Gravy

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What's Next for the Women of Mama Dip's Kitchen? Dec 06, 2023

Show notes

In "What's Next for the Women of Mama Dip's Kitchen?" Gravy producer Leoneda Inge takes listeners to Mama Dip’s Kitchen, known for its chicken and dumplings and scrumptious homemade desserts. The restaurant has fed tourists, celebrities, and steady customers for nearly fifty years in Chapel Hill, North Carolina—so the community was shocked when the Council family voted earlier this year to sell the restaurant and the land around it.

Mildred “Mama Dip” Council was a celebrated entrepreneur. When she died in 2018, the restaurant continued, welcoming patrons at its longtime spot on Rosemary Street. Now, the Council family has a big decision to make. They have to figure out a way to continue growing the business and preserve Mama Dip’s legacy.

Mama Dip is a brand. She is a household name around town. She was not a popular alumna of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or a star athlete—though this African American woman stood tall at 6’2”. But many students, staff, and residents have eaten her country cooking or tried to perfect a dish from one of her cookbooks.

Mama Dip had eight children, and several of them were cross-trained to operate every facet of the business. Her youngest child, Spring Council, is north of sixty-five years old, retirement age for many folks. The asking price for Mama Dip’s Kitchen—the building, not the brand—is $3.6 million. Early conversations included talk of building a more fast-casual restaurant, with a smaller staff, specializing in the restaurant’s top sellers, like the chicken and dumplings.

While the future of Mama Dip’s Kitchen is still up in the air, the family legacy lives on. Granddaughter Tonya Council recently opened her own cookie shop in Chapel Hill. Granddaughter Erika Council in Atlanta owns Bomb Biscuit Company. And daughter Annette Council continues to sell her Sweet Neecy cake mixes. For this episode, Inge talks to Spring Council and Erika Council, as well as some of Mama Dip’s loyal followers, to explore the legacy and future of this iconic Chapel Hill institution.

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Tasting the South in the San Fernando Valley Nov 22, 2023

Show notes

In “Tasting the South in the San Fernando Valley,” producer Rebecca Katz tells the story of how three black women created a soul food institution in one of the whitest parts of the San Fernando Valley that still thrives today.

During the Second Great Migration in the 1940s, large numbers of Black Americans traveled west to Los Angeles, California. The Black population in Los Angeles increased nearly twelvefold from 1940 to 1970.

In this episode, we learn about the racial history of the San Fernando Valley specifically a suburb just north of the city of Los Angeles. While Los Angeles as a city was diversifying after the second great migration, certain parts of the Valley remained largely white due to its iron-clad race restrictions—some of the harshest in the nation. In the episode, we hone in on one small town at the Western tip of the valley called Chatsworth, which was 98% white in the 1980s.

Three Black women, Clara Huling, Roda Hadi, and Willie Stanford, were each already working in the restaurant industry in the Valley in the 1980s, not far from Chatsworth. They each had different ties to the South and they all missed Southern cooking and classic soul food. One night, they decided to open a restaurant—bringing classic soul food to the largely white valley. And they did just that. They came together and opened a tiny soul food spot in the unlikeliest of all places—Chatsworth.

Nearly 40 years after that grand opening, Clara’s granddaughter, Jessica Huling, still owns and operates the restaurant, which has been deemed some of the best soul food in Los Angeles by many reputable food outlets.

In this episode, we hear from Jessica about how the restaurant thrived in such a white area through the years. We explore how the restaurant has overcome the odds, evolved its customer base, and greatly influenced the Black community in the Valley today.

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Adaptation, Survival, Gratitude: A Lumbee Thanksgiving Story Nov 08, 2023

Show notes

At this point, most of us know the Thanksgiving story about the Pilgrims and the Indians happily indulging in a joint feast is a vast oversimplification of what actually happened. But how many of us still have an idea of Native people that's stuck in the past? "People didn't believe that I was Native because I was from North Carolina," Lumbee Indian Malinda Maynor Lowery says. "The only thing they learned about Indians in school, maybe, was that we were removed from the Southeast."

