I need to start writing again, and so I'm doing it right here on All-American Keto site, but I'll be moving everything over to a new website once I get my BBQ ideas flowing better. On to the important part! Chris and I went to an Indigo House Dinner - called the Global Dining Table: A Dish of Curry with Rice in Mary Randolph's 1810 Kitchen.
OMG, this was amazing. You might have heard of Leni Sorensen - she is a featured culinary historian on the Netflix series High on the Hog, she was recently profiled in the New York Times. (Here's a link to the article, it's set up so you can read it even if you don't have a subscription.) Go ahead, take your time and read that article. There is no one else like Leni. Be prepared.
So, she has created this warm, welcoming culinary haven in Indigo House - her own home, but also a teaching lab - she hosts canning classes - in fact, once deer season starts, she'll be holding a venison canning class, but you have to be quick to act on that one, it will happen once she has a particular nuisance deer that ate all her garden produce it could reach this summer. There will only be a two day lead time. Prepare now. You can sign up for canning classes at her Indigo House website. Don't worry, if you don't want to can meat, there are plenty of veggie and fruit classes, too.
Her house is filled with artwork, books (so many books!) and a huge kitchen and dining room table, all in an open space, almost one room. It is the perfect home. Her husband was a carpenter, the inside is almost like a - you remember those gnome books, where the gnomes lived inside hollow trees? This house is like the fairy tale, fully stocked with books, gnome tree house.
So, beyond canning classes, Leni creates dinners based on historical cookbooks and cooks. The one we attended was based on Mary Randolph's 1810 Table - as in Mary Randolph was very politically connected, and at one point, purchased a house in Richmond and ran an exclusive boarding house - the members of the General Assembly rented rooms from her, and she held dinner parties for them and their guests every night during the Assembly. So, basically we ate what the Virginia elite ate in 1810.
Sometimes you read the recipes in old cookbooks, and it all sounds so very bland. Not true! This dinner was all about the global foodways that made up dinner tables in the early 1800s, but she was spittin' facts about the entire worldwide food chains and how they started to form from the earliest Spanish conquistadors taking in the Aztec chocolate. As we ate, Leni had small notebooks filled with her notes about particular ingredients, and she talked about NAMED kitchen cooks and menu creators. The people who actually made the food were often unknown servants or enslaved people, but she has done a lot of research, and so she introduced us to people mentioned in correspondence or people like Malinda Russell - author of the first African-American written cookbook, published in 1866.
I wish I had brought my own notebook, but of course, I didn't. Damn it. Uh... I guarantee you I'm going to go to another Indigo House dinner though, so I'll bring a notebook next time. We started with a tomato soup. It was one of the best tomato soups I had ever had. Leni makes her own chili pepper vinegar, and it was used liberally. This soup I could drink in the gallons.
I don't think I'll post pictures of the rest of the meal. It was good - spicy, mouth wateringly good. But the real magic of the evening was just... the evening. OK, so the rest of the dinner - we had Salmon escabeche and tarragon vinaigrette dressed salad greens from Leni's garden. We had chicken curry with Carolina gold rice - with a specific way of offset rice cooking employed in Mary Randolph's cookbook, we had this luscious - I forgot the official name of it, but it was homemade raspberry jam folded into perfectly whipped heavy cream. We were all licking our bowls. Leni cooked, and she also has Liz as a helper, who both served the dishes and also cheffed up the place.
The other guests that night were members of a book club from Atlanta! They had driven all the way up from Georgia that very day, were planning to spend the weekend exploring Charlottesville and Monticello. Betty, Angela, Juanita and... damn, I should have brought a notebook. There wasn't a particular book they had planned this visit around, but I guess they go traveling as a group every so often to continue their book club discussions. Their next trip will be to New York City, and it's because they had read The Personal Librarian These women were LOVELY and warm. It was such a delight to share a meal with them.
Obviously, the conversation was political. We were eating a delicious meal, that was served to the elites of the day, but created by cooks we don't know the names of. We discussed colonialism, slavery, exploited foodways, all of it. What Leni is absolutely adamant about though, is that this cannot be viewed as just so much trauma, but that the world is made up of PEOPLE, who existed in imperfect systems, but everyone has their own personality, thoughts, ideas, dreams, and that the world is filled with creativity and love and exploration.
Before the dinner began, we explored Leni's homestead, and I got a few pictures and was able to pet some cats, so honestly... best night ever. Who wants to go eat at Leni's house with me?! Let's start planning now!
Oh yeah, and I got zapped by an electric fence because I'm an idiot and touched an electric fence.
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