Getting a bit jaded by election politics? Ready for a fresh perspective? Like history, love to laugh, appreciate good food? This article is for you! Adrian Miller will be presenting at this year’s 7th Annual Camp Bacon®. His subject: “Pork: The Perennial Dark Horse Presidential Candidate.” I’m forecasting it will help put some of those less-than-inspiring presidential debates out of your mind. And I guarantee you will know a lot more about pork and its historical presence in the White House over the past 216 years.

I first met Adrian many years ago at the Southern Foodways Alliance symposium in Oxford, Mississippi. Paul, Alex and I flew down the year before we were going to open the Zingerman’s Roadhouse. This was fall of 2002, and the theme that year was BBQ, something we were pretty sure was going to be a key piece of our menu. And as high as my initial expectations might have been, they were exceeded. The food, the people, the learning, and inspiration were all exceptional. I heard Adrian speak at the symposium that year, and then again a few years later after he’d joined the board of SFA. He caught my attention with the depth of his historical knowledge, and I laughed almost as much as I learned.

That trip was, in hindsight, a life-altering event. It was the beginning of a nearly 15-year long relationship with an amazing non-profit, and a connection with a region of the country of which, honestly, I’d previously known relatively little. Southern Foodways does fantastic work to bring together people of all backgrounds to study, share, and learn from the traditional foodways of the American South. They’ve put subjects on the table like race and food, the changing face of the South in the 21st century, the role of women, pop culture, and much more. I’ve been to just about every symposium since.

It was with all of those fantastic foods and great people in mind that we decided to create Camp Bacon® as a fundraiser for SFA seven years ago. It seemed an appropriate way to help return the generosity of spirit that we’d encountered there, and to help raise a bit of money to fund further work so that others around the country could benefit as well. If you don’t know much about SFA, by all means log onto southernfoodways.org and do some scoping. The oral histories, the short films – it’s all amazing! You can’t help but be engaged by their exceptional work.

You can also come to the 7th Annual Camp Bacon® this year and hear what Adrian Miller has to say. You might actually have already heard him—he’s been the guest speaker at two of our 11th annual African American Foodways dinners at the Roadhouse. I’ll never ever forget the feeling the night he did his “Black Chefs in the White House” event on the same exact evening of President Obama’s first inauguration. When we’d set up the event nearly a year earlier, neither of us had much thought that then Senator Obama was likely to be nominated, let alone win the general election. What a wonderful and inspiring evening! You might have read his great book, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time. If you like food and history, it’s highly recommended!

PORK: THE PERENNIAL DARK HORSE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE | By Adrian Miller

Adrian Miller is an attorney, food writer, and former Special Assistant to President Bill Clinton. Adrian’s first book, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time, won the 2014 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Outstanding Reference and Scholarship. Adrian’s next book on African American presidential chefs will be published in Spring 2017.

Our presidents, from George Washington to Barack Obama, have had their share of food fights. I don’t mean that they actually threw food at other people, but they have figuratively and self-consciously used to create and maintain their public image and wrest control of it from others when necessary. It’s astonishing how fervently the American public believes that what a president likes, and dislikes, to eat somehow opens a window on the presidential soul. This is why in recent presidential memory, we’ve learned how much Ronald Reagan loved jelly beans, how much George H.W. Bush hated broccoli, when Bill Clinton jogged to a McDonald’s, how George W. Bush loves his barbecue and how Barack Obama likes to gulp down a good beer. The stakes can be high when using food to craft a presidential persona because it all comes down to getting votes, and pork has played a pivotal role in such endeavors.

You think I’m exaggerating? I offer as Exhibit 1 the case of President Martin Van Buren who was successfully tarred by his political enemies as a French food-loving elitist who used golden utensils. President Van Buren’s presidential rival, William Henry Harrison, drew a sharp contrast to the incumbent president by promoting himself as someone who loved “hog, hominy and hard cider”— a meal combination that appealed to the masses of common people. Harrison’s negative political campaign was so successful that he beat the incumbent Van Buren and won the presidency. It was the most serious case of political indigestion in presidential history. Though Harrison used pork for electoral good or evil, depending upon your perspective, pork has not received as much presidential press as other proteins. That’s mainly because pork has lost significant status in American meals since colonial times, mainly due to the growing popularity of beef.

