Sam Beall - The Foothills Cuisine of Blackberry Farm: Recipes and Wisdom from Our Artisans, Chefs, and Smoky Mountain Ancestors

This book is my heartfelt effort to share the food and rhythms of a very special place. Nestled in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee, Blackberry Farm and the extraordinary people who live and work here embody a way of life that has been all but lost. At Blackberry Farmone of the most celebrated hotel and culinary destinations in Americaand on these pages, youll discover Foothills Cuisine: a term that is derived from our location, where one ridgeline separates the country mountain cooking to our south from the haute cuisine of the city to our north, Knoxville. Our Foothills Cuisine is a perfect amalgam of these two culinary worldsa blend of old and new, rural and urban, rustic and refined. I hope the menus that follow entice you and inspire you to step into your own kitchen to experience this melding of tradition with innovation.

In addition to the full menus in this book, we also highlight some of the old ways that we live out every day, whether were preserving or pickling the gardens bounty, making cheese from our fresh sheeps milk, or curing our own meats. These artisanal culinary crafts are practically lost arts in most of the country, but not in our Larder, where we house our Preservation Kitchen, Creamery, and Butcher Shop. These arts define these mountains and the people who have called them home for generations. Our predecessors in the region, isolated by the mountains, were independent people who had to survive by their wits and wisdom. They have passed down these artisanal crafts for centuries not because the crafts are quaint but because they work. They sustained our forebears, nourishing them through many difficult seasons. In fact the crafts youll read about here could be seen as the fittest crafts to survive, just as our resilient ancestors did.

The recipes and artisanal processes are indeed vital to our story, yet there is more to tell. Flip through these pages and youll discover by the books very structure how the rhythm of life flows here. Before the age of smartphones and digital calendars, time was managed differently. Seeds went into the ground not by what the package said, but by what the moon and earth told us, and we managed our Larder not with the goal of putting food on the table for a single meal, but to sustain ourselves throughout a full year.

At Blackberry Farm we live in the same way, for in addition to being a world-renowned restaurant and hotel, Blackberry is also a fully working farm. Life on a working farm is shaped by the multitude of tasks that must be completed every day, week, and month. Of course we refer to seasons like everyone else, but the real measure of our days is the natural time it takes to do any given task. The tasks themselves are fairly constant year after year, yet when and in what order they are done is determined by the condition of the soil, the temperature of earth and air, and the amount and quality of precipitation.

Put another way, our to do list is controlled almost exclusively by Mother Nature, and she does not consult a calendar. Planting, harvest, hog killing, hunting: these are the tasks the people of this region have been completing for centuries, and each in its own time. The actions that once meant the difference between survival and demise are still meaningful to us today because they respect the earths natural rhythms. Modern societys innovation and technology, so crucial to our improved quality of life, have merely proven what our ancestors knew instinctively: a strawberry or tomato grown in hothouses in January and shipped halfway around the world does not smell or taste like it should.

In each chapter in this book we introduce a time, illustrate the tasks associated with that time in a section called What Were Doing Now, and share a few seasonal dishes. For most people, every New Year begins on January 1 and the rest of the year flows forward from that starting date. But on a working farm such as Blackberry, everyone lives each part of the year differently, according to his or her own list of tasks. For our gardeners, the start of the new year is planting time in the spring, when the earth is soft enough to accept the sowing of seeds, and this is where we begin our story. The preservationist celebrates his new year about four to six weeks behind the gardeners, typically when the first strawberries arrive in late spring. For the charcutier, the new year starts at hog-killin time in the fall, for that is when the weather turns colder and is best for curing meat in our outdoor smokehouses. And our livestock caretaker and cheese maker celebrate the new year during late winters lambing season, when the lambs are born and the ewes produce abundant milk. Please note that wherever we indicate the months during which these events generally take place, we are naturally referring to our own region; you may have to adjust these rough time frames to make them relevant to your own experience.