“Like Burgundy wines or Savoie
cheeses, the terroir of maple syrups matters,” she says. For example, maple syrup—a whole food made only from the sap that rises in the tree only after a long, cold winter—can taste different depending on whether the maple tree grows in areas rich in limestone (giving flavor notes of caramel, vanilla and bitter almond) or schist (where minerals yield a slightly moldy note), giving it a unique taste of place.
Wild Bounty Before European settlement here, Native American tribes were often identified—and strengthened physically and spiritually—by the regional foods they ate, whether gathered by hunting or fishing in the wild or raised them- selves. Early visiting ex- plorers and naturalists noted such delicacies as wild strawberries growing along the New Hampshire shoreline, native persimmons in Virginia and beach plums on Cape Cod. In Early American
Gardens: For Meate or Medicine, gardener and author Ann Leighton chronicles which plants were native to New England and which ones the 17th-century colonists brought or had sent from England. The resulting cuisine evolved into a fusion of English recipes with New World ingredients. Through many
generations, regional cuisines developed along the Eastern sea- board, often featuring maple syrup, cranber- ries, wild blackber- ries, corn, pumpkins, Carolina gold rice, cod, clams, blue crab, shad and shrimp. Grafting
new and old world plants produced the happy accidents of the Bartlett pear, Concord grape and Newtown Pippin apple. What grew in these innovative gardens naturally began to grace Ameri- can tables. “Native corn became a truly Amer-
ican food,” observes Lenore Greenstein, a food and nutrition journalist who has taught at several U.S. universities. “The corn of the settlers, however, was not the sweet corn we know today, but the field corn used to feed livestock and make corn meal, syrup and starches. Sweet corn was unknown until 1779, yet by 1850 it had replaced field corn on American tables.”
Ethnic Traditions Beyond the land itself, regional foods con- tinue to be influenced by the transportation routes followed in early trading ventures; the ways of the English homeland were soon joined by those of Afri- can slaves. Greenstein relates
“In this wine, you can taste
the magical place where our children, Hailey and Loren, grew up. Aromas of blackberries and bay leaves, like those that grow along the spring-fed creek with subtle notes of tobacco, smoke and earth, dance in the background, derived from the soil itself.”
~ Janet Trefethen, of Trefethen Family Vineyards, in Napa, California, about its HaLo cabernet sauvignon.
that New Orleans’ famous gumbo comes from the African ngombo, for okra, its principal ingredient. The thick stew gets some of its distinc- tive flavor and smooth texture from gumbo file powder made of dried, wild sassafras leaves. In other parts of the South, a cuisine that became known as soul food grew up around dishes made from pro- duce that slaves could grow in their own kitchen gardens: boiled peanuts, sweet potato pie, boiled greens and black-eyed peas. Immigrants from
Ireland who arrived in the New World during the potato famine of
What’s Growing in Your Region?
slow Food, an international non- profit organization dedicated to “good, clean and fair food,” has created an American Ark of Taste, its list of regional foods. backyard entries include the granite beauty apple from New Hampshire, green striped cushaw [squash] from Tennessee, hand-harvested wild rice from minnesota, Four Corners gold bean from Colorado, Padre plum from California and Alaskan birch syrup. (see SlowFoodUSA. org/downloads/ Ark_Foods_By_ Region_9.29_ .09_.pdf)
To find local farms
and producers, visit:
LocalHarvest.org
SustainableTableorg/ issues/eatlocal
FoodRoutes.org
the 1840s and those Europeans prom- ised free land under the Homestead Acts of the 1860s brought garden seeds, favorite plants and ethnic food traditions with them, further enlarging our coun- try’s collective eating repertoire to in- clude sauerkraut, coleslaw, cheesecake, cinnamon rolls and potato salad. Mennonite farmers who had emi-
grated from the Netherlands to Ger- many and then on to Russia, as their pacifist views clashed with the prevail- ing governments, finally left the steppes of the Ukraine for the similar terroir of the Kansas prairie in 1875. (This was around the same time that cowboys
natural awakenings July 2010 43
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