Home and Away. A University Brings Food to the Table

Introduction

A rolled beef recipe travels from Sicily to New York’s Ellis Island to Greenville in the Mississippi Delta to Johnson City, Tennessee, with the Maggio family. A recipe for Continental Apple Cake survives the Holocaust but its creator is killed in 1942 by the Nazis in the Treblinka Death Camp at age 45. An old, handwritten recipe for Sherry Trifle endures the bombing of the family farm in Cheshire, England, by the Luftwaffe in World War II, to be enjoyed 50 years later by the grandson with his friends in East Tennessee.

A North Alabama family shares its method of making Chicken Pie, a dish that has brought relatives together since the 1940s. For the first time, a former flyweight boxer, Filipino by birth, East Tennessean by choice, reveals the Almond Chicken recipe that put his sons through college. A surrogate mother for a group of West Point cadets tells how she made stuffed mushrooms that temporarily erased memories of the mess hall.

This book is as much about remembering, preserving, and connecting as it is about frying, baking, and steaming. As my favorite storyteller, Kathryn Windham from Selma, Alabama, puts it: “Good food inspires good stories.” This book attempts to tell the story of a university and its people through the common bond of food.

Home and Away grew out of an idea my friend Susan Antkiewicz mentioned to me one October day in 1997. Neither of us at the time imagined that the book would ultimately swell to more than 700 pages, with over 1,000 entries and some 500 contributors. But the stories and the recipes kept coming-from students, faculty, staff, alumni, friends, campus visitors. Some of the entries came easily; others after cajoling and persistent persuasion. Contributors who initially said they had nothing to offer brought forth culinary treasures after being asked such questions as, “What did your grandmother cook for you?”

All of us who have been involved in the creation of this book have a much deeper understanding of the influence a university can have in bringing various cultures together and in preserving their stories and foodways. Within the region served by ETSU, people still make their own molasses and apple butter. They know how to “kill” lettuce as it has been done for decades. At harvest time, they make chow-chow. They pick ramps in the mountains in the spring. Soup beans and cornbread remain common on the tables of the area.

At the same time, and in these same places, a doctoral graduate of ETSU is running a Thai restaurant near the Smoky Mountains. Passover Seders are celebrated each spring in the Tri-Cities. African-Americans observe Kwanzaa in late December and Indians mark the holiday Diwali with elaborate feasts of biriyani, curries, and chutneys.

In honor of these traditions, Home and Away offers up eggplant relish from a professor’s Sicilian Godmother, instructions on how to prepare goose liver from a Hungarian high jumper, a nineteenth-century wine recipe from Leesburg, Tennessee, and chili that has fed the world’s top journalists at Harvard. We dish up roast beef cooked with molasses from a former Miss South America, a Native American’s way of celebrating the Fourth of July with potatoes, the favorite meal of ETSU’s greatest basketball player, and the cake recipe that caused an early student to proclaim: “When I tasted a piece of this cake at a Domestic Science Open House at East Tennessee State Normal in 1912, I decided right then to study cooking and try to learn to bake cakes like that one.”

In these pages a Tennessee writer describes her frustration in hunting for grits in Vermont. A family recalls feeding hungry travelers on the railroads of Southwest Virginia during the Great Depression. A professor exiled from his homeland shares the joys, the intricacies, and the memories of a Cuban pig roast and a photograph from the first one held in Johnson City. A poet and professor remembers breakfasts on an Alabama farm in the 1950s.

“Your food ought to talk to you about who you are and what you are. There’s no greater way to know a person than through their food,” says my friend Leah Chase, owner of Dooky Chase, a fine Creole restaurant in New Orleans. The premise behind this book is that food has more meaning if we know its history and we learn about the lives of those who have prepared it. Through Elena Pedroso, for example, I not only refined my approach to making black beans but also discovered the story of her grandfather’s refusal to prepare a meal for Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.

I read about how this first urologist to practice in Cuba, Dr. Gonzalo Pedroso, developed a reputation in Havana as an excellent cook but was unwilling to entertain the leader of the country because of the enormous entourage that would have accompanied him. Dr. Pedroso’s story led me to meet a relative I had heard about ever since coming back to Johnson City in 1985. When Larry Smith and I were making lists of photographs we needed for Home and Away, we decided a shot of Dr. Pedroso should accompany the story and recipe. I called Elena, who told me she would hunt for one.

A few days later, Jack Sausman called me and said, “I understand you’re looking for a picture of Elena Pedroso’s grandfather. I’ve been wanting to meet you, so I’ll bring it by your office.” Despite the variance in the spelling of the names, Jack and I are cousins. Having worked in radio and television myself, I have been asked quite often if I know Jack or if I’m related to him. He was one of the first people hired by WJHL television in Johnson City and worked with a dear friend and colleague of mine, Dick Ellis, who later ran WETS-FM at ETSU until his death in 1993. Jack left the area to manage television stations out West but returned to Johnson City in retirement. After the phone call, I thought he was bringing the picture by because he had gotten into the photography business. But that was not the case. He told me he and Elena were engaged to be married. Jack and I had an entertaining conversation about the broadcasting business that day in my office, and we figured out our exact kinship. So through a black bean recipe and a Cuban urologist who had died 21 years earlier, I connected with my own family.

It is our hope that despite the pressures toward sameness and standardization that increase daily in the modern age, the readers of this book will gain a deeper affection for what is real and true and enduring in the food world and that the flavors and stories we present here will serve to connect you in a deeper way to those around you and to those who are with us only in memory.

Eating can be one of the grand adventures of life, and passion about food can stir us physically and spiritually, as two characters, one from real life and one from fiction, illustrate. On the wall behind the oyster bar at Wintzell’s Oyster House in downtown Mobile, Alabama, next to the list of oyster-eating champions, a sign says: “An Irish Bishop in the eighteenth century ate 400 oysters daily and his tombstone read, ‘Here lies Averil in his coffin. If the Last Trumpet does not waken him, whisper ‘Fresh Oysters.’”

Georgia native Carson McCullers, in The Member of the Wedding, published as a novel in 1946 and as a play a few years later, writes of the bond between Blacks and Whites in the South and the loneliness of a sensitive young girl growing up in rural Georgia. Food figures into the work in a subtle way, in this passage as the final test of a character’s mortality:

“Now hopping-john was F. Jasmine’s very favorite food. She had always warned them to wave a plate of rice and peas before her nose when she was in her coffin, to make certain there was no mistake; for if a breath of life was left in her, she would sit up and eat, but if she smelled the hopping-john and did not stir, then they could just nail down the coffin and be certain she was truly dead.”

We hope that Home and Away brings you good food, entertaining stories, lively company, and enduring memories.