In this first episode of Gravy, first shared almost 10 years ago today, meet a tribe of Indians who are very much still in the Southeast—and whose food reflects a distinct hybrid of Southern and Native history. The Lumbee's story is one that spans centuries, and includes new windows into periods you may think you know—like the Jim Crow era. Plus something you'll be eager to eat: the collard sandwich.

If you want more after that, check out these oral histories of the Lumbee community, done by the SFA's Sara Wood.

You might also want to read Malinda Maynor Lowery's book "Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South."

And, if you're dying to make your own collard sandwich, you can find a recipe for that and much more in Gloria Barton Gates' "The Scuffletown Cookbook."

Tina Antolini, Gravy's first producer, reported and produced this episode. Tina has worked in public radio for nearly 20 years. She was a senior producer for NPR's State of the Reunion, for which she won a Peabody and a national Edward R Murrow Award for her work.

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The Swamp Witches Oct 25, 2023

Show notes

Winter mornings are serene in the cypress groves of the Mississippi Delta. There’s the glide of the canoe, and the gentle ripple of camouflage waders disappearing into waist-deep water. What finally breaks the pre-dawn quiet is the fire of a shotgun, and the splash of a Labrador Retriever. And then, there’s the laughter of a group of women. That’s the sound of Swamp Witches.

The Swamp Witches have been duck hunting together for nearly 20 years. Men are often surprised to stumble upon a half-dozen women—not in the company of fathers or husbands or brothers—out hunting. In this episode of Gravy, reporter-producer Dana Bialek goes hunting with the Swamp Witches and explores the rise in women hunters, how hunter recruitment is connected to the conservation of waterfowl habitat, and what it means to celebrate hunted game around the table.

Dana Bialek is a radio producer based in Brooklyn, New York.

A special thanks to Allison and Jim Crews for their hospitality and for making this story possible.

The music is this episode was from the album Mississippi Number One by Eden Brent of Greenville, Mississippi.

Some of Lila Sessum’s favorite recipes for game can be found in John Folse’s cookbook After the Hunt.

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Czech Out Texas Kolaches Oct 11, 2023

Show notes

In “Czech Out Texas Kolaches,” Gravy producer Evan Stern invites listeners to join him on a return trip to his native Texas to explore the history, origins, and evolutions of kolaches through the voices of bakers of varying backgrounds and perspectives. This episode complements the oral history project Stern created for SFA, The Keepers of Kolaches: The Evolutions of Texas-Czech Baking.

Few pastries are more intertwined with the fabric of Central Texas than kolaches. With roots in the Czech Nation and owed to 19th Century Moravian immigrants, these soft, pillowy confections of yeasty dough with open centers of fruit, poppyseed or sweet cheese fillings have long provided humble links to the old country in small Texas towns like Halletsville, La Grange, West, and Schulenburg. Yet kolaches have also weathered many transformations under the Lone Star flag and have developed an identity that continues to change—and is, at times, challenging to define.

Historian and blogger Dawn Orsak explains how meat filled “klobasnikys” emerged and eventually came to become interchangeable with kolaches in the eyes of the broader public. She argues that Texas-Czech baking should be afforded the same respect as its European ancestors. “Fifty or sixty years after people started immigrating to Texas, what does traditional mean?” she asks. Acclaimed ninety-year-old baker Lydia Mae Faust also speaks to these traditions. She grew up preparing kolaches on her family farm with hand churned cottage cheese, and continues to share and teach her recipes to ensure their preservation.

Meanwhile, there’s Laos-born, Houston-based Vatsana Souvannavong. The owner of the bakery Koala Kolache, she’s on a mission to make kolaches nationally known, and has found in them a vessel for flavors as bulgogi and kimchi, chicken marsala, and Thai chicken and basil.

While these bakers’ cultural backgrounds vary, their stories ultimately reveal kolaches as emblematic of a changing, increasingly diverse Texas, South, and nation. The group is united in their enthusiasm and hopes for this doughy indulgence’s continuity.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Vatsana Souvannavong, Dawn Orsak, Lydia Mae Faust, Denise Mazal, and Jerry Haisler

For Lydia Faust’s kolache recipe, click here.

Gravy is proud to be a part of APT Podcast Studios

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North Carolina Pottery from Clay to Kiln Sep 27, 2023

Show notes

In “North Carolina Pottery from Clay to Kiln” Gravy producer Wilson Sayre invites us to consider the vehicles that our food sits on—plates. In this episode, she takes us to central North Carolina, where the story of the hand-thrown pottery and its relationship with food is told with gusto.

