Without Appalachia we wouldn’t have the US

Marea Stamper, also known as The blessed Madonnais a DJ and producer currently based in London, but born and raised in Kentucky. Earlier this year, the Talkhouse reader‘s Food Issue – now published digitally and in print – Marea spoke to us about how growing up in Appalachia shaped her relationship with food.
— Annie Fell, editor-in-chief of Talkhouse Music

We wouldn’t have the United States without the resources that come from Appalachia: salt, coal, natural gas, timber. These are all things that come in large quantities from the part of the world I come from.

Appalachia covers a large part of a region – I think it’s thirteen states – but the important thing to note about the Appalachians is that while some areas are flatter and more suitable for farming, much of the food available is of the kind that that you find in areas where the land may not be the easiest for farming. There are fair food deserts in Appalachia. It was a big deal when Wal-Mart came along because there were just things you couldn’t get. That’s how it was in my day, but my grandparents lived through the Depression – which was like Depression+ because they were so geographically isolated. When my grandmother was a little girl, she had a little brother who had a nutritional disorder that absolutely could have been solved with access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Every day my grandmother and her sister walked miles through the mountains to get to the only store there, to see if there was an orange or an apple or something. Time after time there was nothing, and so her brother didn’t make it. He died of hunger. I think food means something different when the people who changed your diapers have experienced someone starving to death.

That said, I grew up in a world where food was absolutely amazing. My grandmother cooked everything. I wouldn’t even call all the dishes she made particularly Appalachian, but some were. There’s one called wilted greens: you take some kind of green (usually the first green to come up when it’s cold outside, like kale), and then you fry up a bunch of bacon, pour the fat on the greens and salt them. The greens are softened on site. Then there are dishes you see that are very common in Britain and Ireland. The relative who really brought over one side of my family was a bride from Jamestown – she was sold to cook and clean for someone in Jamestown. So you have these recipes that come straight from County Cork and end up in Eastern Kentucky. There are many dishes that fall into this category. In Ireland and England the tomatoes were of course not so nice…

My grandfather on my father’s side was what was called a county agent, and he taught farmers how not to overextend their land and not rotate their crops. We got a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables that would make people like urban farmers markets tremble with envy. And a couple of weird things that I think people would probably let go of: ‘Eug.” Eating a lot of poor people really scares people.

I don’t need to make any grand arguments to say that the idea of ​​the hillbilly as some kind of dumb, slack-jawed clown is something that can still be joked about in America. I went to school in Lexington and Louisville, and even in Kentucky I was well aware that what I ate was not the same as what the kids around me ate. Even if I wasn’t eating something with a sign on it that flashed, “Hey, here’s a hillbilly!” – the very fact that I didn’t have things in my lunchbox that other middle-class kids with health insurance had was one such indicator. I had a free lunch; we were on food stamps and WIC. There was a real deep shame that was forced upon me, and even my mother, because I needed it. I remember my mother going to the grocery store at night so no one would see her using food stamps.

There are a number of things you carry with you and internalize, and part of that is certainly what type of food you would eat in the presence of other people. We have some real winners. I probably wouldn’t eat pickled baloney in front of other people. The way you get it, it just comes out of a huge pot, and you cut off chunks of it. It’s fucking amazing. We also have jars of bright red pickled eggs, and these things called hot sausages – they’re not really that hot, it’s more like hot buffalo chicken. They used to come in a little bright red jar of brine, and they are so tasty. Penrose makes them, and they were discontinued for good, but they just started making them again. Just before Christmas, I went home to bury my grandparents, and we stopped at a gas station on the way to Somerset, Kentucky, where I bought their burial plot. I found Penrose sausages in the supermarket! They weren’t in the pot – they were individually wrapped – but we brought them up anyway. My papaya loved them so much so I left one for him on his gravestone.

We’re at a moment where we’re starting to see that some of the things that would have made people angry are now becoming things that people want, in the age of fine dining from head to toe. The gentrification of food is one of those things you hear a lot about, but most of the people doing fine dining in Appalachia are hillbillies. If they want to go for it, bless them. I’m just glad I still have a restaurant where I can get a decent cookie.

Also especially with the historical cookbook Food by Ronni Lundy and Johnny Autry – they haven’t missed a step. It’s an incredible book. I received it not long after lockdown, and I went ahead and started cooking things in it. It was such a revelation to me. There were things I hadn’t tasted since I was a child. Some dishes felt like a séance. My father is dead, and the only thing I want to mark is his soup beans. It’s pinto beans with pork, salt and pepper. Sometimes you would cheat and add a little extra ham stock, which is really delicious. It wasn’t complicated to make, and eating it was like eating with my father’s ghost. It’s a special book and it meant so much to me that I was able to try making those things for the first time.

This food may be gentrified, but you know what? Most stuff just grows out of a rock. It’s not like there’s anything rare going on here. If people really want to get involved with heirloom tomatoes, bless them. I would like to have one in England. If anyone can think of how I can improve this here, I would be very happy.

As told to Annie Fell.