Used with permission from Virginia Living.

Illustration by Derik Hobbs. Used with permission from Garden & Gun.

SEE OUR RECIPE IN GARDEN & GUN

(ON THEIR MAP, CLICK WEST VIRGINIA.)

The Appalachian Martini was just the start. Check out Kat's other pawpaw cocktail recipes:

The Mabon: The pawpaw’s creamy goodness is married with the heat of ginger and spiced rum.

Pawpaw Whiskey Sour: This classic drink gets a fruity twist.

Petticoat: It's like chocolate and pawpaws are having a love affair in your glass.

Photo by Justin Marx on Flickr.

“People are finding nostalgia in things that Appalachian people have done for years and years and trying to replicate that.”

— Adam Taylor, manager of the Catawba Sustainability Center

Cameron Terry at one of his urban plots. Photography by Sam Dean.

Cameron Terry’s family hadn’t farmed for two generations. Decades ago, his grandfather decided that life as a Georgia peanut farmer wasn’t for him, so he enlisted in the military and traveled the world for 20 years, eventually settling in Colorado. “He wanted to be as far from the farm as possible,” Terry says.

Yet, for all his grandfather’s attempts to distance himself from farming, Terry was obsessed with it. While living in the heart of Denver and working an uninspiring day job, Terry directed all his passion and energy into plants. Lettuce led to squash. Squash led to strawberries. Strawberries led to greens. “I was living a very rural lifestyle in the middle of the city,” he says.

Before long, Terry was out of room and out of patience. He knew he wanted to be a farm entrepreneur, but with the cost of land, he just couldn’t figure out how to make it work. Then, during a 2017 farming sabbatical in Canada, he stumbled upon Curtis Stone. This small-farm guru says he generates $100,000 a year on five yard-sized plots, totaling just one quarter of an acre. Aside from his own small yard, which serves as the business’s home base, Stone doesn’t own any of the land he farms. “We lease it out from homeowners in exchange for vegetables,” he explains on his YouTube channel, which has nearly 450,000 subscribers, “And we take all the labor of maintaining the lawn off them. A lawn is essentially a cost center. It doesn’t really produce anything for you.”

Overhead view of one of Terry's backyard farms.

This unprecedented level of freshness caught the eyes of consumers at local farmers’ markets, where Terry first began selling—and, before long, restaurateurs like Nathan Sloan, the owner and executive chef at Bloom in Roanoke’s up-and-coming Wasena neighborhood. Says Sloan, “I was taught as a young chef in French restaurants, it’s all about the quality of the produce."

Terry provides Sloan with an exclusive lettuce mix that he uses at Bloom every week, mostly in salads, plus seasonal produce like okra, okra flowers, pea shoots, sunflower shoots, and wasabi shoots. Sloan weaves these fresh vegetables into his constantly evolving menu. Although Terry is a new grower, Sloan says he’s already on par with people who have been farming for decades.

Today, Terry’s business, Garden Variety Harvests, farms a hard-working quarter-acre spread across three plots, growing everything from strawberries to Napa cabbage. It’s the same amount of land as his inspiration, the Canada-based Stone, and, like Stone, Terry has made smart choices, focusing on high-value products and strategically intercropping them. His small acreage produces enough food to supply a half-dozen restaurants while he continues to sell at farmers’ markets.

Even so, Terry can see a point where he’ll need more space. “It becomes difficult to maintain more than a quarter-acre of land by myself, with all the driving and having to be in so many places at once,” he says. To find room to grow, Terry is now working with a cooperative farm trust, Southwest Virginia Agrarian Commons. Following a model used in nine other communities across the country, they hope to secure larger plots, over 10 acres, through purchase or donation. The trust will then subdivide those plots and lease them to small farms like Garden Variety Harvests.

“We believe agricultural land should be used to feed the immediate community,” says Terry, who sees this extending naturally from ideals that drove him to farm yards in the first place. “The best way to do that is make sure the community owns the land.” But he knows that any transition is still a year or two away. For now, Garden Variety Harvest continues tilling underused yards and open spaces within Roanoke’s city limits, growing food for the same community where he lives.

Let's be honest — did anyone actually enjoy communion as a kid?

At my church, I'm pretty sure the “wine” was unsweetened prune juice and the “unleavened bread” tasted like saltless oyster crackers that had been left unsealed for six months. Compare them to the sugary bowl of Cap'N Crunch I ate before each service, and it's no surprise I grew up to be such a heathen.

Maybe things would have been different if I attended Emmanuel Baptist Church in Kanawha County, West Virginia. There, Chef Mike Costello’s grandmother helped keep the communion game strong.

"In the kitchen of the basement of the church," he said, "she and a lot of other women would be cooking together, and one of the things they'd be making, especially later in the week, were these communion wafers."

Though Mike never actually took them as communion, he and his brother would snack on the crackers while the church ladies cooked. "They were so light and crispy and salty. And they were just so delicious."

Looking back, he realizes this was the first time he watched a community come together to prepare food. As a farmer and chef, that's now part of his daily life. At Lost Creek Farm, Mike and his wife Amy Dawson host community dinners, and each meal starts with his childhood wafers.