Pork had some early advantages over beef in terms of making a regular appearance on the dining tables of European colonists. Pigs are lower maintenance animals to raise than cattle. One can feed them almost anything, they can forage for themselves in a variety of environments, they have a lot more offspring than cattle, and almost every part of their bodies can be used for some purpose after butchering. For these reasons, though beef was more highly prized, pork was more regularly utilized by colonists. Thus, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, pork had a well-earned reputation for being a subsistence-level meat, a consistent source of protein even in lean times. This doesn’t mean that all pork products were considered to be poverty food. Wealthy colonists relished eating hams and pork shoulder as premium cuts of meat, and such preferences gave rise to the expression “eating high on the hog.” This was reference to where these cuts of meat were located on the pig as compared to bacon, ham hocks and the feet. It’s no wonder that pork cemented its “common person” status in the American public’s imagination, and that politicians recognized the benefits of larding their public image with references to pork. After all, the masses were mostly eating pork, or could relate to eating pork, and that’s where the votes where.

In terms of its culinary and political reputation, pork started to wane in the nineteenth century. Let’s first look at pork’s culinary status. Though beef was an uncommon treat on American tables before the 1800s, it became more widely available and cheaper thanks to advances in cattle ranching, industrial butchering and commercial transportation. Beef also became the food of successful elites—an edible example of social aspiration. This only further marginalized pork’s status as a poverty or subsistence food. As Harvey Levenstein wrote in Revolution at the Table:
“The supremacy of beef provided grist for the mills of those who complained that the middle-class American diet was too restricted… The beef and potatoes syndrome was reinforced by a disdain for pork, almost universally available in antebellum days. Here too, the middle class followed their social superiors, who shunned fresh and salted pork and deigned only to eat an occasional slice of smoked ham. Although its low price induced them to consume much more pork than it did the rich, in middle-class eyes pork ranked far below not just beef, but lamb, poultry, and game as well.”

Flip though the indexes of the existing cookbooks written by presidential chefs, and the latter point made by Levenstein is painfully true. Pork dishes usually get a few lines compared to the other meats. Even the presidential barbecue book authored by Walter Jetton, Lyndon Johnson’s barbecue-in-chief, only has a few pork recipes. Presidential food is at its best for state dinners at the White House, and beef is the overwhelming centerpiece of such meals. Pork makes an occasional appearance, but it is something that is eaten more frequently during the president’s private meals in the executive residence, out of the public spotlight.

In the nineteenth century, pork’s reputation also took a political hit because it was associated with an unseemly political practice known as “pork barrel politics.” In its earliest incarnation, the pork barrel was literally a wood barrel full of salted pork that was stored for use as needed. Though many associate its use with feeding enslaved people on plantations, the pork barrel was also used on many farms and also to feed military personnel. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the pork barrel became a metaphor in the 1870s for the pot of government money that is set aside to pay for public projects. Soon, an odious practice arose in the U.S. Congress and state legislatures where elected officials were promised, in exchange for their votes, that money would be appropriated to pay for projects in the district they represented. The logic is that by pleasing their constituents with such projects, the elected officials would get re-elected. This was very sound logic, for many elected officials enjoyed lengthy political careers based on their ability to spend government money in their district. Thus, “pork barrel politics” was born, and symbolized government abuse and waste. In time, people dropped “barrel” and “politics,” and “pork” became short hand for bad government.

Despite the negativity thrown its way, pork has been able to rise to the culinary occasion. The following is a compilation of several great moments in presidential pork history:

January 1, 1842
President Martin Van Buren begins annual tradition of serving roast pork at New Year’s Day receptions.

Circa December 1890
Famed Kentucky cook Dollie Johnson, an African American woman, begins making sausage rolls (small sausages encased in pastry)—a favorite of First Lady Caroline Harrison.

Early 1920s
President Warren Harding grubs on knockwurst sausage and sauerkraut at stag parties he hosted at the White House for his buddies.

February 21, 1929
President Herbert Hoover changes the regular White House breakfast to bacon and eggs from the sausage and wheat cakes served in the Calvin Coolidge administration.

March 1934
“Winks,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Llewellin setter eats all of the ham and eggs breakfast set out for the White House residence staff. Winks soon left the White House to “spend more time with his family.” This event, along with others, cleared the way for Fala to become FDR’s favorite dog.

May 8, 1939
President Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Ingrid of Denmark dine on hot dogs for lunch.

June 10, 1939
President Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain dine on hot dogs for lunch.

Circa December 1941
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill dine on sweet and sour pig’s feet at the White House. Churchill was not too pleased with the “texture” of this delicacy.

Circa 1967
A ham prepared for a White House residence staff dinner went missing. Mary Kaltman, President Lyndon Johnson’s White House Food Coordinator informed White House Chief Usher J. B. West of this predicament. At first, the employees were suspected, but no one was implicated in the crime. A few months later, an awful smell emanated from the staff dining room, but no one could pinpoint the source. Eventually, the White House engineers removed the paneling from one of the dining room walls to discover a decomposing ham bone. Those involved quickly surmised that some rats must have dragged it off the table and absconded with the ham.

