Edible Michiana Holiday 2022

“PORK IS THE ABSOLUTE KING OF SOUL FOOD. WE

cooking the bacon in the morning to saving that grease to put it in the collard greens with the smoked ham hocks. But the meal would be pork ribs . I lived around, and every time I came back home there was always a grill, always lit, always having that aroma. You’d see my stepdad out over there looking at the meat, smiling. Knowing he has gold on that grill. And that was our big gatherings. We definitely had the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas, where everyone got together. But we had so many summer barbecues where friends and family from the neighborhood, and from all across town, would come to get some of my stepdad’s famous ribs or rib tips. And, of course, there were traditional Memphis-style ribs with the dry rub—no sauce. The dry rub, over coals, cooked perfectly. Sliced in two so you could have two bones with all the meat. I would definitely say ribs, the smell of ribs, is the food that reminds me of home. Lisa Harris: In terms of family dishes, we would go back to Denver and see our grandparents, and my grandmother— my mom’s mother—would always make pot roast. That’s one of my main loves of food, her pot roast . I think I’ve been closer to making it than anybody else in my family. You know, everybody’s talking about what those ingredients are. It’s the love, I think, because she just put a little sliver of bell pepper in there. You have the carrot, and like there’s nothing in there. It’s like the stone soup almost, and that made this beautiful pot roast. We traveled a lot around the country, and somehow, very young, I also learned WOULDN’T HAVE ANY SOUL FOOD WITHOUT PORK...”

But it would probably be tomato gravy: Mississippi tomato gravy . I didn’t grow up knowing what that was. I knew that Grandma canned a lot—she grew up with, like, 18 brothers and sisters, so they were poor in Mississippi. But she would always say, when they didn’t have a lot, her mother, our great-grandma Cooney, would always get a jar of tomatoes. And she would put that jar of tomatoes down with some seasoning, some onions—she would either use okra as a thickener, or flour if she didn’t have okra. And she would spoon it over hoe cakes; it would be spooned over white rice, fresh biscuits. It’s always done in the cast-iron skillet, and typically we always make it after frying something, some type of protein that came before it. So whether that’s cube steak—the poor man’s steak is what I used to call it—fried chicken or fried pork chops, you always pour off the majority of that oil, but you always leave the burnt stuff, the remnants and oil in the cast iron. Then I start to build in my gravy, chopped onions, flour. And now that I’m older and I have my own sense of taste, I do more fancy things. I’ll add some rosemary in there or a sage leaf. Things that Grandma wasn’t doing but to build those flavors.

You can eat that over anything. It’s very filling. Any time I’m eating tomato gravy, it’s really hard for me not to think of Gramma Lou, her name was Loudors, or Great-grandma Cooney, or Aunt Meat or Aunt Sebay—you know, all these crazy Mississippi women—I have to think of them. DaiVaughn Searcy: I grew up with my great-grandmother. She was from the South. Every time we went to her house, everything was on the table, everything from scratch—pie crusts, beans, everything. The house was smelling wonderful. It was a small house, so the living room was pretty much the kitchen. So you were in the kitchen! My stepdad was from Memphis. He came up here when he was a teenager with his recipes from grilling. He was famous for his Memphis-style ribs, which definitely played a part in me getting into barbecue myself. It started off where we would have ribs on holidays, then every day, especially in the summertime. The ingredient that always reminds me of home is pork, because pork is the absolute king of soul food. We wouldn’t have any soul food without pork, from

22

| HOL IDAY 2022