Tag: Leni Sorensen

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Culture

Collard greens for the soul

Leni Sorensen shares her knowledge of how modern Southern cooking draws from cultures around the globe. Photo: Eze Amos

Vast culinary traditions influence Southern food—European, Native American, African, Caribbean. But if you’re thinking individually about those traditions when you’re thinking about Southern food, you’re kind of doing it wrong, according to food historian Leni Sorensen. Those traditions hit American soil in the 1600s and immediately began to mingle, even as they traveled south, she says.

“It happened fast, and it began to happen much earlier than it is ordinarily supposed to,” says Sorensen. “In the last quarter of the 17th century is when it begins to accelerate.”

The result in the American South was a European cooking tradition—staples from Great Britain tinged with French influences—vastly transformed by the indigenous and enslaved people of the New World. Where chefs in Europe may have had luxurious ingredients, clever cooks stateside had to coax flavors out of what the land provided, using seasoning (think plenty of fat and salt) and technique (think low-and-slow transformations).

“Southern food is indigenous food,” says Ryan Hubbard, owner of Red Hub Food Co. “Southern food is not filets or T-bones or rib eyes…It captures more the cuts of meat you weren’t used to seeing.”

The history of the American South also led to a rapid alignment of Southern food into regions, Sorensen says. Just as quickly as the cuisine’s worldwide influences coalesced in the States, the influences redistributed with subtle differences into the Old South, Mid-South, Gulf Coast, and other sub-regions.

“That’s what makes it exciting,” Sorensen says. “You can go 200 or 300 miles, and you are in a different world.”

The regionalism sprung naturally from the different growing regions present across the South, says Sorensen, but it was also due to the new nation’s “immense peripatetic population.”

“Different groups and families were moving and looking for new land,” she says. “You had that tremendous exodus of the slave trade out of the Old South and eastern coastline. In one decade, 350,000 Black Virginians were sold to the rest of the Southern slave states.”

Nevertheless, Sorensen says four ingredients anchor Southern food: corn, rice, greens, and pork. Take hush puppies, one of Red Hub’s most popular menu items. Hubbard points to the Native American influence in the corn and the deep-frying tradition of Scotland coming together to make an inexpensive, humble dish found throughout the South.

Today, Sorensen says Southern cooking is enjoying newfound respect in culinary circles. But where does Charlottesville fit in the Southern culinary tradition? According to Sorensen, central Virginia lacks a specific focus because of its many bounties.

“Part of what it was known for was its fecundity,” she says. “We were a breadbasket and an apple basket…we were really producers—food that was transported to a lot of other places.”

Southern (con)fusion

New Southern cuisine is like putting ranch dressing on pizza. Everyone’s doing it, but no one admits it.

“When we set out to do Whiskey Jar, we specifically were not trying
to be ‘new Southern,’” local restaurateur Will Richey says. “We might make some tweaks in the new Southern vein, but I still say we are classically Southern.”

So what is new Southern? The South Carolina Encyclopedia defines it as “a culinary trend that developed during the final three decades of the twentieth century in the American South [when] a new affluence provided the climate to experiment with new foods or prepare traditional fare in new ways.” The University
of South Carolina-driven wiki cites grits made with milk, cream, or broth instead of water as an example.

According to Richey, new Southern is all about the extent of experimentation. Vinegar-based coleslaw instead of the traditional mayo base? Southern. Slaw with jicama and avocado? New Southern. Indeed, Richey says the easiest way to spot a new Southern dish is to look for Californian influence. Since Southern cuisine has long relied on farm-fresh produce, Cali’s 1970s-era farm-to-table movement fit right in.

So where does one find a new Southern supper in C’ville? Harrison Keevil’s Brookville was once the standard-bearer, Richey says, but since the restaurant closed in 2016, the genre has been underrepresented. “Maybe Ian Boden at The Shack, because he is so hyper-local in his sourcing,” Richey says.

Categories
Culture Living

Carving out history: Leni Sorensen bridges the gap between kitchen and table at Monticello

Food historian Leni Sorensen highlights the culinary talent of Monticello’s enslaved chefs in her livestream series “Cooking at Monticello.” Photo courtesy Jefferson’s Monticello.

Thomas Jefferson never wrote about the food at Monticello.

His kitchens were stocked with ingredients from around the world—cinnamon from Asia, lemons from the Caribbean, brandies and fine cheeses from Richmond. But in his writing, Jefferson didn’t remark on the fine food that his enslaved chefs prepared for his table. He simply expected its consistent excellence.

More than 200 years later, food historian Leni Sorensen is working in the Monticello kitchen to make sure viewers of her livestream cooking series know, unlike Jefferson, not to take the efforts of those cooks for granted.

“It’s exhausting,” Sorensen says. “You’re in the smoke, constantly in the smoke. Your clothes smell of smoke, and your hair smells of smoke. You burn the hell out of yourself. And all the pans are heavy, except the copper pots on the stew stove. And you’re bending over all the time. So on a lot of levels, while it’s charming to do, I’m really glad I don’t have to do it.”

