Stackcake and Bear Scat: Giving Thanks

Wednesday morning we harvested collards, mustard greens, celery, parsley, and lettuces from the garden (above), packed up some of our winter squash and pumpkins, and headed for my parents' home about an hour away for Thanksgiving.


My mom and dad live on 50 acres of mostly wooded land in a rural community* near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They bought their land 30 years ago, when land in the remote areas of western North Carolina was cheap and mostly wild.

My parents built their house --the house I grew up in--in 1979 and they live there still. They have been dedicated to preserving and caring for the land for the past 30 years. Over the course of my lifetime, I've seen the hardwood forest around my parents' home slowly regenerating as time passes and the earth heals itself from the injuries of logging and clearing sustained before our time. It has been a huge part of my education to see the plants and trees, animals and birds in the woods around my parents' house thrive and reproduce, creating and strengthening living systems.

The land around my parents' house is just as much home to my sister and me as the house itself -- we spent much of our childhoods outside in the woods, creek, and pasture land, and we know the land as intimately as if were another member of our family. We grew up learning the names of the trees and plants, animals, birds, and insects that shared our home. All of those living things still feel like they are part of my extended family -- all our relations as some native peoples would say.

Calling in the Ancestors

The day before Thanksgiving was my mom's birthday, and I had resolved to try my first recipe from my favorite new cookbook/history book (see my earlier post for details).

I wanted to bake a traditional Southern Appalachian stackcake with apples, but because my mom loves cranberries and because I already had some for Thanksgiving cranberry sauce, I wanted to incorporate cranberries, too.

So here(above) is my modified, nontraditional stackcake. I started with a recipe for Apple Stack Cake from the book I mentioned above, Joseph Dabney's Smokehouse Ham, Spoonbread, and Scuppernong Wine.

Here's some background on stackcake from Dabney:

"This is probably the most 'mountain' of cakes. . . .One story goes that since fancy 'in fare' wedding cakes were beyond the reach of many...mountain families, neighbor wives would bring in cake layers to donate to the bride's family. Author Elizabeth Dunn confirmed the tradition, declaring a bride's popularity was often measured by the number of layers in her cake! As the layers arrived, the bride's family would spread the apple filling between each."

Since Dabney notes that "while plain applesauce can be used in such cakes, dried apples offer a much stronger flavor and therefore were the choice of most mountain cooks," I decided to use some of the apples that Alan gleaned and dried earlier this summer. I made a slow-cooked apple sauce from the dried apples with cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves and then followed this recipe for the cake:

Haywood County Stack Cake

• 4 cups flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. soda
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 3/4 cup shortning (I used butter)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup sorghum molasses (I used regular molasses)
• 1 cup milk
• 3 eggs
• 3 cups applesauce
  

Sift flour, salt, soda, and baking powder. Cream the shortning [butter] and add sugar, a little at a time, blending well. Add sorghum [or other molasses] and mix thoroughly. Add milk and eggs, one at a time, beating well until smooth. Pour 1/3 inch deep in greased 9-inch pans and bake until golden brown. when cool, stack the layers (around six) and use the applesauce between them.

According to Dabney, "This 1800s recipe was used for many years by Mrs. Dolphus Kerley of Waynesville, North Carolina, who died in January 1948, just shy of age ninety. The recipe actually came from her mother, Mrs. Drury Bigham, of the Allens Creek section of Haywood County, North Carolina."

I modified the recipe in a couple of ways. First, I used butter instead of shortening, which worked just fine. I substituted sugarcane molasses for the sorghum just because I didn't have any sorghum, but I fully intend to try it again with sorghum for a more traditional taste. Also, I decided to make fewer thicker layers -- a major departure from tradition -- and used a bundt pan for the top layer. I lined the bottom of the bundt pan (which became the top of the cake) with fresh apples, about 1/2 cup of my ginger cranberry sauce, and a little (less than a tablespooon of) raw sugar.

Also, the recipe doesn't give an oven temperature or time - I baked it at 350 degrees and it took about 50 minutes before a knife came out clean. If you made thinner layers as the original recipe suggests, I can't imagine you would want to bake it for more than 30 minutes.

