Kellams: This is Ozarks at Large. We have made it into July, and we have also been able to secure Becca Martin-Brown for another edition of The Other Way. Becca, welcome back to the show. Welcome to July.
Martin-Brown: Thank you so much. And what do you mean it's July?
Kellams: Well, yeah. Which way are we going to go this week?
Martin-Brown: This week we're going to talk about food with one of my favorite people. Kat Robinson is the author of her 14th book, which is just now coming out, called "What We Eat in Arkansas: 50 Recipes for the Natural State's Signature Dishes, Volume One." And we are going to get her on the line and talk about chocolate gravy and cheese dip.
Kellams: And 48 other things. All right, let's go.
Martin-Brown: And I believe, Kat, you are with us now.
Robinson: I am.
Kellams: Welcome back to Ozarks at Large. Can't wait to hear about this book.
Martin-Brown: So it sounds like this book is really intended for all the gazillions of people who are moving here and want to embrace Arkansas.
Robinson: In many ways, that is the essence of it. I'm asked quite a bit: if someone was to arrive here, what would we give them to start out with? And I have other books that have been suggested for this, but in the weird economy that we're in, and in an age where people are wanting to get to the point right away, I saw the need to create a cookbook that literally was getting to the point, just the key recipes.
So in this book, I've pared it down to 50 different recipes for dishes that are common to Arkansas. Now, some of them are quite normal things for us, like biscuits and gravy would be normal, or fried catfish, or chicken, or a black-eyed pea salad. Some of them are a little strange for people outside of the state — for instance, learning how to properly prepare poke sallat, which a lot of people call "Polk salad," with a D. It's actually "poke sallat" — S-A-L-L-A-T — in a proper way. That's not going to poison you. There's instructions there.
There's, of course, recipes for things like the popular — the three popular things attributed to Arkansas, which would be cheese dip, fried pickles and chocolate gravy. But it also digs deeper into things like how to properly prepare Arkansas Delta-style tamales, which, unlike their Mississippi Delta companions, are soaked rather than steamed. They're actually boiled in a broth, which gives them a particular texture and flavor that is unlike both Mississippi Delta tamales and Mexican tamales. I also delve into things like chicken-fried venison and squirrel and dumplings, because these are dishes that have been common to Arkansas for a long time. And, you know, for our Delta fans, also duck poppers, which are a popular way to provide duck for the appetizer.
Martin-Brown: What started you on this path — to talk about food, to write about food, to try to capture these essential, historic, iconic Arkansas foods and recipes?
Robinson: Whenever I left my last full-time career back in 2007, I was a television producer. I wanted to write for a living, but I wasn't sure what I was going to do. But September 2007, a lot of different things were happening in the food world, particularly in Arkansas, with the introduction of the certified Arkansas farmers market and with the first of our crop of near-celebrity chefs that were on the way. There was a renewed interest in our food ways, but very few resources on how to examine them.
I worked my way up from writing little articles here and there, from small publications to state, regional and eventually national publications, sharing what John T. Edge from the Southern Foodways Alliance calls the gospel of Arkansas food. I accidentally became a food historian and expert in the subject, and after 19 years, I find myself in a weird place — the wonderful place where I'm able to publish books like "What We Eat in Arkansas," as well as participate as a research source for so many other writers out there, since I've had the opportunity to soak myself in Arkansas food culture.
Now, mind you, my research goes back far further than 19 years. I've been an Arkansawyer my entire life. My family's from lower Arkansas, and I grew up in Little Rock, but I still traveled the entire state. And I'm learning every day. I will never run out of things to research when it comes to Arkansas food. I will never be done with telling that story. It's kind of fabulous and fun.
Kellams: So there are 50 recipes here for the Natural State's signature dishes. Do you cover gizzards?
Robinson: I do both chicken livers and chicken gizzards. They are prepared quite differently, but you'll see them side by side on a lot of menus, and, of course, side by side in the bird. These are things that, you know, we grew up with. I know that the current generation is less likely to enjoy the wonder that is livers and gizzards, but there are still purveyors — mostly, strangely enough, gas stations — where you can still find them.
In my family, my mother was always the one that loved livers, while I loved gizzards. And, personally, to me, livers are what I normally put on a fishhook to go and catch catfish. But preparations for both of these are in the cookbook, along with some other things that we don't really think about. I mean, pork chops, of course, are still popular, but smothered pork chops are not a thing that you see on menus, except for at the very most rural of diners, and usually only as a family special. Of course, things like hush puppies everybody knows about today, but I have a good recipe for those too. It's just the little things that you find as you come across, going through the old Arkansas cookbooks and talking to people and getting oral histories of what people ate — not only today, but in the past. I've been able to create a lexicon of what it is that we did eat, what we do eat now, and what we probably will end up eating in the future.
My whole thought on the matter is we have the internet today, and since the turn into the 21st century, everybody has the internet. Anybody can go online and pretty much get a menu or a recipe for anything that's out there. And thanks to all of our online retailers, now we can get exotic ingredients. It means that we are actually homogenizing our food culture. And while it's lovely to have a bowl of pho, or to have some curry sometime or another, saving our own culinary history is extraordinarily important. So by documenting these dishes — where they were before then and where they are now — it gives us an opportunity to reach back and hold on to what we've got.
Martin-Brown: And I noticed that the appended to the title of this book is Volume One. So what does that mean, exactly?
Robinson: So this is going to be part of a series of smaller books. There are people that are daunted whenever they see a book that sells — it is a 280- to 322-page book, and it's $35 on the shelf these days. We're all in an economic squeeze. I realized there's a possibility to distill this down so that people can get exactly the information that they needed through these cookbooks.
I have future cookbooks that will have the "What We Eat in Arkansas" title with them, but they're going to be a bit more specific to go along with this. I plan a future deer and duck camp book, some seasonal books on, like, summer and winter cuisine, and then possibly, if someone asks nice enough, some of the famous restaurant dishes as well. The overall goal is you'll have a small collection that you can pass along, or you can pick up at a store very easily to get started. And then eventually there will be a compilation book that will include all of them, so you can have them hardcover in one single place. It gives the opportunity for quick expansion — without, you know, eventually you're going to have to collect them all — but you can start with Volume One right now.
Kellams: And you were mentioning about the homogenization of what we eat, and we're sharing much more. Do you think there are recipes, foods that have completely evaporated, vanished from our local cuisines?
Robinson: There are some dishes that you don't see prepared anymore. A couple of books back, "Arkansas Cookery: Retro Recipes from the Natural State" — all the recipes in that book were between 1935 and 1985. And, yes, several of the recipes that are in that book, you don't see performed, as it were, in a restaurant setting anymore.
For instance, congealed salads have almost completely disappeared. Now, mind you, that is mostly a nationwide thing, but our Coca-Cola and cherry salads have gone. It's hard to find ambrosia anywhere. And then there's a particular dish called tagliarini, which was an egg noodle and ground beef dish that appeared almost exclusively in Arkansas cookbooks during the middle part of the 20th century. But once Hamburger Helper hit the grocery store shelves, it all but disappeared. Nobody needed to make it anymore because all they had to do now was brown some ground beef and add a box.
Kellams: "What We Eat in Arkansas: 50 Recipes for the Natural State's Signature Dishes," Volume One. Kat Robinson, thanks so much for spending some time with us.
Robinson: I appreciate getting the opportunity to speak with you.
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