LITTLE ROCK — To judge from average girth alone, it would be fair to conclude that Arkansans are world-class eaters - and quite likely a receptive audience for a magazine focused on the state’s food culture. That’s the premise of a lively new publication with a pun-flavored name: Arkansauce: The Journal of Arkansas Foodways.
Created by the special collections department of the University of Arkansas Libraries in Fayetteville, Arkansauce is based on a supposition spelled out by Tom W. Dillard, who heads the department: “Arkansas offers a fertile field for inquiry into food - its history, traditions, folklore, and its current culinary scene, too.”
Due to production costs, the free Arkansauce was planned to come out only once a year. No tax money has been used to design, print or distribute it. Managing editor Diane F. Worrell says early reaction to the first issue has been positive enough that there are hopes of raising enough money to publish another one late this summer.
Worrell, the special collections librarian for special projects, says the magazine fits into her department’s “initiative to document cooking in Arkansas. Our first project was to collect all Arkansas-related cookbooks, and we have amassed over 1,000 different cookbooks. Developing a journal on the state’s foodways is a natural next step.”
The idea for Arkansauce originated with Dillard and Timothy G. Nutt, special collections assistant head. In his first-issue article, Dillard applies the “world-class eaters” label to Arkansans. He observes that Natural State denizens “like to dwell on other aspects of dining - talking about our favorite foods, seeking out sources for Arkansas black apples, exchanging recipes, trying to grow the perfect tomato, and passing on our family food traditions to our children.”
For the premiere effort, Worrell recruited as guest editor the longtime Arkansas journalist and political operative Rex Nelson, a trencherman of note who operates the
rexnelsonsouthernfried.com
blog about foods of the South.
“I’ve always believed there has not been enough attention given to the Arkansas food culture,” says Nelson. “I wanted a fairly wide variety of stories, so I called on everyone from historians to bloggers to write pieces. We cover restaurants, food groups, old recipes, gardening - pretty much the gamut of food writing.”
Among the features in Arkansauce are:
Defining Arkansas Cuisine, written by Nelson. He poses the rhetorical question, “So what is Arkansas cuisine?” In response, he offers “my best shot at a short definition: traditional country cooking done simply and done well, using the freshest, locally sourced ingredients possible.”
Foods at Our House During the Great Depression, by John G. Ragsdale, a retired petroleum engineer who, with his wife, DeDe, is a connoisseur of Dutch oven and camp cooking. A financial gift from the couple helped the magazine get started. Ragsdale recalls that his lawyer father’s clients in El Dorado in the 1930s would sometimes pay with food: “This might be squirrels, ducks, a bushel of turnip greens or some other garden produce. My favorite was pan-fried squirrel, cooked nice and tender.”
Beans, Beans, Beans: Phaseolus Vulgaris in Arkansas History, by Michael B. Dougan, a distinguished professor emeritus at Arkansas State University at Jonesboro. Pointing out that hence so Arkansaucable.”
Arkansas Barbecue, by Kane Webb, a veteran journalist who is the new editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Voices page. “Luckily for Arkansans, unbeknownst to the barbecue-erati from the Great Elsewhere,” writes Webb, “our state provides enough hickory-smoked goodness for a lifetime’s worth of moments of grace.”
Jewels of the Delta: Three Chicot County Eateries, by Tom DeBlack, a professor of history at Arkansas Tech University in Russellville. DeBlack lauds the Cow Pen Restaurant, the Lake Shore Cafe and Rhoda’s Famous Hot Tamales.
More Than Just a Place to Eat, by Trey Berry, deputy director of the Department of Arkansas Heritage. Berry waxes wistful about boyhood stops in the family car at the original Burge’s Restaurant in Lewisville, as well as other small town eateries along U.S. 67 and Arkansas 69 in the state’s southwest quadrant. He laments the vanishing of such mom-and-pop places.
On the Making of Fried Green Tomatoes, by Kat Robinson, a Little Rock-based travel and food writer who blogs for Arkansas Times. “When done right, a fried green tomato slice is about the best thing you can have on the side of your plate during summer,” writes Robinson.
Blackberry Cobbler Evokes Summer Fun, by Louise Terzia, director of development for the Historic Arkansas Museum. Terzia fondly remembers her mother’s cobbler and the source of the prime ingredient: “My brothers would ride their bikes to the places where the blackberry canes hung with the sweetest, darkest berries. They were wild blackberries,not so oddly huge as today’s, just a nice moderate berry - but tasty.”
How to Cook a Steak, by Charles J. Finger, an English born writer who died in 1941. His papers were donated by his daughter 25 years ago to the University of Arkansas, and Nelson found this whimsical beef-cooking essay among them. Here was Finger’s starting point: “First see that your steak is at least two inches thick, with rich fat on it, refusing any meat which has been spoiled by butchers in the modern wasteful way of trimming off the fat.”
A Slice of Heaven: The Pie Shop, by Ray Wittenberg, a former restaurant owner working as advertising and development director for The Oxford American magazine. In this ode to the Pie Shop in the White River town of DeValls Bluff, Wittenberg tries to calculate the prodigious output of proprietor Mary Thomas: “It’s a wild guess - at least 12 pies a day, six days a week, 52 weeks out of the year, and for 50 years - that’s 187,200 pies by my count.” As lagniappe on the back cover of Arkansauce is reprinted the menu served at the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs on Dec. 15, 1948, to celebrate Sid McMath’s election as governor. The main course would have been a good fit for Nelson’s definition of Arkansas cuisine: “traditional country cooking done simply and done well.” It was Mammy Hannah fried chicken with country gravy and a corn fritter.
The special collections department is mailing copies of Arkansauce as long as they last. To request one, call (479) 575-5577 or e-mail dfworrel@uark.edu. The magazine can be read online at
libinfo.uark.edu/SpecialCollections/news/ arkansauce/Arkansaucewinter11.pdf
the pink tomato is the official state fruit and the official state vegetable, Dougan proposes that “the green bean, in all its varieties, become the state vegetable,” displacing the tomato in that category. The green bean, he writes, “is in the Latin vulgaris - common and
Style, Pages 29 on 03/22/2011