Here's how the cake turned out (above). It was unbelievably, ridiculously delicious. It had a very old-fashioned molasses-ey spice cake flavor, and was moist and luscious with the apple and cranberry sauces seeping into the cake adding deep, tart fruity flavor to the sweetness of the cake. Holy smoke, it was good.

I really loved the taste, and of course I loved the feeling of holding a thread spinning back through the generations of food tradition: baking a cake in the same tradition nurtured and passed along by other women in these very mountains years ago. And I loved altering the tradition to suit the particular moment -- modifying ingredients, personalizing the recipe - stirring individual creativity into the rich blend of food heritage as have so many people who came before.

Cooking from an old recipe like this makes me feel connected to my ancestors - not my genetic ancestors necessarily, but all of the people who came before me.

Visiting the Wild Relations

Eventually, after a couple of days centered around the kitchen, featuring much enjoyment of the stackcake as well as baked winter squash from our garden, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy, sweet potatoes, creamed corn, and a huge pot of slow-cooked collards from the photo at the top of this post, we needed to get out of the house and move our bodies.

We all went for a long walk in the woods the day after Thanksgiving, and came across two exciting things. First, we found a gorgeous hornets' nest. It seems to have been made by bald-faced hornets. It was incredibly light, with paper-thin walls made up of beautiful, overlapping swirls of grey and white. The nest was vacant and in pieces, which we picked up and carried home. Also we came across some fairly fresh bear scat full of persimmon seeds. Knowing that at some point in the recent past a black bear has passed through the very spot where I'm standing still sends a thrill through me. Thinking about the bear picking up persimmons off the ground, or climbing high up a persimmon tree to get to the sweet and sticky fruit feels to me like a little spell of connection with all of the wild animals in the woods. The forest was full of all kinds of activity -- but the hornets nest and the bear scat were the highlights -- little reminders of the presence of some of our wilder relations.

Large Enthusiastic Thank-yous

So I'm giving thanks for a few days spent with family and friends including a ritual of connection with the ancestors (baking stackcake) and moments of connection with all of our plant and animal relations (hornets, bears, trees, birds, woodland plants). I spent some time the day after Thanksgiving reading Ted Williams' The Thanksgiving Address, an interpretation of traditional Iroquois prayers of thanks-giving. The Thanksgiving Address is something that my dear friend Tyson shared with me from Williams' wonderful book, Big Medicine from Six Nations (pictured at left).

In the spirit of The Thanksgiving Address, I'll borrow the refrain from Ted Williams' version to offer my appreciation to the universe for the last few days:

Three times three times three large enthusiastic thank yous!

In gratitude...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*By "community" I mean a place too small to be called a town...

Winter Reading: From Scuppernongs to Switchel

When it gets cold outside, there's nothing I like more than curling up somewhere with a hot beverage, a cat, and a book. I come from a long line of bookworms, librarians, word-lovers, readers, writers, and other nerd-types. Book-loving is in my blood.

If the book contains recipes, food history, and stories about food, all the better as far as I am concerned. One of my all-time favorites is 100 Vegetables and Where They Came From, by a hero of mine, seed saver and historian William Woys Weaver.

So I can't tell you how excited I was to be introduced last night to this book: Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, & Scuppernong Wine by Joseph E. Dabney. We were having dinner with our good friends Bud and MF. After a highly satisfying meal of stuffed butternut squash, cream of broccoli soup made from broccoli from their garden, and a creamy custard for dessert, we retired to the living room to talk about James Bond movies (!), Noam Chomsky, and traditional mountain "stack cakes." This last topic lead to MF whipping out the aforementioned book.

We found several very fine stack cake recipes within, but that was just the beginning. This book is a treasure trove of Southern Appalachian food lore, food histories, food traditions, and recipes. It's one part oral history, one part cookbook, and one part hymn to the people and traditions of the Southern Appalachians. It is meticulously researched and written with the reverence and relish of a person who has cultivated a long-lasting and deep love of food and food traditions.

I quickly became completely absorbed -- a whole chapter on sweet potatoes, another on persimmons, and a veritable profusion of information about old-time food-preserving techniques. Very old Cherokee recipes, wild foods traditions, and chapters on moonshine, wine, and beer. Recipes calling for everything from "several squirrels" to "Tennessee truffles," otherwise known as ramps. A section on "The Art of Growing" in the southern mountains. And lots of amazing old photographs of places all around where I grew up and where I live now. This is so far up my alley it's out the other side.

