APSU Culinary Student Hopes to Cook Up Fantastic Career
By ANN WALLACE, The Leaf-Chronicle

      If dreams come true, one day for one Paula Anderson will don a chef's hat for Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville. Why?
     "Because this must be the grandest hotel in the South," says Anderson, a culinary student at the Fort Campbell campus of Austin Peay State University."I've visited the Opryland Hotel to just stand and watch the chefs work, this is something I want to do," says the 35-year-old mother of four, who maintains a 3.7 grade point average.
      Anderson loves cooking. That affinity for food preparation was nurtured by her mother."My mom went to college studying to be a nurse as I was growing up, and Dad was a Baptist pastor. With their busy schedules, I helped out in the kitchen quite a bit," she says. Among her favorite recipes are sweet potato pie, dirty rice, gumbo -- thanks to her Louisiana roots -- and anything with vegetables."A lot of the church members would bring in crops as gifts of tithe," she recalls. "We would have crates and crates of tomatoes and cucumbers stacked in the kitchen."
         Anderson remembers her mom showing her how to can and freeze that garden harvest."We had huge pots on the stove that were constantly boiling either with jars or food. We made tomato juice, tomato sauce, jams and all sorts of things," Anderson says. "Mom and Dad would then distribute the canned food to different families." Her mom even taught her how to be a frugal shopper."Once I learned to drive, Mom would take a newspaper and show me the sales. Then she would send me to stores to do the shopping," she says. "At a young age, I learned how to stretch food dollars." Frugality is a habit that continues, but her joy lies in the preparation. Anderson says her APSU culinary classes have provided a gold mine of experience and knowledge.
     "Cliff Stanfield is my instructor and he is fabulous. I particularly like the cake decorating class, that's my passion right now," she says. "I like working with my hands. I love doing the presentation involved to produce a beautiful meal to guests," she says. Anderson attends the monthly meetings of the local chapter of the American Culinary Federation, and is learning more about food presentation through a part-time job at Hachland Inn.
"Phila Hach is the owner and chef. She has such talent and I'm so glad to be able to learn from her," she says."I do some food preparation, set up tables, serve and clean up. I'm learning all aspects of a top quality dining establishment."
      When at home, Anderson has her very own fan club. Her husband, Brian, has been very understanding of her culinary learning curve through almost 18 years of marriage, which started with their first meal as husband and wife -- or at least the first planned meal."We were at our apartment and I was going to make breakfast. I had set the table, put flowers out and had the
food out of the refrigerator when I realized that I didn't have any pots or pans to cook with," she says with a laugh."It had totally slipped my mind, so I called my mom and we went over there for breakfast."
      As the months went by Anderson learned to modify the size of her recipes."I was used to cooking for a family of seven, so we would wind up with a lot of leftovers," she says. Then there was the white cream gravy that turned orange "because I used seasoning salt instead of regular salt."
       But, now Anderson is a whiz in the kitchen."Once you have homemade mashed potatoes, the box is nothing any more," she says.
       After graduation in December, Anderson hopes to persue her dream."I can't think of a career that I would enjoy more, especially if I can eventually land a position at the Opryland
Hotel," she says. "Imagine, working in such a grand place." Ann Wallace can be reached at 245-0287 or by e-mail at annwallace@theleafchronicle.com.

