I'll be lecturing and doing cooking demos at the following events:
September 10-11, 2010 Monticello
September 29, 2010: A Lowcountry Evening With a Tasting of Lowcountry Fare.
I will be speaking on Lowcountry Cooking at the Smithsonian.
Tickets available here. We will begin at 6:45 pm that evening. I'll speak, there will be food, and there will be a question and answer session. My friend
anna saint john, who sells my products at the
Bethesda Central Farm Market, will be catering the event (Champagne punch and lemonade, boiled peanuts on the tables, Carolina (chicken) pilau, cornbread, green bean/benne salad, and sweet benne wafers).
October 2: Grand Marshall of Pig Island Celebration of Beer and Barbecue on Governor's Island in New York.
Details here.
September 1, 2010
I've never much cared for September. Back to school. Hurricanes. Layers of clothes that are shed all day. I do welcome the cooler weather and the return of oyster season. I'm writing about oysters for the Washington Post. The article will appear in early October. I've been out to the Eastern Shore of Maryland interviewing skipjack captains and tongers and regular folks who are participating in the Marylanders Grow Oysters program. More to follow!
If you find yourself on the Bay Hundred Peninsula (between Easton and Tilghman Island), I highly recommend the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels. It's fascinating. It was there that I met Turkle North (right), who was an oyster tonger on the bay for 50 years. One of the few remaining skipjacks, the Thomas Clyde, was being readied for the new season (which has been pushed back to October 1). And check out this photo from the museum, showing how big oysters in the Chesapeake used to be! I am not surprised, because we used to regularly find foot-long oysters in the estuaries of the South Carolina lowcountry when I was growing up.
I was also thrilled to see sorghum being planted again this year. Sorghum bicolor, one of several grain-producing grasses that were brought to America with the slave trade from West Africa, has always held a special place in my heart. It is one of the most useful plants on earth, its grain providing sustenance to more than 500 million people in over 30 countries. There are many varieties of these can-like grasses, but most produce not only edible seeds, but its stalks are used to make syrup (my favorite, molasses-like), baskets, building materials, fences, brooms, firewood, furniture and flooring. It is also one of the major sources of biofuel, as well as alcohol, waxes, vegetable oil, and dyes. It was also used as both forage and silage for cattle where I grew up. It has been cultivated in southern Africa for over 3000 years, and was referred to in colonial times as "Guinea grass" or " Guinea corn," like Guinea fowl, Guinea squash (eggplant), and Guinea pepper (cayenne), though in some instances (cayenne, for example), the word does not necessarily point to proper origins. (Cayenne is New World, but slaves from West Africa were long familiar with it by the time most of them made the Middle Passage.)
A guinea was also an English gold coin worth one pound and one shilling that was in circulation from 1663 to 1813. It also came to be used as a derogatory slang term for an Italian or person of Italian descent, referencing the Guinea coast of Africa, which was the original source of the gold from which the coin was made.
In Blairsville, Georgia, where my grits and meals are ground, there is an annual Sorghum Festival.
The field to the right is near Claiborne, Maryland.