Calendar of Events
Note: Meetings are usually held on the second Sunday of each month, September through May, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. Currently we are meeting via Zoom, but in-person meetings are held at the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Services Center, 4805 Edgemoor Lane, Bethesda, Maryland, and occasionally at other venues. The meetings are open to anyone. However, certain meetings may require a fee.
Our Heirloom Grains and Vegetables
May 5, 2024 @ 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
TALK DESCRIPTION:
Unlike modern cultivars, heirloom plants were bred for flavor as well as performance in the garden and field. This talk highlights our heirloom grains and vegetables from the 19th century. What are the greatest of the horticultural creations that came to typify Low country and Tidewater cookery? What were the most historically significant and flavorsome 19th century field crops and garden vegetables from Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina? These were the by words of fine dining in the 1800s in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Richmond, and Charleston. We will hear the stories of these ingredients, including how numbers of them were recently rediscovered and brought back to Southern fields and tables. We will consider how these ingredients were processed, prepared, and made the basis of regional cuisine.
BIO
David Shields is known as “the flavor saver.” He tracks down lost food crops and assists in restoring them to fields and tables. These include Carolina Gold Rice, Cocke’s Prolific Corn, Rice Peas, Purple Straw Wheat, the Dyehouse Cherry, Benne, Carolina African Runner Peanut, Purple Ribbon Sugar Cane, Hick’s Mulberry, Seashore Black Seed Rye, and Bradford Watermelon. He has written award winning agricultural and culinary histories—Southern Provisions (2015), The Culinarians (2017),Taste the State (2021)—and now The Ark of Taste (2023). His research links horticultural to the table, agricultural to home and professional cookery. He chairs the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, heads the Ark of Taste Committee for the South, and holds the Carolina Distinguished Professorship at the University of South Carolina. He is the Southern Foodways Alliance’s“ Keeper of the Flame,” a James Beard finalist in food history, and Slow Food’s Snailblazer for Biodiversity. He won the brown award for the Best Single Book about American Popular in 2013. He and long-time collaborator, Chef Kevin Mitchell, will be hosting and writing a PBS television show, The Flavor Savers in 2024-25. https://www.facebook.com/david.s.shields/