Charlottesville Food (2 page)

Johnson grass at Timbercreek Organics.
Photo by Casey Ireland
.

Organic, as a descriptor and a USDA-approved label, has begun to lose its monopoly over the food markets of health-conscious consumers. The imported California organic tomato, trucked across the country with a price tag to make up for its long transit, has begun to fall out of favor against the lumpy, lobed charm of a backyard plant purchased from Monticello's garden store. The aisles of “natural” peanut butters, Australian honey and Vermont cheddar grow empty as consumers begin to seek closer, homegrown solutions to their allergies and preferences. To Charlottesville diners and cooks, the little green label of USDA Organic, once a revolution in its own right, has become less attractive than the farmers' market, the CSA pickup and the roadside stand. Locavore eating has captured the city's imagination and has made for some of the most memorable meals, colorful characters and captivating stories the commonwealth has to offer.

Chapter 1

Monticello and Thomas Jefferson

The Origin of (Heirloom) Species

P
UTTING
C
HARLOTTESVILLE ON THE
M
AP

How has Charlottesville, a town of only forty-three thousand people, made such an indelible mark on the culinary landscape of the United States? From the winemaking dreams of Thomas Jefferson to the pasture pens of Joel Salatin, this white-columned city has fostered the careers of several of the nation's most influential innovators of and experts on food and drink. How have the mountains and hills of central Virginia yielded such a bounty of restaurateurs and vintners, not to mention such demanding consumers? We may frame these questions better by mapping the area's historical and geographic boundaries. The red clay soil underneath the ruins at Barboursville Vineyards or the gnarled apple trees left over from Jeffersonian intrepidness tell a story as rich and vibrant as the land itself.

Charlottesville is the county seat of Albemarle County, but it remains an independent city within the geographic confines of Albemarle. The rural counties of Greene, Fluvanna and Nelson share borders with Albemarle County, connected by a network of major U.S. highways and smaller route systems. These four counties and the city of Charlottesville combined as a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) host a population of a mere 200,000, a blip on the overall state population of 8 million.
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The 1,700 square miles that make up the Charlottesville MSA parallel or cross the Blue Ridge Mountains and cozy up to rural streams or the Rivanna River, an offshoot of the James. The climate is humid sub-tropical with four full seasons and considerable precipitation throughout the year, though a period from late spring to early fall sees the most rainfall. Relatively cold winters are a mainstay of the area, particularly in the high altitudes of the Blue Ridge. The yearly averages of twenty-two inches of snow and 35.9-degree Januaries contrast with hot, muggy summers with frequent highs over 90.0 degrees.
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This is a place of full, developed seasons, of crisp fall days and pebbly mountain streams. It's a landscape ripe for peach orchards, roadside produce stands, cideries and heritage pork raising.

Zach Miller holding a blue chicken egg laid by an Araucana chicken.
Photo by Casey Ireland
.

Charlottesville as a metropolitan area, university town and corporate center takes up a mere 10.3 square miles of these 1,700 square miles of land.
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Its streets, neighborhoods and buildings are filled with a surprisingly wide variety of people from different nationalities, ethnicities and backgrounds. The University of Virginia draws professors and staff as well as students to the area; UVA itself and UVA Medical Center are the two largest employers in the city, offering more than thirteen thousand jobs to local residents.
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The International Rescue Committee's office in Charlottesville resettles an average of two hundred refugees a year, offering them shelter and sustenance as well as job training and housing opportunities.
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The growing Muslim contingent, Bhutanese families from Nepal and Tibetan monks have made space for themselves among traditional Charlottesville communities and neighborhoods, making the city more diverse year after year.

Even raw data like these statistics about Charlottesville's population and geography gives some insight into what makes the area such a hotbed of agricultural, culinary and multicultural progress. The long growing season, humidity and topography of Charlottesville's surrounding counties make the land well suited to a variety of agricultural products. Peppery-smelling field greens, long sheaves of rainbow chard and viscerally red beets are a sample of the produce available at the farmers' market almost nine months out of the year. Snowy January evenings are perfect for hearty stews of local beef, eating thin shavings of Virginia-raised prosciutto and making sauces with the last Mason jar of August's tomatoes. Fresh-caught mountain trout ends up on the plates of world-class chefs lured to the area by foraged mushrooms and first-rate teachers. UVA's touted position as the second-best public school in the nation draws in intellectuals and students who then, when they combine passions for taste and for learning, take root in a restaurant loft above the Downtown Mall or a patch of earth in Monticello's gardens.

E
ATING WITH
T
HOMAS
J
EFFERSON

We modern culinary enthusiasts are not the first to have planted grapes, battled farmyard pests or cured sides of pork in this region. The beauty and ecological richness of Charlottesville and the surrounding counties led Thomas Jefferson to make his home at Monticello hundreds of years before homesteading came on board as a lifestyle choice. Our nation's third president has the joint honor of being a founding foodie as well as a founding father.
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In the Charlottesville area, Jefferson is as famous for his experimental gardening efforts as he is for the Louisiana Purchase. Visitors to Monticello can tour flower, vegetable and fruit gardens re-created in painstaking detail from historical clues about the originals. A love of both imported wine and backyard cucumbers marks Thomas Jefferson as the original Charlottesville epicurean.