If you eat with your eyes, then the “plating” of food is an essential component of a meal and the stories that surround it. In North Carolina, the history of baking clay into utilitarian—and beautiful—plates and bowls is an ancient one. That tradition has been handed down for generations and interpreted by each potter who chose to let the clay get under their fingernails. Today, Seagrove, in the central part of the state, is home to the largest concentration of studio potters in the United States.

Each potter has their own journey, but as Mark Hewitt explains, it’s all a bit “mad.”

He, like many potters, spends weeks or months turning lumps of clay into beautiful vessels. One by one, pots, pitchers and plates take shape on the pottery wheel, receive decoration, and are set into a kiln to undergo their final transformation from brittle dried clay into gleaming vessels.

But that transformation is also a gamble, especially for those who fire with wood. Pots can explode, destroying everything in a kiln, or the firing temperature gets too hot (or not hot enough), causing glazes to turn unappealing colors. And yet they take that gamble over and over again. It’s how they tell stories, of place and of their artistic journey.

Plates are also our story as eaters, says Glenn Hinson, professor of folklore and anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Whether paper or porcelain, plates shape our relationship with the food they hold, as well as our memories of a meal.

In this episode, Sayre speaks with Hewitt and Hinson, as well as Delores J. Farmer, founder of Durham’s first Black-owned pottery studio, to learn more about the synergies between dirt, food, and plate. With the spotlight shifted to what’s underneath our food, we hope listeners will see this whole other canvas for story. Because in the end, when our food is gone, when we’re gone, it’s from our plates that people will learn about our foodways.

Thanks to guest Mark Hewitt, who opens his pottery twice a year for kiln openings. Thanks also to guest Delores Farmer, who offers classes at her studio to folks in Durham, NC, who are interested in getting a bit of clay under their fingernails.

Glenn Hinson and his wife, Amy Bauman, were kind enough to welcome the reporter into their home, share a meal, and provide some of the most beautiful plates for the feast.

Although they were not featured in this episode, special thanks to professor Bernie Herman for help in pointing us in the right direction and potter Matt Hallyburton, for providing background context and making beautiful work.

Gravy is proud to be a part of APT Podcast Studios.

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A Shrimp Boat Blessing with no Shrimp Boats Sep 13, 2023

Show notes

In “A Shrimp Boat Blessing with no Shrimp Boats,” Gravy producer Irina Zhorov takes listeners to Bayou La Batre, on Alabama's Gulf Coast. Long known as the seafood capital of Alabama, Bayou La Batre has hosted a Blessing of the Fleet – a festival to bless local commercial shrimp and fishing boats – since the 1940s.

Fishing has long been a dangerous and capricious industry, where luck – in harvests, weather, accidents – has almost as much to do with a captain's success as his skill. The annual blessing, an old European tradition established in Bayou La Batre by a Catholic family of transplants from Louisiana, was a bulwark to ever-present risks. Shrimp boat captains would decorate their boats with festive flags and parade along the bayou, receiving a blessing from the Archbishop of Mobile, a little courage to go back out to sea.

But as the industry changed and evolved, what the Blessing could do seemed less obvious. Boats were built bigger and with refrigeration, so people could stay at sea longer and bring in bigger harvests. At the same time, systemic threats emerged to the shrimping industry. Competition from imports and farm-raised shrimp is keeping shrimp prices unsustainably low while prices for gas, insurance and maintenance grow. The Blessing hasn't kept up with the changes. Many captains are too busy hustling for economic survival to show up. Not a single commercial shrimp boat attended the 2023 Blessing of the Fleet.

In this episode, Zhorov talks to Vincent Bosarge, Deacon at St. Margaret's Church, which hosts the Blessing, who grew up going to the festival; Rodney Lyons, a fisherman whose family once supported the Blessing by donating food but who no longer attends; Jeremy Zirlott, a younger shrimper who says he's struggled to make ends meet in the industry's current state and who's never put his boats in the Blessing; and Tommy Purvis and Kimberly Barrow, who shrimp on the side but for whom the Blessing is a vital tradition.

