A Tale of Two Cities
Reflections on Asheville and Portland as two very different kinds of food cities.
Hello! Happy summer! Happy…end of summer? I wrote at the beginning of summer about how the season can be one where I like to slow down, savor the long days, dwell in sweet moments outside and with friends. Then August came around and summer was everything, everywhere, all at once. This is how it goes, in Portland, just as in my home of Minnesota: the nice, warm months are brief and fleeting, so people pack in as much activity as they can before returning to dormancy.
I’m spent, winded, and grateful for it all. I spent the first half of the month in North Carolina and Georgia putting on some workshops and events, and was reminded, as I am every visit to the South broadly and Appalachia in particular, just how remarkable (rich, nuanced, complicated) the food culture is there. It’s an answer, in theory and practice, to the question I often hear while abroad: what is American food?
The very best stages I’ve done have an element of reciprocity. I’m there to learn, yes, but I should also be able to offer something in return, recipes or techniques that I can teach to those kind enough to host me for a month. Since I'm generally interning at restaurants steeped in their region’s cuisine and ingredients, I want so badly to offer something rooted in my own. This is the dilemma. Where do I turn to, as a product of Midwestern suburbia? I do not think the Michelin-starred restaurants of Japan, or the highly precise fine dining restaurants of Scotland, want to learn about hot dish and jello salad.
I almost always turn to baking and pastry, as it is what I know best. Often I incorporate a Swedish element, be that cardamom buns or rye bread, because that is my own ancestry. But nonetheless I will often get asked by those I’m working with, or at least find myself asking internally, what is my own culinary culture to offer, as an American?
That’s a dissertation, really, and one you’d need to rewrite every few years. There’s the American staples you can find at any ballpark or state fair, but there are also the cuisines of everyone who has made this country their home, and increasingly, there’s something else blossoming in the margins between those two things.
But even this oversimplifies. I just returned from a couple of weeks in the South and was reminded about the deep, tightly woven roots of its food traditions. For my pop-up menus, I sought out many of the ingredients I miss when in Portland or abroad; Cateto cornmeal from my friends Lindsey and Duane of Two Stones , to be used it in crusts, custards, and more; a bottle of Black Walnut Nocino from Eda Rhyne distilling, telling myself that the cookies I was going to use it in would offset the cost of the bottle; delightfully small, muscadine-like grapes called Razzmatazz at the Shelby farmers market for an edible garnish. I cooked down a pork shoulder and made pulled pork and seasoned it with a farmer friend’s ramp vinegar and hot sauce. I ate a peach a day.
The South broadly, and Appalachia specifically (at least for me, as it’s where I’ve spent the most time), is an embodied refutation of the idea that America has no food culture to contribute to the world. My focus is often centered on Appalachia because it’s where I spent my most impressionable post-college years, formulating my own culinary worldview, making the amount of mistakes necessary to learn and grow with a place. The region is a testament to the deep roots and diverse regionality of American foodways, a fascinating blend of Cherokee, Scots-Irish, German, and African arts and crafts and foods.
A few Appalachian cooking techniques that point to the immense amount of longstanding wisdom in all of its folk arts:
hanging beans in their pods to dry on strings for the summer, concentrating their flavor and adding an element of umami, before they are cooked down in liquid.
Saving this cooking liquid (called Pot Liquor) from the beans, or from collards or other greens, to use as a base for soups and stocks.
Transplanting German Sauerkraut recipes onto New World soil with the addition of corn and peppers to make a fermented chow chow or sour corn.
These techniques and flavors are the hallmarks of many great cuisines: there’s umami and funk, complexity and nuance, derived from patience and preservation. And more and more, Appalachian food is more than just chow chow and beans, sour corn and cornbread: than cornbread: it’s tacos and kimchis and pupusas and more.
I live now in Portland, Oregon, a place equally celebrated for its food. But it would feel preposterous (hilarious, I think) for someone to visit here and ask: ok, so what are the staple foods of this region? What are the local delicacies? This city’s food scene, conversely, seems built around eschewing norms and standards. The Chef’s Table on Sarah Minnick, for example, paints her pizza as being Portland-specific because she doesn’t have to be confined to the rigidities or standards of New York or Italian pizzas, and can instead use flowers and nettles and foraged mushrooms and more on her pies. Another beloved restaurant nearby my house, Eem, is a Texas BBQ Thai curry mashup that refutes convention in favor of flavors as big and bold as possible. This lack of identity, and in its place the ability to experiment, is what unifies much of this city’s food. In that way, it’s brazenly American.
In Portland, a sense of regionality and history is sacrificed on the altar of novelty and individual freedom. Chefs aren’t held to any standards, except that the food is good, and thoughtful, well-sourced and well-executed. Which, more often than not, it is. Food here is excellent, maybe the best I’ve had collectively in any one American city (though I’ll confess I’ve never lived in New York).
In Asheville, this creativity and precision, especially in fine dining (although this too is changing, is sacrificed for a chance to experience food truly tied to a time and place. The lack of creativity and precision isn’t because those things aren’t part of Appalachian cuisine, but rather because of the way a tourist town can become a parody of itself, distilling down its myriad traditions into a cultivated and singular Southern experience: grits, biscuits, fried chicken. To spend years in Appalachia is to see the food is really based on vegetables and fruits and foraged items: meat is seasoning because there wasn’t flat, clearcut land to raise livestock; wheat is a newer addition to the pantry, brought down by northern elites in the false name of refinement; fermentation is everywhere because it had to be to survive the winters. It is a humble, hearty cuisine, much like its people.
I can’t choose one over the other. And think both have something to learn from each other. We’re living in an age where those differences are dissipating, as farmers and chefs can share ideas and information between regions quicker than ever before, and draw inspiration from the same cookbooks and social media accounts and more. A beautiful thing, yet I hope it doesn’t evaporate all the difference and distinction. Regional foodways, steeped if not in tradition, then at least in a mix of past wisdom and modern adaptation, seem to be the only way forward. As for Asheville and Portland, I find I need both; I’ll keep hopping back and forth.