Born in 1743 in Shadwell, Virginia, now a part of Albemarle County, Jefferson inherited five thousand acres of local farmland upon turning twenty-one.
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A deep-rooted love of learning and ceaseless quest for knowledge marked Jefferson's intellectual life as well as his active gardening and horticultural efforts as a young man. A study of his
Garden Book
, a combination of horticultural diary, letter collection and sketchbook, reveals that Jefferson was gardening at twenty-three and recording the blooming dates of local wildflowers. Later deciding “the greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture,”
¹⁰
it perhaps comes as no surprise that Jefferson spent a considerable portion of his pre-political youth laying the groundwork for the horticultural and culinary interests that so define both his presidency and personal life.

The “author” of a developing post-colonial country, Jefferson's epicurean and political leanings often took on an attitude of regional insularity and fierce independence. During the War of 1812, Jefferson shared a sentiment of self-sufficiency not unlike a modern conception of homesteading. Sounding positively anti-establishmentarian, Jefferson acknowledges, “We must endeavor to make every thing we want within ourselves, and have as little intercourse as possible with Europe in its present demoralised state.”
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The demoralization of Europe, it seems, can be transferred from the realm of politics to the realm of culinary consumption. To import European foodstuffs is, to Jefferson, to further support an antagonistic and outdated political and cultural entity. Part of Jefferson's political platform, as well as his personal ideology, was the construction of a morally clean, democratically developed and unpretentious alternative to the static failures of the Old World. The creation of a purer source of political power went hand-in-hand with an interest in promoting more direct food sources, a development that was to occur right in Jefferson's backyard.

As an adult, Jefferson provided one of his best-known contributions to Monticello and American agriculture in the form of his extraordinarily plentiful vegetable garden. Historian Peter J. Hatch calls Jefferson a “seedy evangelist,” referring to his garden as “an Ellis Island of vegetables.”
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This one-thousand-foot-long enclosed space held a remarkable 330 varieties of 89 species of vegetables and herbs and 170 fruit varieties.
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One can get a sense for Jefferson's favorite vegetables by the frequency of plantings rather than mere epistolary enthusiasm; the English pea appears to have been the president's most favorite vegetable based on the number of plantings, the amount of garden space allotted to their growth and the textual description of his “pea contests” held with neighboring horticultural enthusiasts.
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If one were to take Jefferson's gushing remarks about the taste of the Marseilles fig or the values of an olive as concrete evidence of utter devotion, both the actual layout of his garden as well as its modern reconfiguration would have looked much different—and arguably would have been possible only in a different clime.

The layout, design and tending of the vegetable garden proved crucial to its success as an experimental horticultural playground. Jefferson's decision to carve the one-thousand-foot-long terrace from the southeastern slope of Monticello resulted in the creation of a microclimate, or a pocket of distinct atmospheric conditions existing within a larger zone.
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The man-made terrace traps the sunshine, which leads to the earlier production of crops and an extended growing season. The slight elevation of the estate deterred harmful frost, as cold air forces warm air to drift upward during winter nights.
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Jefferson's use of manure as fertilizer, careful study and manipulation of roots and seeds and general watchful eye provided his gardens with basic structural integrity and strong foundations.

A crucial facet of the garden's success was Jefferson's interest in procuring and distributing seed varieties. When certain crops and plant varieties failed in central Virginia, geologist William Maclure informed Jefferson, “Sufficient attention has not been paid in the choice of seeds to the previous habits of the vegetable depending much on the nature of the Climate and perhaps something on the soil.”
¹⁷
Though Jefferson did tailor his garden to the weather and geography of central Virginia, his delight in acquiring new, even exotic, species of plants never failed. Jefferson's correspondences reveal his excitement about procuring new varieties and, even more so, his delight at sharing seeds of his own. The Lewis and Clark expedition offered an incredible variety of new plant species “peculiar to the countries [Lewis] has visited” for Jefferson to examine and send out to friends.
¹⁸
Indeed, such horticultural excitement over these newly discovered samples led Bernard McMahon, one of Jefferson's chief gardening associates from Philadelphia, to “painfully” ask Jefferson for seeds.
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Though Jefferson might be “so much occupied with the important affairs of the Nation,” his “goodness” allowed McMahon to “procure some seeds of the indigenous plants of the western parts of America” after all.
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Given the complex, often opaque naming system Jefferson employed—identifying plants by the person who gave him the seed, a physical characteristic or place of origin—it's not surprising that the Center for Historic Plants, an offshoot of Monticello's gardening restoration, and Monticello itself have encountered difficulty in placing, naming and uncovering many of the species about which Jefferson wrote. But seed-sleuthing aside, the work of naming, trading and raising unique and heritage plant species continues on today in the Charlottesville area. The Heritage Harvest Festival seeks to continue the seed-trading work of Jefferson in a modern context, albeit in a more crowd-friendly manner. Organized in 2007 by Ira Wallace, the owner of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, the annual event began at the Center for Historic Plants at Jefferson's Tufton Farm and has since been relocated to Monticello's West Lawn—a view at which Jefferson would have gazed while working in his study.
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The Heritage Harvest Festival offers lectures, workshops and general educational programs on the arts and joys of small farming, gardening and sustainable living. Events such as “Monticello Herbs & Their Uses” or “Thomas Jefferson & Natural History Woodland Walk” were clearly designed with Monticello's former inhabitant in mind and would have undoubtedly been of considerable interest to him.