December 1, 1975
The organizers of the annual Salley (South Carolina) Chitlin Strut sent five pounds of uncooked, frozen chitlins (pig intestines) to President Gerald Ford.

2000s
President George W. Bush regularly gets takeout from his favorite Texas barbecue joints for the ride on Air Force One from his ranch in Crawford, Texas back to Washington, D.C.

On Tuesday, April 22 at 7pm  Zingerman’s Roadhouse will host a very special dinner with  Adrian Miller, author of Soul Food: The Surprising Story of An American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time. Chef Alex has created a menu direct from the chapters of Soul Food and Adrian will share his knowledge and the history of the foods we’ll be eating at the dinner.

RESERVE A SEAT

Ari and Adrian recently chatted about the book:

I loved the book.  I think anyone who’s interested in food and history should definitely read it.  Can you give folks a sense of what the book covers?

The book is an edible tour of African American history from West Africa to the American West. Since culinary history can be a vast subject, I thought the best way to tell a concise story was by way of an “anatomy of a meal.” I created a representative soul food meal, and I wrote a chapter on every part of the meal and explain what it is, how it got on the soul food plate and what it means for the culture. In most chapters, I include traditional, health-conscious and fancy recipes. One of my main objectives is that people get in the kitchen and cook soul food.

How do you think this historically accurate description of soul food differs from what the average American thinks about it? 

In my experience, the average American has maybe heard the words “soul food,” but they really don’t know what it is. For those in the know, they think of something boiled for hours, deep fried or gloriously sweet that ultimately is unhealthy eating. It raises the questions the food writer Donna Pierce asked more than a decade ago: Does soul food need a warning label? Others have adopted the narrative that soul food is the master’s unwanted food or leftovers.

 I learned so much from it.  If writing is at all you for you like it is for me, I’m guessing you learned a lot too.  What are some of the learnings that surprised you during the writing? 

Yes, we are kindred spirits, my man! Three big things jump out at me right away. The first surprise is that when I discovered what enslaved African Americans actually ate, the cuisine came close to what we now call “vegan.” They were eating vegetables in season, there was very little meat, and processed foods were a luxury. The second surprise is that, in most situations, master and slave were eating from the same pot. That information completely upends the idea that soul food is slave food. The third surprise is the high-class pedigree of so many soul foods. We tend to think of foods that black people eat as “poverty food” but rich folks were grubbing on it too. Context is important.

You say that the book is a love letter  .. . say more about that? 

Soul food has such a horrible reputation that I believe it causes people to discount the culinary genius of soul food cooks. I thought it was high time that some celebrated these cooks instead of denigrating them.

What are some of the roots of soul food that go back to African culture and cooking?

Jessica B. Harris has done a lot to show the culinary connections between West Africa and the Americas. In terms of the soul food story, we see similar food habits from West Africa replicated here in what would eventually become the United States. Soul food meals usually involve more fish, more green, leafy vegetables and more seasoning with chillis than the typical American meal.

Greens seem particularly important! Can you say a bit more about them? 

West Africans figured out a long time ago that eating green, leafy vegetables were good for you, and that culinary legacy is very strong in soul food cooking. Just as tropical climate bitter greens are consumed in West Africa, temperate climate bitter greens get top billing in soul food circles. The most popular are cabbage, collards, kale, mustard and turnip greens. Now that the mainstream has discovered the nutritional benefits of this food, what used to be called “weeds” when African Americans primarily ate them is now called a “superfood.” When I speak on my book tour, I tell kale lovers “Welcome to the party, black folks have been eating that for at least three centuries.”

Catfish? 

As I mentioned earlier, West Africans are big fish eaters. I had no idea that there were species of catfish in West Africa, and that smoked catfish is essential to many stews. Knowing this partly negates the idea that enslaved West Africans arrived to the Americas and were forced to eat completely foreign foods. Now we see that were some things that they would have recognized, thus continuing a West African food tradition in a different part of the world. Anyway, African Americans remain big fish eaters to this day, and catfish is the connoisseur’s choice.

To be clear the life of enslaved people was very, very difficult.  Can you talk more about it and what it meant for people’s cooking and eating?  

Yes, the difficulty for most enslaved people was getting enough food to eat that was edible. Enslaved people were given, on average, a weekly ration of 5 pounds of cornmeal (or some other starch), a couple of pounds of meat that was dried, salted or smoked and a jug of molasses. That’s it. Thus, the enslaved had to figure out how to supplement their diet by fishing, foraging, gardening and hunting  outside of the sunup-to-sundown work schedule. They managed successful strategies to survive, but persistent hunger is a consistent theme in slave narratives.

