Last week I read some remarks by a young architect that gave me hope. He wrote of rejecting the model of design that he learned in school: The architect sits alone, anywhere, with a blank sheet of paper or a blank computer-aided design interface, and draws a plan for a building. The solitary artist pulls his idea from the ether without regard for the site, its context, local materials or building customs, or even the needs of the real humans who will spend time in the building.
That model is how we wound up with the starchitect system (some remote genius draws up buildings for places he's never visited) and what Charles Portis called "the dark and alien splendor" of the generic concrete, glass, and steel structures that began to appear in Arkansas under the banner of the New International Style after World War II.
The architect described the 20th-century design model with an analogy from the kitchen: It's like sitting down and writing a recipe without regard for what's in season or what's already in the kitchen. Most of us have more experience with cookbooks than architectural drawings, and we've all come across recipes like that.
A few good things happened during the great shutdown of 2020, and one was that we shed the prescriptive approach to cooking that took hold at about the same time as the postwar model of design. As someone wrote in the early months of the pandemic, now that every trip to the grocery store is morally fraught--meaning we might unknowingly transmit a deadly disease--we are much less likely to run out to pick up one or two ingredients just to follow a recipe.
We learned to make do with what was at hand. And our cooking improved.
I didn't enter a grocery store for over a year. The act of grocery shopping, especially under mask mandates, seemed to require infuriating passivity and willingness to accept the new status quo. And I was afraid of infection.
I understood what John Cheever meant when he asked in "The Death of Justina," "Now is there--or isn't there--something about the posture we assume when we push a wagon [grocery cart] that unsexes us? Can it be done with gallantry? I bring this up because the multitude of shoppers seemed that evening, as they pushed their wagons, penitential and unsexed."
So I ordered fruit, vegetables, meat, and eggs through the Arkansas Local Food Network and picked up my order once a week, in a parking lot, outdoors, free from fear. When I couldn't make it to pickup, a nice lady from church brought the food to my house. With caution and gallantry, she would hand over a sack or two of produce, then a carton of eggs. In that year when we were deprived of Communion, any kind of communion would do.
I also ordered what I came to call "commodity foods," non-perishable seasonings and starches and fats that we use to make the vegetables, meat, and eggs taste good. That's when I finally understood how Arkansas foodways used to work. Nothing came ready to eat or even combined, but plenty of food additives (without the negative connotation that phrase has today) were available from afar to enrich whatever was foraged, hunted, grown, or raised nearby.
Well before European contact, what people ate around here depended on the interplay between local availability and trade. In the 1980s, grade-school children in Arkansas were taught to regard maize, beans, and squash as the classic trio of indigenous foods, but all of those came to this land from the really deep south--Mexico--via trading networks that were established long before Spanish and French explorers got here.
Anything that can be preserved by cooking, drying, and/or salting can be carried over a long distance and traded. Distance necessarily imposes some scarcity, and anything scarce can be considered a delicacy. One day I will devote a column to Arkansas' export, in the 18th century, of dried and salted bison tongues, but today I want to offer some remarks from Amanda Trulock that show how a household just getting established in the still-wild Arkansas Delta in the 1840s relied on a combination of locally sourced and brought-from-far-off foods.
The Trulock household, which Amanda termed "our white and Black family," arrived in Arkansas in January 1845: James Hines and Amanda Beardsley Trulock, James' sister Elizabeth Trulock, three Trulock children, and 40 slaves ranging from infancy to late middle age. The "white family" settled in a rented frame house near their newly purchased land south of Pine Bluff while James Hines Trulock set about constructing slave cabins. (I would guess that the slaves had tents for temporary housing.) The whole household had traveled by boat from Apalachicola Bay to New Orleans, and then from New Orleans up the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers to Jefferson County, Ark.
According to Amanda, at New Orleans they bought two sides of bacon, some sugar-cured ham, flour, coffee, potatoes, cheese, new cooking utensils, and 500 or 600 bushels of corn (for people and livestock). Amanda hated to spend cash and complained about having to buy food during her household's first year in Arkansas. An investment in four cows marked the Trulock household's first step towards increasing the proportion of food that it produced for itself. By May 1845, Amanda could write to her brother that "[we] make a pound of butter [per day] besides having nice cream to put in our Coffee, and a plenty of nice Clabber that is more than you can say."
She added, "Mr. T kills us sometimes as many as eight or 10 Squirrels a day and that is fine eating I can assure you." The neighbors gave a piece of Berkshire pig to Amanda and Elizabeth Trulock, a pair of pigs to James, and a pair of Guinea chickens to the children.
The Trulocks bought an enormous quantity of salted pork for the winter of 1845-46; by the late spring of 1846, Amanda's garden had begun to yield peas, greens, radishes, and Irish potatoes, and the household was on its way to producing its own food.