Greens in Black and White

By WARREN ST. JOHN
      To most Southerners, few things are as pleasing as plopping down before a heaping plate of simple, home-style cooking — dishes like collard or turnip greens, fried chicken, black-eyed peas, corn bread, sweet potato casserole. This type of food is so evocative of the easygoing contentment of home that Southerners — and even much of the rest of America — refer to it simply as comfort food.
      But there's a potentially uncomfortable conversation to be had about Southern comfort food, one that has simmered like creamy gravy on a stove top for perhaps 20 years and may now reach a very public boil: how much of what is called Southern cooking can be traced to black culture, and how much to white?
      That discussion is the centerpiece of a conference that begins tomorrow at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, the fifth annual gathering of the Southern Foodways Alliance. With this year's conference, "Southern Food in Black & White," organizers and participants plan to take head-on the task of trying to sort out who gets credit for what's on the Southern table.
      It will not be easy or neat. At past Southern Foodways conferences, discussions on the origin of fried chicken, barbecue and Southern baked goods like biscuits have led to shouting matches. Participants at this year's discussion, particularly chefs and food historians who say they are fighting for what they believe is the proper recognition for their ancestors' role in the creation of Southern cuisine, expect it to be similarly heated. "It's not about, `Sit there quiet in the corner and wait to get credit,' because that's not going to happen," said Joe Randall, an African-American chef from Savannah, Ga., who says blacks haven't been given proper credit for their contribution to Southern food. "You have to go forth and claim the contribution that our forefathers have made."
      In some ways the debate over the African-American influence on Southern food is a more opaque version of the debate over black contributions to rock 'n' roll. It's accepted that because blacks long served as cooks to Southern whites, first as slaves and then as domestics, they had a profound influence on the cuisine. But because whites wrote and published most of the early cookbooks on Southern food, there are few culinary equivalents of early Robert Johnson recordings to establish the provenance of particular dishes."Who did the original, and who did the cover?" asked Jessica B. Harris, an African-American food historian and cookbook author. "It's about acknowledging the unacknowledged."
      But many white Southerners, particularly the poor and descendants of impoverished Appalachian yeomen who never had slaves and who could not have afforded domestic help, argue that Southern food must have been theirs. "If you talk to rural white people, they feel that that's their food," said Nathalie Dupree, the writer, whose books include the influential "New Southern Cooking," just released in paperback by the University of Georgia Press."When you say maybe this came from Africa, they look at you like you're crazy."
      And there's even a debate about whether there should be a debate. Some chefs argue that because of the influence of American Indians, Asians and intermarriage on local cuisine, attempting to sort out who contributed what is an impossible and ultimately pointless task."Food belongs to everybody," said Leah Chase, a New Orleans chef widely recognized as the doyenne of Creole cooking and a member of Southern Foodways who has long criticized the debate over the origin of Southern food."If I take a mess of greens and cook them and serve them to you, are they my greens, or your greens? Of course not. They're everybody's greens."
      Sorting out white from black is difficult in part because in the South white and black cuisines are remarkably imilar. Consider the lunch menus at two restaurants across town from each other in Tuscaloosa, Ala. At the Waysider, which has a mostly white clientele, customers can dine on fried chicken, green beans, black-eyed peas and corn bread, delivered to the table in small plastic bowls and washed down with sweet tea.
      Across town at KSV, which serves a mostly black clientele, the lunchtime menu includes country fried steak, collard greens, candied yams, black-eyed peas, macaroni and cheese, green beans and corn bread. Joe Taylor, the owner of KSV, said there are only a couple of dishes on the menu that are pretty much exclusively ordered by his black customers:
neck bones, and hog maws, or the lining of a pig's stomach. "It's no different, really," he said. "It just depends on who buys it."Even the most basic generalizations about what foods are black in origin and which white are fraught. Hot peppers, melons, okra, rice and sesame seeds are thought to have been introduced to the South from Africa, along with techniques like slow-cooking greens with fat flavoring, a style of cooking similar to the one used to make leafy African
stews. Creamy sauces and gravies, along with biscuits, whiteflour pastries, puddings and trifles, are usually credited to the European influence.
        But John T. Edge, the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, said any such sweeping statements are bound to spark arguments."When you say black folks eat more chitlins, you start to get in trouble, because a food like that is totemic to white and black Southerners," he said. "Both see it as reaching back to the tough times they survived. Both see it as food imbued with meaning, and that doesn't go away."
       For years African-Americans were given credit for comfort food, though in a complicated way. Adrian Miller, a former special assistant to President Bill Clinton and the program director of the symposium, said that in surveys he had done of old Southern cookbooks from the late 1800's and the first half of the 20th century, white authors were comfortable crediting black cooks for the cuisine, so long as that acknowledgment was tied up in nostalgia for the old South and its racial hierarchy.
      Mr. Randall, the African-American chef from Savannah, said there was a kind of perverse compliment to blacks
in advertising symbols from those days, like Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben."Madison Avenue had it right in the 1930's," he said. "A big healthy black woman in the kitchen cooking was synonymous with good food."
      The willingness of whites to acknowledge black contributions to Southern food diminished during the civil rights
movement, Mr. Miller said, when African-Americans began to assert their claim on Southern cuisine. The term soul food, for example, gained currency in the late 1960's and early 1970's as part of that effort. Some black chefs and food historians now say the term is limiting because it marginalizes the black version of Southern food, which, they argue, is mostly black food to begin with."I think it's an intricate part of food in America, but it's not the totality of the contribution African-Americans have made," Mr. Randall said. "If you limit it to the food in Harlem and mom and pop soul food places in the South, then you devalue it."
      The Southern Foodways symposium in Oxford will try to balance serious academic discourse with good eating. The conference will begin with a whole pig roast, and over three days — and meals of fried catfish, Coca-Cola brisket, grillades and deviled eggs — attendees will hear lectures with titles like "Possum 'n' Taters — Where Have You Gone?" and "Methods and Ethnographics of Watermelon Pickles."
      In the past talk in these sessions has inevitably turned to race, whether that was the primary aim or not, and frequently the conversations resulted in hurt feelings. A speaker who claimed that fried chicken had European origins, for instance, caused "a collective hissy fit," Mr. Edge said. Discussions of barbecue were similarly charged; white attendees pointed out that poor whites in the mountains were long known to have barbecued meat, while black participants countered that in the old South, the task of keeping a hickory fire burning through the night would have fallen to African-Americans."We've had shouting matches," Ms. Dupree said. "I've been infuriated, because people have called me racist, just because I would say something was white. It's taught me how emotional an issue this is."
      Mr. Edge said the hope of the conference was that by dealing directly with the issue of race and Southern food, something like an understanding could be achieved."I think we fussed with each other more than we do now," he said. "There's the same passion in discussion, but there's an ethic that spans the conversation. We may not be of like minds, but we like this food. We love to eat well, and we're going to stay up late and party, but we hope the discussion naturally gravitates toward issues of racial reconciliation."