Acknowledgments

Thanks for reporting help from Frye Gaillard, and thanks to our audio engineer, Clay Jones of Broadcast Studios.

Gravy is proud to be a part of APT Podcast Studios.

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Annie Fisher’s Beaten Biscuits Meant Business Aug 30, 2023

Show notes

In “Annie Fisher’s Beaten Biscuits Meant Business,” Gravy producer Mackenzie Martin digs into beaten biscuits, the tender, flaky hardtack rolls that date back to the 1800s, when they were often served with ham and particularly popular in the South. Historically speaking, beaten biscuits were incredibly laborious to make—so they were viewed as a culinary delicacy.

And at the turn of the 20th century, no beaten biscuits were as famous in Columbia, Missouri, as those made by Annie Fisher. Serving her beaten biscuits at a party or dinner was a major hostess flex. A prominent surgeon wrote that Annie Fisher was “the most efficient cateress in the town of Columbia and that no university or social function was really classy without her service.”

These days, the kind of success that culinary entrepreneur Annie Fisher enjoyed a century ago might be partly attributed to an impressive marketing plan, investors, or at the very least, access to a bank loan. But here’s the thing about Annie Fisher: As a Black woman in Jim Crow Missouri, she didn’t have access to those advantages, and yet she amassed a fortune anyway.

In addition to starting a bustling catering enterprise almost completely on her own, Fisher also ran a successful mail-order business shipping to both coasts and became quite the real estate mogul, renting out more than a dozen homes at a time. Her success was heralded nationally with newspaper headlines like “Road to fortune paved with beaten biscuits!” and she was even featured in Clement Richardson’s “The National Cyclopedia of the Colored Race” alongside other famed entrepreneurs of the era, like Madam C.J. Walker, the hair care pioneer who became the first Black female millionaire in America.

To investigate Fisher’s legacy, Martin visits her hometown of Columbia, Missouri, and talks with Verna Laboy, who has been giving historical reenactments of Fisher’s story ever since the story first “captivated her soul” 30 years ago. She also meets community leader Sheila Ruffin, who tried unsuccessfully to preserve Fisher’s last standing home before it was torn down in 2011. Finally, she speaks with food columnist Donna Battle Pierce. When Pierce was integrating her Columbia elementary school, she says knowing the story of Annie Fisher would have been deeply empowering to her—but she laments that she didn’t learn about Fisher until she was well into adulthood.

Eighty-five years after Fisher’s death, Martin asks, what could it have been like if Columbia had started to celebrate Fisher’s legacy sooner?

Acknowledgments:

This episode of Gravy was reported and produced by Mackenzie Martin, a James Beard-nominated podcast producer and reporter at KCUR Studios in Kansas City, Missouri. She is the senior producer for A People’s History of Kansas City and the editor of Seeking A Scientist. Her stories have aired on Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Here & Now and Marketplace.

It was part of a collaboration with the KCUR Studios podcast, A People’s History of Kansas City. Hosted by Suzanne Hogan, A People’s History of Kansas City is a show about the underdogs, renegades and visionaries who shaped City and the region.

Special thanks for this episode to KCUR Studios’ Suzanne Hogan, historian Mary Beth Brown, historian Bridget Haney, Vox magazine, and the “Renewing Inequality” project at the University of Richmond.

For further reading on beaten biscuits, we recommend John Egerton’s Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History.

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Tasting Kentucky in Tiananmen Aug 16, 2023

Show notes

In “Tasting Kentucky in Tiananmen,” Gravy producers Ishan Thakore and Katie Jane Fernelius explore how KFC became one of the most popular restaurant chains in China, and what its dominance reveals about other huge Southern firms.

KFC is now part of the corporate conglomerate Yum! Brands, which includes chains like Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. But it has humble origins — Harland Sanders started the brand in Corbin, Kentucky, as a service station off the road. The chain grew through franchise agreements and by the 1980s was looking to expand abroad. As Zachary Karabell, author of Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends on It, explains, China in the ‘80s was a blank canvas for businesses. That presented all sorts of risks, but also potentially unlimited upside.