In the 12 or so hours since MF kindly lent me her copy (seeing the pain it would cause me if she didn't), I have spent most of my waking hours falling in love with this book. I stayed up late reading Christopher snippets about the history of wild grapes in North Carolina, and opened it up first thing this morning to read about possum hunting.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. As I try out recipes, I will post some of them, and I'll write more about Dabney's exhaustive survey of mountain food culture as I read and re-read it, I am sure.

On a related note (food traditions, books I love, recommended reading for cold days and nights), I was re-united last night with my copy of Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz. I had apparently lent it out to MF long ago and forgotten. Christopher has had to hear me lament its absence many times in recent months, only to discover that it was safe and sound in West Asheville all along. I was very excited when MF whipped out my copy last night.

This is one of my all-time favorite books. It is only 187 pages from cover to cover, but it is highly concentrated. Like a thick mole or miso paste, it provides more flavor, substance, and hours of enjoyment than you might imagine. Wild Fermentation is chock full of recipes, food histories, stories from the modern food underground, philosophy, politics, and food lore from many traditions.

Wild Fermentation is the book that I used as a guide when I first began making krauts and brine pickles, ginger brews, kombucha, and other fermented foods. It is the single indispensable resource for people embarking on fermentation adventures, in my opinion, and an invaluable cache of fabulous food facts and folk traditions.

So there are two recommendations for winter reading. Though I am a big fan of libraries, these are books that I think it is worth owning. My copy of Wild Fermentation is well-worn already -- it has the creases and stains to prove that it's a book I pull off the shelf and use in the kitchen all the time. I am going to purchase Smokehouse post haste, and have a feeling it will assume a similarly revered and beloved status in my kitchen.

