Comforting Crops for the Cold Months
Emily Ellis
Appalachia is a region with incredibly rich culinary traditions. Whether you grew up with strings of leather britches dangling from your porch railings, or are new to the area, eating foods with long histories in our region is a great way to learn about how people have cultivated, harvested, and cooked with them for many centuries, support local farmers, chefs and growers, and connect to the land we live on.
Oak Spring’s Biocultural Conservation Farm cultivates heirloom crops rooted in the culture and traditions of Appalachia and the Virginia piedmont, in addition to preparing foods with some of the wild edible plants that grow on the Oak Spring property. Recently, at our first Celebrating the Harvest Dinner held in Oak Spring’s renovated School House, our Chef Saskia Poulos prepared a range of rich, comforting seasonal dishes that incorporated both heritage crops grown at the farm, as well as wild foods harvested from around the site and products purchased from wonderful local farms and businesses.
The nutrient- and history-rich foods below, all of which were included in the Harvest Dinner, are great additions to special holiday meals, or dishes to enjoy on any frosty evening. Scroll down to read more.
Pole Beans
Hannah Freeman beans. Photo by Caitlyn Etherton.
Whether you stick to canned green beans baked into a casserole, or branch out and try a stunning, gemstone-colored heirloom variety, you’re eating an ancient crop that has been grown in the Americas for thousands of years.
Pole beans likely originated somewhere in what is now Peru in around 6000 BC. As people migrated north, the beans traveled with them, and would become an important food for many Native peoples throughout North America, who cultivated a range of beautiful bean varieties adapted to different environments. Most were grown using the Three Sisters method, in which beans, corn, and squash are grown together for support, weed reduction and soil enrichment.
Turkey Craw and Lazy Wife beans with burnt alliums and herb windowpane crackers prepared by Chef Saskia.
The BCCF grows several heritage pole beans, among them Turkey Craw and Hannah Freeman, both which have rich histories in our area. Appalachian folklore tells us that Turkey Craw beans were first scooped out of a wild turkey’s craw (get it?) by an enslaved African American hunter in the early 1800s. (Wild Goose — another heritage bean grown at the BCCF that was gifted to the farm by Chef Sean Brock — has a similar origin story, involving a goose at his grandmother’s dinner table.)
Whatever the true origins of Turkey Craw and other beans rumored to have been unearthed from birds’ digestive systems, they would soon become one of the most popular varieties in Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina for their buttery, creamy flavor, especially in traditional recipes such as leather britches.
There’s a little more information about the Hannah Freeman beans, another beautiful heritage variety grown in the BCCF’s greenhouse. This indigenous heirloom was originally grown and shared by Hannah Freeman, one of the last Lenni-Lenape people in Chester County, PA, which is only about three hours away from Oak Spring. Hannah Freeman lived from 1730-1802, and was a gardener, basket weaver, and healer. The BCCF sourced these beans from Truelove Seeds, a company practicing seed rematriation, and will freely share these and other Lenape seeds with any Lenape people who are interested. Once the seed pods are dried, the BCCF will save the beautiful, speckled beans for the following year.
If you’re interested in incorporating an heirloom pole bean like Turkey Craw or Hannah Freeman into your holiday meal this year, this three sisters succotash is a tasty dish that uses two other ancient native North American crops: squash and corn.
(Thanks to Caitlin Etherton and Christine Harris for the bean info!)
Paw Paws
We’re a little past paw paw season at this point, but if you happened to stick some puree in your freezer last month — or are able to purchase pulp from a local nursery or beg some off a neighbor — you can imbue your holiday desserts with one of Appalachia’s most ancient and important native fruit trees.
Long before humans came on the scene, paw paws were eaten by the megafauna that once roamed North America. In later centuries, they were widely harvested and cultivated by Native peoples up and down the east coast and into the midwest. The Iroquois people, for instance, mashed the fruit into small cakes that were then dried, and later made into a sauce or mixed into cornbread, according to the American Indian Health and Diet Project. It’s worth noting, however, that folks who have tried to stick paw paws in dehydrators today have made themselves quite sick: sadly, whatever method the Iroquois and other Tribes had for making dried paw paws safe to eat was lost after the European conquest.
Paw paw and young ginger granite with calendula petals prepared by Chef Saskia.
Creamy, sweet and nutrient-rich, paw paws also became an important food for the European settlers and enslaved African Americans who lived in their range. According to Andy Moore’s Pawpaw: The Search for America’s Forgotten Fruit, paw paws were an important food source for enslaved people who could supplement their nutritionally monotonous diets with foraged foods. Culinary historian Michael Twitty, who penned the forward to Moore’s book, wrote about seeing paw paws growing outside the dwellings of enslaved people and along the paths they traveled to reach freedom in northern states.
While the short shelf life of paw paws contributed to their decline in popularity in the 20th century, growers, chefs, and food historians have helped stage a comeback for these interesting fruits over the past several decades. Paw paw festivals — including one held by our neighbors at the Clifton Institute — pop up throughout the tree’s range in September and October.
Baking paw paws into a snack cake or sweet bread is a traditional way to enjoy them, but they also work great in frozen desserts, like ice cream and sorbets.
Sunchokes
Sunchokes or Jerusalem artichokes also appeared in our blog post about native North American crops, but these starchy roots are so interesting and tasty that they deserved to make another list!
Sunchokes are members of the sunflower family, and are topped with tall, bright yellow flowers. The underground roots is soft, nutty and slightly sweet when cooked.
Sunchoke soup prepared by Chef Saskia.
Sunchokes are native to much of eastern North America and were wildely cultivated by Native peoples, who also planted them among frequently traveled trails to ensure a food supply on journeys and likely helped them extend their range in that way. After Frenchman Samuel de Champlain tried sunchokes growing in a Native garden on what is now Cape Cod in the 1700s and brought them back to Europe, they became popular on that continent as food for both humans and livestock. The name Jerusalem artichoke is likely derived from girasole, the Italian word for sunflower; “sunchoke” was coined much later in the 1960s by produce seller Frieda Caplan.
Like paw paws, sunchokes are another food that isn’t well known outside forager circles. However, they have experienced a revival in the wider restaurant scene in recent years, thanks in part to the efforts of Native chefs who are working to revive indigenous food traditions. Try using sunchokes in this adaptation of maple sage roasted vegetables from The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen by Sean Sherman, or in our Chef Saskia Poulos’ sunchoke soup. Pickling sunchokes with apples, nuts, and other seasonal forageable foods like wild onions and wild carrot root is also a tasty traditional method to preserve the harvest.
If you want to learn about more comforting crops with long histories in Appalachia and surrounding area, check out our recent blogpost about American Persimmons.
Banner image: Wild Goose beans grown at the BCCF by Christine Harris