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SUMMARY:Food and Music - Mother Maybelle and June Cash
DESCRIPTION: I spent this past weekend in Oxford\, Mississipi. I ate roasted goat\, and roasted peanuts\, and I ate seafood gumbo over biscuits prepared by the City Bakery Caf&eacute\;. I heard Robert O’Mealy talk about Ellison and sweet potatoes and I heard folk talk about work songs and safety. I met Hank Williams daughter born days after he died. And I got to talk about Mother Maybelle Carter’s cookbook.             It was a very\, very good time. If you ever get a chance to attend the Southern Foodways Alliance Fall Symposium\, take it. It’s kind of like smart camp for grownups--if you ditch the home sickness and add American History presented the tastiest way possible.\n              This year the theme was food and music\, which is how I got to thinking about and writing about John Cash’s mother-in-laws’ cookbook.\n            If you are familiar with Country Music history you will know that recorded country music as we know it is typically understood to begin with what is called the big bang in 1927 during the Bristol sessions when Jimmie Rodgers\, who would go on to exemplify and become the iconic example of country solo singing\, would be recorded by Ralph Peer during the very same ten day period as the Carter family\, who would go on to exemplify and become iconic examples of country group singing stressing harmonies and virtuoso musicianship.\n            Mother Maybelle’s cookbook is as structurally complex as her guitar playing\,  and when I’m talking about Mother Maybelle and guitar playing\, I’m talking about a women in the guitar hall of fame along with Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton as daughter June points out in the cookbook. I’m talking about the lady who invented Carter scratch.\n             The cookbook is sly-- structurally complex in ways that the table of contents listing 13 rather traditional chapters including Appetizers\, Beverages and Condiments\; Salads and Salad dressings\; Vegetables\; poultry and game\; meat\; fish and seafood\; breads\; cookies\; cakes\; pies\; hide.\n             Published in 1989 and officially called Mother Maybelle&#39\;s Cookbook A Kitchen Visit with America&#39\;s first family of Country Song\, the cookbook reads something like a long prose poem with multiple voices studded with recipes and pictures. It follows no established chronology and it establishes no over arching culinary aesthetic to parallel the rich and unique music aesthetic the Carters established.\n                Long break out stories\, pages of recollection\, autobiographical and biographical written almost as letters to friends or relations who will be familiar with the events described\, establishing the tone of an intimate kitchen conversation\, drawing the reader slash cook into the life of the Carter family casually and abruptly--as a welcome but unexpected guest. The sense conveyed\, and I think it is a calculated sense is\, we have not prepared for you\, this is who we are.\n                 When first reading the cookbook I was shocked both by all short-cuts and far from Virginia farm food ingredients--- from commercial candy to Lobster.\n             I shouldn’t have been surprised. The photograph on the cover stakes a particular claim before we read the first recipe. We see June dressed not as a country girl but as an affluent bohemian lady standing by a table set with silver and linen and fine porcelain. There are two candelabra’s and there is a chandelier. There appears to be a songwriting award hung on the dining room wall\, and the message is—Mother Maybelle’s life did not begin and end in Poor Valley at the Carter Fold. Her Children went on to live in a luxury\,enjoy a prosperity that acknowledges--her brilliance…paid.\n            As I have read and re-read Mother Maybelle’s Cook it became increasingly clear that from June’s earliest days food and music were a twinned part of how she a Virginia girl learned to trace herself to back to England and Ireland\, with the scones she cooked and ate and treasured\; learned to hold onto her roots in Poor Valley with all the pickles she put up\; learned to create connections to the suburban middle class with recipes for Monster Cookies that allude to Sesame street\; learned to embrace an internationalism\, evidenced by recipes for blini and crepes and pirozki\; and learned to manifest her wealth evidenced by recipes for lobster.\n             If the table was the place\, the altar that Mother Maybelle gathered the family around to prepare them to engage with God\, the table in the cookbook her daughter June gives us is a palimpsest. June in the process of copying and adding to her mother’s cookbook overwrites her mother’s text. The table becomes the place family constructs a radically expanded and profoundly rooted identity\, the place family prepares for and engages an ever changing NOW authentic as the past.\n            If far more surreal. A recipe I will never forget though am not very interested in eating is for stain glass cake.that involves pans of various colored jello cut into shards then reformed in a bundt pan with cookie crumbs.\n            And if that is not surreal try this\: a political poem of sorts masquerading as a recipe\: Green Beans with Mint and Pimiento. Serve as a cold\, crisp salad. Complements Lobster! Cut the ends off 2 pounds of snap beans. Salt lightly and boil until just tender drain. Chill. Pour olive oil over the beans. Sprinkle with fresh mint. Garnish with Pimento.\n            As a musicians the Carters conserve the past creating unbroken circles\, even as they innovate\; as foodies\, they break the circles time after time. Leave it to the Carters to remind us life is about preserving and evolving—and ain’t nothing so lyrical about poverty. Sometimes a contrived receipe for stainglass cake is to be treasured above an honest recipe for mush. And that&#39\;s a complex Carter truth.\n
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CATEGORIES:jimmie-rodgers,june-cash,mother-maybelle-carter,oxford-ms,robert-o-mealy,southern-foodways-alliance-fall-symposium
CLASS:PUBLIC
SEQUENCE:2
DTSTAMP:20100328T131457
CREATED;TZID=US-Central:20091103T085451
LAST-MODIFIED;TZID=US-Central:20091113T132007
DTSTART;TZID=US-Central:20091103T084400
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