Space Chef Makes Out-Of-This-World Holiday Turkey

Astronaut Chris Hadfield tests rehydrated chocolate cake as NASA Food Scientist Vickie Kloeris waits for a reaction at the Johnson Space Center.

Story Tools
      JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, Texas (AP) -- As manager of NASA's Space Food Systems Laboratory, Vickie Kloeris and her staff spend their days developing, testing and packaging meals for astronauts. The goal: variety, nutrition and flavor. No more dry meal cubes, especially during the holidays. So when astronaut Michael Foale and cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri open their meal packets on Thanksgiving Day, they will find turkey and all the fixings, even as they orbit 240 miles above Earth aboard the international space station.
       Will it taste like a home-cooked meal? Almost."It's good. It doesn't taste a lot like a fresh carved turkey but you can't do that in a pouch," Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield said Wednesday after sampling some of the food.
      At first look, the food -- which can be freeze dried or thermostabilized, a process similar to canning -- is not the most
appetizing sight. The presentation -- in clear or silver pouches -- is a bit sterile and the food can resemble the brownie cubes and chocolate pudding in a tube that astronauts during the Mercury and Gemini programs of the 1950s and 1960s ate.

Popular shrimp

But once the meals are rehydrated with water or heated, they taste surprisingly good. Foods like shrimp cocktail -- the most requested item by astronauts -- or green beans and mushrooms, or split pea soup have the look, flavor and thickness of items eaten at any restaurant. Better yet, the food remains good in the packages for up to two to three years.
        "We want foods with lots of texture and different colors," said food scientist Donna Nabors, wearing a white coat and
plastic gloves as she prepared a large tray of shrimp fried rice in the lab's kitchen. The dish, prepared with water chestnuts, peas, carrots and various spices, was placed in a machine resembling a large clothes dryer for a five-day freeze-drying process. Then, it will be vacuum sealed in individual serving pouches. Lt. Col. Yang Liwei, the first man China sent to space, ate such things as one-bite nuggets of spicy shredded pork, diced chicken and fried rice during his brief flight last month.
       Having a variety of meals is important to the astronauts, Kloeris said. Astronauts on the space station have a 10-day meal cycle. Their menu, chosen from a list of more than 250 food items, is split between American and Russian food."We don't want them to suffer from menu fatigue," she said. "More variety on the menu is something we've heard from every station crew that has returned. It helps them psychologically."
       Hadfield said on longer missions, like living aboard the space station for several months, food can become an important part of an astronaut's daily routine."There's lots of good food. At meal time, you look forward to it," he said.

A fishy challenge

       Space station crew members, who have three meals a day plus a snack, heat up some of their food in a warmer that looks like a silver suitcase. Each meal costs an average of $100, mostly due to packaging and testing, Kloeris said. It can take six to eight months for the lab to develop and test a new food item.
      In the last three years, the lab has developed 50 new items, but as with any cook and kitchen, there are culinary misfires. A swordfish dish prepared with a tomato sauce proved unpopular with many astronauts."One of the complaints that crew members have about fish on orbit is the smell. We thought maybe the tomato sauce would
mask the smell," Kloeris said. The astronauts said it made it worse, she said. "We haven't given up on fish but we have to come up with a different formulation," she said.