Sorensen’s cooking demo and Q&A session is part of a series of videos, broadcast live on YouTube and Facebook and available on the Monticello website (monticello.org), that seek to connect guests with the history of the Monticello estate even as the grounds themselves limit visitors.

As Sorensen peels, spices, and prepares an apple compote like the kind Jefferson would have eaten, she uses skills that were once a source of pride for Monticello’s enslaved workers—as well as, at times, a path to freedom. Cooking gave many workers what they needed to move after emancipation, settling into kitchens across the United States to carve out a new life for themselves.

“It was often done under terrible duress and hideous kinds of racism…but they had this skill that they could do that brought in money for their children’s education, to buy a piece of property, to act within their Black community…,” Sorensen says. “It’s quite a marvelous story, that level of independence that being able to cook [gave them].”

Teaching at Monticello is one of many jobs Sorensen has picked up due to COVID curtailing much of her regular work. She’s now selling bulk orders of homemade tamales, a business she first ran in Los Angeles in the ’70s. And in her free time, she plans and executes elaborately themed, socially distanced dinner parties at her Charlottesville home.

At the most recent dinner, her two guests arrived on their way back from a day at Monticello. Even in the time of the pandemic, people are finding a way to connect with Virginia’s past through the estate. And Sorensen anticipates that with potential future cooking livestreams, historic venues like Monticello and Montpelier can continue to create connections between past and present.

“I’m often trying to draw analogies so that we don’t see the enslaved community…as somehow being necessarily different,” Sorensen says. “We all have these incredible commonalities. Often, it’s wonderful to see places where people have bridged those gaps and eliminated those gaps.”

Categories
Living

The ham biscuit is named Charlottesville’s signature dish

JM Stock Provisions tops its buttermilk-and-lard biscuit with tasso ham and a drizzle of honey and hot sauce. Photo by Tom McGovern

By Sam Padgett

Considering our broad food and drink world, it’s difficult to imagine a single dish that could represent the city’s local food scene. Charlottesville, on account of its geography and demographics, has a more dynamic selection of foods compared to the seafood-obsessed southeastern part of the state and metropolitan areas of Northern Virginia. However, difficult as it might be to identify the dish of the city, a panel of four judges assembled by the Tom Tom Founders Festival made the executive decision that it is the humble ham biscuit.

Leni Sorensen, a culinary historian and the writer behind the Indigo House blog, sees ham biscuits as an inevitability of living in Charlottesville. Sorensen moved here later in life, and the ubiquity of ham biscuits made an impression on her. “They’re everywhere,” she says. “They’re a part of every cocktail party, every museum opening, every kind of festive occasion. I personally know people who would not dream of having a party without ham biscuits.”

Besides its abundance, Sorensen sees the ham biscuit as something that cuts across all spectrums of dining, from gourmet to everyday. Locally, the adaptability of the ham biscuit is extraordinarily clear.

Specialty foods store Feast! has a 2-inch li’l cutie of a slider-style ham biscuit made with local sweet potato biscuits, local ham and a dollop of Virginia spicy plum chutney.

Timberlake Drugs makes its traditional version with a fluffy white biscuit and ham, and there’s the option to add egg and cheese, too.

JM Stock Provisions tops a buttermilk-and-lard biscuit with tasso (spicy, smoky, Louisiana-style ham) and a drizzle of both honey and hot sauce.

The Ivy Inn uses Kite’s Country ham, a sugar-cured ham from Madison County, served with hickory syrup mustard.

The Whiskey Jar also uses Kite’s ham and offers the option of adding egg and cheese.

Ace Biscuit & Barbecue, Fox’s Cafe, Tip Top Restaurant, Commonwealth Restaurant & Skybar, Keevil & Keevil Grocery and Kitchen, Bluegrass Grill & Bakery and plenty of other spots that we don’t have room to name here have ’em, too.

What’s your favorite local version of the ham biscuit? Tell us at eatdrink@c-ville.com.

Is this the best IPA ever?

Luddites might want to steer clear of Champion Brewing Company’s new ML IPA, which debuted last week during the Tom Tom Founders Festival. In conjunction with local startup Metis Machine Learning (the “ML” in the name), Champion’s newest beverage was designed via computer. Using machine learning algorithms, information about the nation’s top 10 best-selling IPAs, as well as Charlottesville’s 10 worst-selling IPAs, was fed into a program that output the desired parameters for the theoretical best IPA.

While there are plenty of variables that make up the taste of the beer, they analyzed the beers’ IBUs (International Bittering Unit, a measure of bitterness), SRM (Standard Reference Method, a color system brewers use to determine finished beer and malt color) and alcohol content.

The results for each variable were 60, 6 and 6, respectively, possibly stoking more fear of a machine uprising.

Michael Prichard, founder and CEO of Metis Machine, wants to quash those fears. “All we really wanted to do was arm the brewer with some information they could work with,” he says. “It’s still a craft; we don’t want people to think we’re trying to replace the brewer.”

Hunter Smith, president and head brewer at Champion, confirms: “At the end of the day, all I was given was some parameters. After that, it was brewing as usual.”

