sunday dinners with country ministers. Moreover, since foodways tend to be private, John M. Vlach believed, they would be expected to persist while more public expressions of identity might fade. 159 i6o Carolina Piedmont Country Both the foods and their social context serve to reinforce traditional values and, ultimately, a sense of place. Gladys Taylor, whose family hosted soldiers from a nearby military base to Sunday dinners during WorldWar II, discovered that northerners "had never had fried okra. A lot of things that were southern to them that were different to them, that wewouldhave had. And grits, of course. A lot of the boys from the northern states had never had our kind of cooking And sometimes they had to get accustomed to it before they would even say they liked it." Besides regional variations, foodways may also distinguish racial, class, and occupational boundaries, extremely important to maintain in the traditional Piedmont. Thus, Whitehead noted, pork neckbones were seen by higher-income whites as "poor peoples food," while lower-class whitessaw them as black foods. Rupert Vance described differences in foods between landowning farmers and tenants, with the former consuming better cuts of meat and a more diversified diet of fruits and vegetables. As income declined , though, cornbread, pork, beans, molasses, potatoes, and greens became more common. As might be expected, Lois MacDonald noticed that mill workers generally ate less nutritious foods than town dwellers. While foodways served at least partially to distinguish classes and occupations , food traditions between races blurred much more than these groups mixed in everydaylife. While differential income continued to dictate at least some of the variation between African- and Anglo-American foods, these groups shared much in common. Aswith manyother elements of Piedmont folklife (such as family and religious values), the strands of black and white foodways have blended together so thoroughly that it has become virtually impossible to disentangle them. Much of this interweaving stemmed from the former relationship between black and white women, traditionally those responsible for preparing family and group meals. Whether in the country or city, mill village or uptown neighborhood, many white families employed a black woman as cook. Dale Garroway explained: "A lot of our traditional foods came from black people, because before this century, during slave days, they did all the cooking. And so fried chicken and all those things,... it came from them. And I'd say a high percentage of the white women were taught to cook by black women." If many white foodways derive from African Americans, where did their preferences come from? Tony Whitehead suggested that black foodways were shaped primarily by the political economy of slavery and then perpetuated under the sharecropping system. From there, the emphasis on pork, fatback, collard and turnip greens, black-eyed peas, potatoes, grits, and cornbread, along with the tradition of frying meats, passed into AngloAmerican subculture by means of black cooks for white families. [3.14.132.214] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:23 GMT) Foods and Food Traditions 161 Regardless of the sources of...