"These little crackers," he said, "are some of the most significant things I could put on the plate."

See more from Mike and Amy below, and tell us about your experience with communion wafers. Have they been handmade delights like Mike's or prepackaged blandness like mine?

Communion Wafers

from Emmanuel Baptist Church

via Lost Creek Farm

Makes a half sheet pan of crackers

Prep time: 5-10 minutes

Total time: 20-30 minutes

Ingredients:

• 1 cup all purpose flour
• ¼ cup room temperature water
• ¼ cup canola oil (vegetable oil or olive oil can be used, as well)
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt or other medium-coarse salt, divided

Preheat oven to 400 degrees In a large bowl, combine the flour and ½ teaspoon of the salt, then stir to combine.

Add water and oil. Mix until ingredients are evenly combined and there are no pockets of flour remaining. The dough should come together as a soft mass. It should feel slightly oily, but not at all sticky.

On a floured surface, roll dough evenly, maintaining the general shape of your baking pan. Flour dough, rotate and turn over frequently during the rolling process. Roll until thin, about ⅛ inch or thinner.

Sprinkle the remaining salt evenly over the dough. If desired, add other flavoring (herbs, spices, seeds, cheese, etc.). Make a light pass over dough with a rolling pin to press additives into the dough. Carefully transfer dough to a baking sheet.

Use a sharp knife or a rotary cutter to trim excess dough from edges of pan. Cut crackers into desired shape. If making crackers larger than 1 or 2 inch squares, poke several holes into the dough with a fork.

Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown. Let cool before serving.

Photo provided by Foxfire.

Who doesn't love an apple stack cake?

With layers of cake and spiced apples, this hearty desert is sort of Appalachia's answer to the English trifle. And like the trifle, it can have variations. <

A delicious mini version, the fruit stack pie uses fewer layers and invites you to pick whatever filling you like best. Apple, peaches, pears, plums — they're all game in this second scrumptious recipe in Foxfire's baking series. Inspired by the hit TV show The Great British Bake Off, this Appalachian culture and history center is drawing from over fifty years worth of recipes to spotlight four delicious bakes.

Have you ever had an apple stack cake? What do you think about this adaptation?

Be sure to leave a comment below, and check out the first recipe in this series — Scotch Cake.

Adapted from The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery

• 2 cups flour
• 1 tsp ginger
• 1 tsp cloves
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 cup shortening
• 1/2 cup sugar*
• 1 egg
• 1/3 cup molasses or sorghum syrup
• Any canned fruit in thick sweetened syrup**

*The original recipe calls for 1 full cup sugar + 1/2 cup molasses. We found this was too sweet and reduced it.

**We recommend making your own filling; any pie filling will do, so long as the juices are cooked to a thick syrup. Check out our post on half-moon pies for instructions on making apple pie filling.

Sift together dry ingredients in separate bowl. Cream together shortening and sugar until fluffy. Add egg and beat well. Mix in molasses/sorghum. Slowly mix the flour mixture into egg moisture. Divide dough into 3 or 4 balls. Lay out 3-4 squares of parchment paper. Trace a 9″ circular cake pan on each parchment sheet then flip over. Roll out dough (one on each parchment sheet) to 1/4-inch thick and bake each circle about 5-8 minutes in a 350 degrees Fahrenheit oven. (Watch these closely!) Let pastry cool completely, and then spread fruit between each layer of pastry and stack. Refrigerate overnight before serving.

For more stacking layers, double the recipe! If you find your layers are too dry, add a little buttermilk to get the consistency you want. But remember, after it sits overnight, the layers will soften from the fruit juices.

This photo ran with the recipe when it was originally published in 1984. Photo provided by Foxfire.

True confession — I am obsessed with The Great British Bake Off. Watching it, I discover amazing food like pavlova, a meringue dish named after a Russian ballerina. I find inspiration in the contestants, who exude camaraderie even as they compete, sometimes even helping one another in a pinch. And I laugh out loud at the show's comedian hosts. Seriously, I'd buy a Noel Fielding action figure if I could find one.

Turns out, I'm not the only one who loves the show. The folks at Foxfire, Appalachia's premier center for history and culture, are honoring Bake Off with a delicious series of mountain bakes. Having collected heritage recipes in the region for more than fifty years, they have no shortage of options.

After a lot of pondering, baking, and eating, they decided to start with scotch cake. This showpiece of a recipe was originally published in 1984 as part of their now classic collection The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery. It's a spicy, warm cake that ends up surrounded by thick, fluffy frosting. As if that's not enough, it's then studded with pecans and coconut, making it both delicious and beautiful.

Have you ever tried or made a scotch cake? Would you? We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Scotch Cake

Originally published and shared by Foxfire

• 2 cups flour
• 2 cups sugar
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/2 cup oil
• 1/4 cup cocoa
• 1 cup water
• 1/2 cup buttermilk
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp vanilla
• Icing (recipe follows)

• 1/2 cup butter
• 1/4 cup cocoa
• 6 Tbsp milk
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 box confectioners sugar
• 1 cup chopped pecans
• 1 cup flaked coconut

Cream together butter and cocoa. Add milk and vanilla. Stir in confectioners sugar and mix thoroughly. Last add pecans and coconut.