Prichard and Smith met at a machine learning talk about a year ago, and they decided to collaborate; it seemed appropriate to have the ML IPA ready to serve during the innovation-focused Tom Tom Festival.

The ML IPA, which could stay on the menu after Tom Tom if the demand is there, is, according to Smith, a “spot-on typical IPA.”

Market Street Wine opens

Back in February, we reported that Market Street Wineshop owner Robert Harllee had decided to retire and sell his shop at 311 E. Market St. to two longtime employees, Siân Richards and Thadd McQuade. Market Street Wineshop 2.0—now called Market Street Wine—will open this weekend, with an open house from 1 to 4pm on Saturday, April 21.—Erin O’Hare

Categories
Living

At the Table: Revamped restaurant shows off Virginia’s riches

Leni Sorensen, retired African-American research historian for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, says Virginia cuisine is a melting pot of influences. Commonwealth Restaurant's ham hock meatballs "scream Virginia," says chef Reggie Calhoun. Photo by Eze Amos

Is there such a thing as “Virginia cuisine”? It’s an old question, and one I found myself revisiting after learning that Commonwealth Restaurant & Skybar has a new motto: “modern Virginia cuisine.” What is Virginia cuisine—modern or otherwise? And, is Commonwealth’s any good?

To help answer these questions, I called Dr. Leni Sorensen, who may know as much about Virginia food history as anyone alive. The retired African-American research historian for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello is a Virginia food historian who has cooked her way through much of Mary Randolph’s definitive 1824 cookbook, The Virginia House-Wife.

Commonwealth’s renewed focus on modern Virginia cuisine comes via Will Richey’s company, Ten Course Hospitality, which the restaurant’s owners hired this fall to revamp and manage the Downtown Mall eatery. For the menu that Richey envisioned, he could think of no better consultant than Harrison Keevil, an area chef well-versed in Virginia food. Now the co-owner of Keevil & Keevil Grocery and Kitchen, Keevil sourced almost every ingredient from Virginia at Brookville, his former restaurant. Together, Keevil and Commonwealth chef Reggie Calhoun developed a new Virginia menu.

Over a dinner of the fruits of their labor, Sorensen and I dove deep into the question of Virginia cuisine, starting from a premise that, at first glance, might seem tautological: Virginia cuisine is whatever people in Virginia typically cook and eat. But, to follow the logical consequences that flow from the premise is to reach several key insights. First, while history matters, it is not the only thing that matters. Yes, culinary tradition is worth preserving and informs what we eat today. But, to the moniker “true” Virginia cuisine, no period of time—not the 1700s nor the 2000s—can lay sole claim.   

Relatedly, there is no concept of “pure” Virginia cuisine unadulterated by outside influences. From its earliest days, our commonwealth’s food has been a melting pot of other cultural influences, applied to Virginia produce. “What we are really looking at,” Sorensen said, “is a tradition, at any given time, of including what’s available.” In early days, influences came from Europe and, through slavery, West Africa. More recently, our state has seen a burst of immigration of people from El Salvador, India and Mexico, among other places.

Commonwealth’s new menu reflects these concepts well. Keevil’s favorite menu item, for example, pork rinds with spicy pork dip, puts a modern twist on a classic Virginia ingredient. Traditionally prepared rinds, fried until puffy and crisp, are vessels to scoop ground Autumn Olive Farms pork, spiked with punchy flavors from Virginia’s more recent Asian cultural influences: fish sauce, cilantro, chili peppers and ginger. “Brilliant,” says Sorensen, who confesses to being “gobsmacked” by the dish.

Calhoun’s favorite dish, ham hock meatballs, “screams Virginia,” he says. After boiling hocks in chicken broth for four hours, Calhoun binds the picked meat with ground Autumn Olive pork, Timbercreek Farm beef, egg, panko, Parmesan, oregano, parsley, fennel seed and some of the broth. The delicious, plump meatballs were served atop blistered field peas, a classic Virginia crop, says Sorensen.

So too are cabbage and Brussels sprouts, which joined forces in a wintry cruciferous salad. A slaw of raw cabbage leaves and sprouts adorned charred slices of heart of cabbage, in a rich but balanced butter walnut vinaigrette, with crumbles of bacon and more walnuts. “Delicious and complex,” praises Sorensen.

Rockfish is another Virginia staple, and Calhoun gives it the royal treatment. Together with several mussels, a flaky, white filet of fish is bathed in a fumet made by reducing a broth of rockfish bones, onion, fennel, carrot and rosemary. “This is marvelous. Absolutely marvelous,” Sorensen says afer one bite.

And, finally, there was more pork, of course. This is Virginia, after all. The cut of the day was a grilled Timbercreek Farm pork chop that was so full of flavor that Sorensen and I were both astounded to learn it had not been brined. Instead, it had been simply grilled with salt and pepper. “We want the flavor of the pork to really shine,” Keevil says.

So, what to make of Commonwealth’s new take on Virginia cuisine? “If this is what they mean by it, I am impressed,” Sorensen says. “I expected it to be good, but this is better than good. It’s excellent.”