Happy winter, happy eating, and happy reading!

~~~~

A note on the title of this post: Scuppernongs and Muscadines are wild grapes that grew rampantly in North Carolina before and at the time of European settlement. According to Joseph Dabney, they were still to be found in abundance growing wild in these parts as recently as the 1940s, and were used for wine-making, desserts, and an amazing-sounding ferment made from wild grapes and molasses, apparently based on a Cherokee tradition. Switchel is a delicious home-made soft drink with molasses and ginger, a fine recipe for which can be found in Wild Fermentation.

Sauerkraut!

This is the first year we've grown cabbage, and we had a pretty good crop despite our naive lack of cabbage moth control at the beginning.

Some of the cabbage from our garden (top) is going into the current batch of sauerkraut. Making kraut is my favorite old-time way of preserving vegetables without heat or electricity. All that you need is a crock and some salt, and you are on your way to sour, salty, sauerkraut delights.

The batch that's fermenting now includes the aforementioned cabbage, a bunch of gorgeous beets I pulled a few days ago, onions, dill flowers, and carrots. Past experience tells me that the beets will make it turn out a very pretty hot pink color.

I could include a recipe here, but there's really no need for formal directions. Just chop everything up (I like to make beets and radishes super-thin, cut the carrots on a diagonal, and slice the cabbage in long, crinkly strips); smash it down in the crock as you go (I use a potato masher for this part); keep adding layers; and sprinkle a teaspoon or so of salt after every few inches of chopped veggies. Here's a picture (bottom) of the layers getting layered. Then put a plate on top and something heavy (I use an old Bombay Sapphire bottle full of water) and press, press, press every time you're in the kitchen.

Wait a few weeks or if you are a hardcore European-style krauter, a few months, and then, viola!

Did I mention it's very good for you?

Coming Home to Abundance

After a week of air and car travel and some wonderful time in Colorado, I returned to an avalanche of vegetables.

I felt like kissing the ground when my plane landed in Asheville after 12 hours of travel -- so grateful to come back to these lush, soft mountains after the rocky and dramatic landscape of the west.

In the garden, everything is exploding in flower and fruit. Zinnias, nasturtiums, bee balm, fennel, calendula, poppies, strawflowers, and sunflowers are in full bloom. Japanese Long Cucumbers are coming in hot and heavy, bi-color zephyr squash is everywhere you look, greens are still kicking, broccoli is producing a second crop, peppers are starting to come in, and tomatoes are just a few days away from ripe.

Above: Japanese Long Cucumber plants jumping the fence....

At left: Some of the food we brought in from the garden this morning...

This morning's harvest included cucumbers, cauliflower, beets, onions, purple jalepenos, cherry tomatoes, squash, edible gourds, okra, dill, and basil. Last night we feasted on food from the garden - a perfect welcome home.

Christopher reminded me of when I used to brine vegetables, making a mixed crock of pickled veggies, when we lived in town. Since we had so many cukes and squash today, along with plenty of other brine-able veggies, I started a crock this afternoon.

Pickling in salt water, or brine, is an ancient and easy way to preserve vegetables for later use. No electricity or heat is required, and you end up with delicious sour and salty pickled veggies that last for months.

For more information on brine pickling, see Sandor Katz's Wild Fermentation or Marilyn Kluger's Preserving Summer's Bounty.

Here's a summary of how brining works from Kluger: "Produce that has been properly cured in a 10 percent brine will keep almost indefinitely. The brine solution is strong enough to kill most of the bacteriathat are present when the vegetables are put into the salt water. Those that survive salt are destroyed in due time by the lactic acid that is produced by the bacteria themselves when they decompose the sugar drawn out of the cucumbers by the salt, through the process of fermentation. The lactic acid formed is responsible for much of the desirable flavor of fermented pickles."

A few years ago, when I was first getting way into brining vegetables in the summer for winter sour pickles, an old family friend told me that at her grandmother's house when she was a little girl, it was a special treat to get to go out behind the house to the underground root cellar and pull out pickled baby corn from a big crock to eat as a snack. She remembered the salty, sour taste of pickled corn as an old mountain tradition, one that had been lost in her family when root cellars and crocks were replaced by refrigeration and tupperware.

Packing cucumbers, squash, and okra into a crock today, I felt deeply connected to the long chain of food tradition that mostly women have stewarded for so many generations, handing down recipes, swapping techniques, and working together in families and communities to process and preserve food.

Here's a basic recipe for the mixed vegetable brine pickle I made today. I used the veggies that we happened to have in the garden today; you can use whatever is fresh and available.

Ingredients and Equipment:

• Fresh vegetables and herbs: okra, squash, cucumbers, peppers, peeled garlic, small onions, cauliflower, basil, and dill
• Sea salt and black peppercorns
• Water
• A large ceramic crock or (if you don't have a crock) a large wide-mouthed glass jar such as a cookie or apothecary jar (not a mason jar). You need a jar or crock with a mouth wide enough for a plate to fit inside. I used a 5 gallon ceramic crock, one of the best kitchen investments I've ever made, bought a few years ago from Lehman's.
• A plate that fits inside the crock and something to weigh it down. An old-time method is to use a rock; I use a mason jar filled with water (with the lid on to prevent spills).
  

Directions:

1. Wash all of your vegetables and herbs thoroughly, and make sure the blossom-ends are scrubbed or cut off. You can cut up anything that's too large and unwieldy for the crock, and leave everything else whole. Put all of the veggies in the crock, and add pepper, dill, basil, and anything else you want to throw in for flavor.
2. Dissolve salt in water at the ratio of 1 cup per 2 quarts of water.
3. Pour the salt water over the vegetables until they're covered. You might have to keep making more brine until you have enough to completely cover the veggies. I used about 5 quarts of brine.
   
4. Sit the plate inside the crock so that no air is trapped underneath it, and weigh it down with something heavy and press down.
   
5. All of the veggies should be well underwater. If they are not, keep adding brine mixed at the same proportion until they are completely submerged.
   
6. Throw on a little extra salt on top for good measure.
7. Cover with a clean, lightweight cloth (I use a floursack dishtowel).
   
8. Let the crock sit for 3-6 weeks, skimming off any scum that forms.

Brined vegetables can keep for a long time in the crock -- remember my friend's grandmother's pickled corn was stored, already pickled, in the crock in a cool place. Or, when the pickles reach your desired point of flavor, you can jar them up and refrigerate them, and they'll keep for a long time there, too. You can de-salt them before serving if you want by rinsing.

Some people desalt and process brined vegetables--Preserving Summer's Bounty has lots of recipes for pickle preparations using brined vegetables as an ingredient. I avoid heat-processing brined vegetables so that the beneficial bacteria that is created in the fermentation process is preserved.

At left: the beginning of today's mixed vegetable crock...