Local Food

Joseph Mitchell

The author in Fairmont, in Robeson County, North Carolina, in the nineteen-fifties.
Courtesy Estate of Joseph Mitchell

I tend to not think much about ‘local food’ since for most of the year here in Ontario, there is not much of it. Resident members of the "100-Mile Diet Club" surely have to travel much farther south than that to find sustenance in the winter and much, much farther to obtain spices during any season. Still, right now we have an abundance of ‘sweet corn’ and fine tomatoes from the garden of my father-in-law.

But, if one did drive all the way to North Carolina, here is an excellent and evocative description of what you might find:

“Some days, in June, July, and August, it would seem to me that the branch was overflowing with things to eat. On such days, I would often take a tin bucket along and pick huckleberries and take them home, and my mother or our cook, a Negro woman named Anna McNair, would make deep-dish huckleberry pies out of them. Or I would pick wild strawberries. Or I would pick wild blackberries—around home, they were called brier berries. Or I would pick a couple of buckets of wild plums—they were called Chickasaw plums—and my mother would make dozens of glasses of wild-plum jelly out of them; it was one of her specialties. She would set the glasses of ruby-red jelly on shelves in one of the kitchen windows and the morning sun hitting the window would transform it into a stained-glass window. Or I would pick a couple of buckets of wild grapes and my mother or Anna would make wild-grape-hull pies out of them, an old country-Southern dessert that, according to one of my grandmothers, originated in the Hard Times—the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. My mother’s grape-hull pies were unusually delectable; she used fox grapes and scuppernong grapes in them, and she used the seeded pulps of the grapes as well as the hulls. In the fall, when the coarse, spongy outer hulls of the black walnuts started turning from green to yellow to black, I would take a bushel bag to the branch every afternoon for a week or so and fill it half to three-quarters full of walnuts (with the hulls still on, they could be quite heavy) and tie a rope to the bag and drag it home and spread the walnuts out on the dirt floor of the cellar to dry. And after the first frost I would go to certain wild-persimmon trees on the hill of the branch whose fruit I knew from experience and pick a bucket of persimmons and my mother would mash them through a colander and mix them with milk and butter and cornmeal and honey and nutmeg and make a pudding out of them, baked persimmon pudding, which was another delectable old country-Southern dessert.”

Obviously this was written many years ago and I am sad to report that the ‘branch’ also, long ago, went the way of many wetlands. These words were taken from a manuscript left by Joseph Mitchell who wrote for (and stopped writing for - another story you probably know) The New Yorker. The title of the story is “Days in the Branch” and the subtitle is “Memories of a North Carolina Boyhood”.  He used to leave his house early in the morning, having heard the warning “Watch Out For the Snakes” and return late in the day after hours  of tree climbing and poking around in the streams. It is even sadder, I think, that the children of today are unlikely to gather such memories or berries. (for the story, see The New Yorker, Dec. 1, 2014).