
{"id":4092,"date":"2008-11-25T13:36:51","date_gmt":"2008-11-25T21:36:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=4092"},"modified":"2008-11-25T13:50:20","modified_gmt":"2008-11-25T21:50:20","slug":"cooking-as-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2008\/11\/25\/cooking-as-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Cooking as conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/11\/farmersdaughtera112008.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/11\/farmersdaughtera112008-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"Photo by Ava Barlow. Carrboro resident April McGreger makes sauerkraut in her kitchen by fermenting shredded cabbage with sea salt and juniper berries.\" title=\"farmersdaughtera112008\" width=\"120\" height=\"180\" align=\"left\" size-medium wp-image-4093\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/11\/farmersdaughtera112008-200x300.jpg 200w, https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/11\/farmersdaughtera112008.jpg 1205w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 120px) 100vw, 120px\" \/><\/a><strong>Kirk Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Already, the aromas swirling around in April McGreger\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s kitchen were pretty overwhelming to a first-time visitor.<\/p>\n<p>Slices of chunked pumpkin were in the middle of a long simmer in copper pots on the stove, the scent mixing with lemon juicing in progress. Then the sweet potato yeast rolls came out of the oven.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nMcGreger knows from sweet potatoes. Her brother and father grow hundreds of acres of them back home in Vardaman, Mississippi. She really is what the label on her desserts and jars of preserves, chutneys and slaws states: a farmer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s daughter.<\/p>\n<p>It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a label with growing popularity in part because her unique approach of using seasonal, locally grown food has struck a chord with frequenters of the farmers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 markets. The main reason, however, is that she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just that good.<\/p>\n<p>Right now, she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s trying to figure out how to grow her business. <\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the problem of larger distribution when you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re doing small-scale seasonal stuff,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to just do thousands of jars of pumpkin-chip preserves. The fun of it for me is to be able to see what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s out there \u00e2\u20ac\u201d what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in season \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and to get inspiration from the actual product.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>McGreger\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s bond with her grandmother, cooking with her and learning the food cycles of a family farm with large family gardens, was her entry into the arts of cooking and putting up food.<\/p>\n<p>Graduate school at UNC brought her to this area and although she enjoyed her master\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work researching the volcanic activity on the Italian island of Stromboli in the Aeolian Sea, her passion for cooking began to eclipse a career in geology.<\/p>\n<p>Eventually, she took a job at Lantern just as that now top-rated kitchen was getting rolling and was staffed by the self-dubbed mujeres en fuego \u00e2\u20ac\u201d women on fire. One of her preferred tools remains a wok spatula she got used to working with there.<\/p>\n<p>Though she had no formal training as a chef, she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s taken what she learned growing up and pursued it further with a researcher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s eye. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s studied Appalachian and Native-American dishes \u00e2\u20ac\u201d her sour corn is a direct result \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and taken short courses in sustainable agriculture at Central Carolina Community College and bread baking at the San Francisco Baking Institute.  <\/p>\n<p>Last year, McGreger decided it was time to take a break from restaurants, make the leap, and start Farmer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Daughter. She took course work at N.C. State to become certified in pickling and set up a kitchen in her Carrboro home.<\/p>\n<p>There, she and assistant Jessica Sandford keep McGreger\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s booth at the Carrboro Farmers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Market and her small network of retailers stocked.<\/p>\n<p>She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s developed a wide-ranging repertoire. The pie list in preparation for this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pre-Thanksgiving<br \/>\nFarmers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 Market includes pecan, fig cake, chocolate pecan, persimmon, pumpkin and maple pumpkin. McGreger is especially proud of her work to develop a good chestnut paste. The use of chestnuts in this area disappeared in the last century along with the trees, and her effort to revive the ingredient is an example of her fascination with recapturing traditions. Her technique was adapted from an old French recipe and last week she turned 25 pounds into a rich, creamy paste, most of which will go into tea cakes.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I have a huge interest in history in general,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why I really wanted to bring out these old recipes and reintroduce them to people.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Her research into local foods led to a regular column in Grist magazine, and her active participation as a member of the Southern Foodways Alliance has gotten notice.<\/p>\n<p>McGreger\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Muscadine Meringue Tartlette \u00e2\u20ac\u201d her variation on a low-country grape-hull pie \u00e2\u20ac\u201d was recently named by Garden &#038; Gun magazine as one of the South\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 100 must-try foods.<\/p>\n<p>As much as she is a student of traditions, McGreger does not claim to be a purist and makes an educated effort to put her twist on recipes. She credits Bill Neal, Joe Dabney and other Southern chefs and researchers for pointing the way. Her sweet potato rolls are a variation on a well-known Neal yeast roll recipe. <\/p>\n<p>She is a purist about one thing \u00e2\u20ac\u201d kimchi: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not my culture to mess with. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feel like I have license, so I try to stick close.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>When it comes to working within her own food traditions, she feels a lot more freedom. Her spiced muscatine \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the cranberry sauce of the South \u00e2\u20ac\u201d includes a little ginger, and vanilla-bean shavings are stirred into the pumpkin chip preserves.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m in conversation with my own traditions,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d McGreger said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I try to make small changes to make things mine. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want my changes to be arbitrary but I also don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want them to be stodgy.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<br \/>\nYou can find some of April McGreger\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s thoughts on cooking and food traditions online via Grist magazine, where she writes a monthly column. This month, she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s posted her sweet potato rolls recipe. Visit grist.org\/advice\/daughter\/2008\/11\/20\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,25,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features","category-land-and-table","category-mill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4092"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4103,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4092\/revisions\/4103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}