Photo by Rachel on Flickr.

As Quaker Oats acknowledges that Aunt Jemima syrup is "based on a racial stereotype" and rebrands the product, guest writer Dave Tabler looks back at the Appalachian woman who originally portrayed this controversial character.

***

Nancy Green (1834-1923), a former slave from Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, moved to Chicago after the Civil War, where she went on to become one of the first African American models employed by an American company to promote a product.

Nancy Green as Aunt Jemima, by A.B. Frost. Not dated but likely c. 1890s.

Green was the first person to portray the character Aunt Jemima. The concept and backstory for the character had already been carefully scripted by Charles Rutt and Chris Underwood, founders in 1889 of the Pearl Milling Company.

They created America’s first ready-mixed pancake flour, and a year later registered the Aunt Jemima trademark and renamed the company the Aunt Jemima Manufacturing Company. In 1893 they sold the Aunt Jemima Manufacturing Company to the R.T. Davis Milling Company.

Nancy Green first appeared to the public that same year, presenting R.T. Davis Milling Company’s pancake mix at the Columbian Exposition (aka Chicago World’s Fair). Before trying out for the Jemima role, she had been working as a domestic for the Walker family, whose children grew up to become Chicago Circuit Judge Charles M. Walker and Dr. Samuel Walker.

Her Aunt Jemima was a hit: “Her exhibition booth drew so many people that special policemen were assigned to keep the crowds moving,” says her bio on the African American Registry.

“The Davis Milling Company received over 50,000 orders, and Fair officials awarded Nancy Green a medal and certificate for her showmanship.” The milling company proclaimed Green ‘The Pancake Queen,’ and signed her to a lifetime contract, which she honored until her death in 1923. Green’s ongoing presence, combined with the sophisticated marketing machine behind her, made such a lasting public impact that the company was renamed Aunt Jemima Mills Company in 1914.

Green’s employers sought to merge her personal history with that of the fictional mammy, though the two couldn’t have been more different. And it worked: The Sunday Morning Star, in its 1923 obituary for her, described how her young charges Charles & Samuel Walker “spread her fame among their boy chums, and before long ‘Aunt Jemima’s pancakes’ became a common phrase in Chicago when good things to eat were discussed. A milling concern heard of her, searched her out, obtained her recipe, and induced her to make pancakes at the World’s Fair.”

Now, perhaps the boys waxed enthusiastic about ‘Nancy Green’s pancakes,’ though THAT phrase was certainly not the common one used throughout Chicago when ‘good things to eat were discussed.’ Nancy Green never created pancakes as ‘Aunt Jemima’ when she was a domestic at the Walkers. Also, Pearl Milling Company had formulated their ready-mix pancake formula long before they ever hired Green. They didn’t need her recipe.

“Aunt Jemima’s success,” says Kimberly Wallace-Sanders in Mammy: a century of race, gender and Southern memory, “was predicated upon a fascinating interweaving of commerce, memory, and racial nostalgia that served as a vehicle for post-Civil War national consolidation.

“Aunt Jemima was created to celebrate state-of-the-art technology through a pancake mix; she did not celebrate the promise of post-Emancipation progress for African Americans. Aunt Jemima’s freedom was negated in this role because of the character’s persona as a plantation slave, not a free black woman employed as a domestic.

“An African American woman, pretending to be a slave, was pivotal to the trademark’s commercial achievement in 1893. Its success revolved around the fantasy of returning a black woman to a sanitized version of slavery. The Aunt Jemima character involved a regression of race relations, and her character helped usher in a prominent resurgence of the ‘happy slave’ mythology of the antebellum South.

This doll is the daughter of the fictional character Aunt Jemima. “Diana Jemima” is written near the bottom of her backside. Aunt Jemima and her family were an advertising scheme by the R.T. Davis Mill Co.

“Nancy Green was a middle-aged woman living on the South Side of Chicago, working as a cook and housekeeper for a prominent judge. After a series of auditions, she was hired to cook and serve the new pancake recipe at the World’s Fair. Part of her act was to tell stories from her own early slave life along with plantation tales about Aunt Jemima’s New Orleans childhood written for her by a white southern sales representative.

“The Aunt Jemima trademark was constructed as part of the budding concept of an American Dream for the American family. One year after the Fair, the R.T. Davis Milling Company introduced the Aunt Jemima paper doll family: five dolls that could be cut out from the pancake box. Aunt Jemima’s paper doll family was one of the most popular company premiums; collectors still prize a complete set over the individual dolls.

“This popular re-creation of an African American woman’s life stood in direct opposition to the efforts of real African American women struggling to publicly assert their citizenship. As a symbol of racial harmony, Aunt Jemima proved to be the preferred version of African American womanhood — an exaltation of ‘slaveocracy’ nostalgia.”

***

This story was previously published on Dave Tabler's blog Appalachian History.