Like a hungry youth soccer team diving into a bucket of fried chicken after a game (an oddly specific reference from Ishan’s childhood), KFC went all in. It brought in middle-managers from Taiwan, developed a logistics network, and treated store openings like grand affairs. But it could not avoid major geopolitical issues. Two years after KFC opened its flagship branch off of Tiananmen Square, Chinese troops there killed an estimated hundreds of people to quash political protests.

But within a week, KFC reopened on the Square, catering now to soldiers instead of students demanding change. KFC took off and, by 2011, according to a Harvard Business Review case study, KFC was on average opening one restaurant a day in China.

This growth came at a cost. Bart Elmore, an environmental historian and associate professor of history at the Ohio State University, charted the rise of several Southern multinationals, including FedEx, Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola in his book Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet. Elmore explains how servicing goods to the countryside made corporations enormously wealthy, and how those firms relied on the Global South for materials and markets. But that quest for global ubiquity had severe environmental impacts, including by KFC, such as emissions and pollution.

For Elmore, and hopefully for listeners, acknowledging the economic history of the South is one step towards addressing the social and environmental issues wrought by unchecked economic growth.

Music featured in this episode includes "Borough" and "The Crisper" by Blue Dot Sessions.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to guest Zachary Karabell and his book Superfusion, which lays out the history of KFC in China. Zachary also founded The Progress Network and hosts the podcast What Could Go Right?

Thanks to Bart Elmore for his perspective on the impact of Southern companies around the world. You can read more about those firms in his newly released book Country Capitalism.

Although they were not featured in this episode, a big thank you to historian Adrian Miller for providing context about fried chicken’s origins, as well as to Christine Ha, who owns several restaurants in Houston.

Gravy is proud to be a part of APT Podcast Studios.

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A Tale of Two Laredos Mar 15, 2023

Show notes

In “A Tale of Two Laredos,” Gravy producer Evan Stern visits Laredo, Texas, which shares history, culture, and memory with its sister city across the border, Nuevo Laredo. For decades, Mexican border towns were renowned for refined, white tablecloth restaurants where jacketed waiters served a café society that transcended international boundaries. Among the most celebrated was Nuevo Laredo’s Cadillac Bar, which opened in 1926 and grew famous for delicacies such as frog legs and Ramos Gin Fizzes until it was forced to close in 2010.

Chosen for its location on the river we now call the Rio Grande, Don Tomas Sanchez established Laredo as a ferry crossing in 1755. After the Mexican-American war of the mid-19th century, the land was ceded to the U.S. Some long-time residents moved across the river into Mexican territory and founded Nuevo Laredo, while others remained in what became Texas. Laredo has evolved into a bustling and fast growing center of trade that’s now the largest inland port in the United States. Yet the border has hardened in ways that have vastly altered these neighboring cities’ social dynamics. On the American side, 9/11 spurred a wave of counterterrorism and immigration policies that have slowed the process of entry. In Mexico, the 2003 arrest of cartel leader Osiel Cardenas Guillen spurred a protracted turf war amongst rival factions for control of Nuevo Laredo’s prized point of entry. March of 2022 saw gunmen fire shots at the American consulate, whose workers are forced to adhere to curfews and movement restrictions. The US State Department advises against travel there altogether. For Laredoans, movement across the border into Nuevo Laredo—once a part of daily life—has all but ceased.

In Laredo, Stern searches for traces of the Cadillac Bar’s influence on the American side. He hears memories from native residents including Elsa Rodriguez, who shares firsthand how the border’s hardening has altered the region’s cultural fabric. He also visits with Margarita Araiza, chair of the Webb County Heritage Foundation, who discusses how Laredo and Nuevo Laredo were founded as one city in the 1700s and remain inextricably linked. Newspaper veteran and longtime journalism professor Wanda Garner Cash tells of her grandfather, Mayo Bessan, who, sensing business opportunity, fled Prohibition Era-New Orleans to open the Cadillac Bar with gambling winnings.

Stern also gets a taste of Laredo’s current dining scene through a visit to the Border Foundry, whose owner Pete Mims once hosted a dinner that featured a tasting menu entirely comprised of recipes from the Cadillac. Also on hand to mix an award-winning cocktail is Cesar “Cheese” Martinez, manager of the new Bar Nido, who was named Best Bartender by readers of the Laredo Morning Times.

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