What about mac and cheese – how that get in there? 

Yes, another surprise because there’s not a lot of dairy in soul food and this is clearly an Italian dish. Though, I must tell you that there are several older African Americans who believe that white people “stole” this dish from us just like they did rock ‘n’ roll. Mac ‘n’ cheese gets onto the soul food plate by way of the African Americans who cooked in the Big House. Mac ‘n’ cheese was royalty food as far back as the 1300s and remained a prestige dish for centuries, ultimately making its way to the American South. When the plantation owners entertained with mac ‘n’ cheese, it was the enslaved cooks who often made the dish. After Emancipation, it became a popular item for Sunday meals and special occasions.

And it sounds like it’s a similar story with pound cake and peach cobbler? 

It is! These desserts are made from ingredients—white flour, white sugar, whole milk–of which enslaved cooks had little access. In the antebellum South, cakes, cobblers and pies were dishes that appeared on African American tables only on the weekends and on special occasions. Just like other high-end dishes, enslaved African Americans were often the ones tasked to do the cooking.

This is your third trip to the Roadhouse to do one of these special dinners.  Excited to be coming back? 

Definitely! I had such a great time when I did my “Black Chefs in the White House” event on the night of President Obama’s first inauguration. It was a lively crowd, and it just an enjoyable evening. The same was true when I did the tribute to street vendors. On each occasion, Chef Alex “put his foot in it” so the food was wonderful.

Some of your research was done here at the Longone collection at U of M on your trips to Ann Arbor.  How was that experience?

The Longone collection is such an incredible resource! For a researching geek like me, it’s akin to going to Disneyland with an E ticket—you can go on any ride through history with the rare cookbooks in that collections. It helped me connect some dots in my research.

How did the Great Migration impact African American cooking? 

I firmly believe that the movement of people from the American South to other parts of the country is the key part of the soul food story, more so than the migration from West Africa. Soul food is really the cuisine of migrants who left a particular part of the South (the Deep South) and tried to recreate home—just as other migrants do. They tried to procure, cook and eat the familiar foods of the South, but when they couldn’t they made substitutions and also picked up a few things from their foreign neighbors. Soul food, at its core, is really a limited repertoire of southern cuisine that draws heavily on the celebration foods of the South.

Your family went west rather than to the north.  Can you give us a bit of your personal history? 

I’m born and raised in the Denver, Colorado area. This information immediately loses me street cred in soul food circles. I win most of them back by sharing that my mother is from Chattanooga, Tennessee and my father is from Helena, Arkansas. My mother followed an older sister to Denver and my father was in the military and came out here because of the Air Force base. They met in church in the late 1960s, and that union brought me into the world. Because I had southern-born parents who embraced the region’s food rather than distancing themselves, I grew up eating soul food.

In reading the book it struck me that nearly every single item you described is either a regular on the Roadhouse menu or appears fairly often as a special.  I realized we actually have a darned good soul food restaurant on our hands!!

Ha! That’s good to know. I believe that if soul food is to survive, it has become accessible. That means people who are not African American need to feel comfortable making and eating this cuisine at home and in restaurants. Some African Americans will have to let go of the notion that white people can’t cook in general, and in particular with this cuisine. I heard that a lot in interviews! Accessibility explains the profound popularity of other ethnic cuisines like Chinese, Italian and Mexican (really Tex-Mex). Much like African Americans, these ethnic groups were at the margins but their food became socially acceptable.

You and I have known each other ten years ever since we met at the Southern Foodways Alliance symposium.  We’re both big believers in the work of the organization.  Can you tell folks a bit about it?

I love the Southern Foodways Alliance! Not only because it celebrates the diverse food cultures of the South, but also because it creates a space for very different people to connect through food. It shows that if we just took a moment to learn more about what we cook and eat, we’ll see that we have a lot more in common than what supposedly divides us.

The weekend of May 31 and June 1 we have our 5^th annual Camp Bacon which is a fundraiser for SFA.  Maybe you should come back for it?

I would love that! Dig this, I never went to camp when I was a kid. It would be awesome to go to a really fun camp when I’m an adult!

 What else would you like us to know about Soul Food the book, or the food? 

I want people to understand that soul food deserves much more appreciation that it currently gets. Soul food doesn’t need a warning label…it needs more love. African American cooks belong to a very rich culinary tradition, and I hope that my work is an appetizer for more investigation into this unique heritage.