Gravy

In the episode “It’s Hip to Be a Cube: Maggie Bouillon Unwrapped,” Gravy producers Katie Jane Fernelius and Ishan Thakore take a deeper look at a humble but ubiquitous pantry staple—the bouillon cube. As many home cooks know, these dehydrated cubes of salty, umami flavor dissolve in water to create a makeshift broth. But the result is much more than soup. For immigrants to the American South, for example, bouillon cubes carry powerful sentiments of nostalgia and home.

Approximately 120 million Maggi bouillon cubes are sold each day. It’s a testament to the reach and ubiquity of the Nestle brand, arguably the most notable brand of bouillon cubes—just as many people call a tissue a Kleenex, so do many people call bouillon cubes Maggi.

In fact, if you were to go to an international supermarket, you’d find dozens and dozens of varieties of Maggi. Some would be sold in packages labeled in Arabic, others in French or English… each with its own flavor profile specific to regional cuisines: Djon Djon. Golden Beef. Poulet. Tomato. Ginger and Garlic. Naija Pot.

Maggi’s diversity of flavor profiles speak to just how readily the little cube has been adopted into so many kitchens around the world. And it’s not uncommon for cooks to say it’s the secret ingredient to their favorite local dish. 

So, how did Maggi manage to become both a global juggernaut and hometown hero?

In this episode, Fernelius and Thakore trace Maggi’s path from Swiss laboratories in the late nineteenth century, to Cubism, to postcolonial countries across the Global South, to a beloved Nigerian restaurant just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. They speak to Toyin Adesayo, chef and owner of Toyin Takeout in Marietta, Georgia; Nadia Berenstein, an award-winning food writer and scholar of flavor; and Nigerian chef, writer, and activist Tunde Wey. Through these conversations, they learn why the little bouillon cube has become so special to so many.

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If you appreciate Gravy, you'll likely enjoy Southern Songs and Stories. The episode we're sharing with you today features Jake Xerxes Fussell, a musician whose music is well-known in Oxford, Mississippi, the town the Southern Foodways Alliance calls home.

From Southern Songs and Stories:

In this series, we often spend time with artists and styles of music that are not celebrated in the mainstream, and our guest here is no exception. With a focus on music that is from artists living in the South and on music that has roots in the region, we are constantly talking with bluegrass, blues, country, rock, and Americana artists. These forms of music are immensely important to the history and legacy of original music in this country, but they seldom are associated with today’s biggest stars. One reason why we love those genres is simply because they became so popular, fueling one of America’s greatest exports to the world. But it is easy to get wrapped up in that history and culture and lose sight of other traditions that are not celebrated in the mainstream, nor are they a part of the narrative where roots music born in the South becomes foundational to a preponderance of popular music in the twentieth century. In this conversation with Jake Xerxes Fussell, I was reminded of that.

That episode is just one part of our conversation that took place in mid-May 2023 at the Albino Skunk Music Festival in Greer, SC. Jake played a solo set on guitar, and afterward we spoke about his deep roots in folklore, his fourth album Good and Green Again, being a DJ on WHUP in Hillsborough, NC, and more. This episode also features excerpts of music from his live set.

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Christmas is the time of year when many people line up at the Post Office to ship gifts to far-flung loved ones across the country, maybe even the world. In the Philippines, this practice is not just customary, but a state policy called the Balikbayan Program.

Balikbayan, which is the Tagalog word for “homecoming,” was first coined by President Ferdinand Marcos in 1973 when he launched a series of policies to encourage the large number of overseas Filipino workers to return home for Christmas in the Catholic country. He hoped they would spend their hard-earned foreign currencies in their home country, helping to bolster the Filipino economy. But, if they were not able to make it home, then he encouraged them to send tax-free “balikbayan boxes” in their place. 

Balikbayan boxes are typically 3-foot-by-3-foot-by-3-foot boxes stuffed full of canned goods, candy bars, packaged cookies, toothpastes, deodorants, sweatshirts, shoes, and many other items. 

Today, approximately half-a-million balikbayan boxes are shipped to the Philippines each month by Filipinos working overseas––and this number only increases further around Christmastime. Whole industries exist around the logistics of shipping balikbayan boxes: for example, in Houston, where 2.5 million Filipino immigrants live, companies like Forex Texas have been operating since the mid-1990s to safely ship balikbayan boxes to the Philippines. (These box companies are not uncommon in various Filipino enclaves across America.) 

Balikbayan boxes are not just impressive economic operation, they also are a certified cultural practice and pop culture meme. Filipino comedian Mikey Bustos sang about balikbayan boxes in a video parodying Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball”:

“I got my balikbayan box, I waited for it for 2 months. I bet it's full of awesome stuff. Some Colgate and new briefs, imported corn beef, I got my balikbayan box, so full of imported products, I know I will feel so sosyal parang foreigner lang, thanks to my Mommy. I'll have Nikes on my feet!”

In this episode of Gravy, producer Katie Jane Fernelius examines the histories underlying the balikbayan box. She speaks with Royal Sumikat, a Filipino artist in Houston, who designed a whole exhibit based on the box. Royal draws upon her experience as a child in the Philippines receiving these boxes from her dad and reflects upon the economic and political realities that forced her dad to work overseas. Jade Alburo, a librarian at UCLA who focuses on the study of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. discusses the impact of American colonialism in the Philippines and how it inspired what items are most coveted for balikbayan boxes. Gravy also explores how to frame the importance of balikbayan boxes to Filipino families living across borders.

SFA is proud to be a part of APT Podcast Studios.

We thank the following individuals for help with this episode:

Royal Sumikat

Jade Albur

Christy Panis Poisot

Featured music in this episode includes:

Talang Patnubay (Silen), Christmas in the Philippines, Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company - Smithsonian Folkways

Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit, Christmas in the Philippines, Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company - Smithsonian Folkways

"Calisson," by Blue Dot Studios

"We Collect Shiny Things," by Blue Dot Studios

"Waltz and Fury," by Blue Dot Studios

The image is from Royal Sumikat’s exhibit in Houston, Texas.

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In "What's Next for the Women of Mama Dip's Kitchen?" Gravy producer Leoneda Inge takes listeners to Mama Dip’s Kitchen, known for its chicken and dumplings and scrumptious homemade desserts. The restaurant has fed tourists, celebrities, and steady customers for nearly fifty years in Chapel Hill, North Carolina—so the community was shocked when the Council family voted earlier this year to sell the restaurant and the land around it. 

Mildred “Mama Dip” Council was a celebrated entrepreneur. When she died in 2018, the restaurant continued, welcoming patrons at its longtime spot on Rosemary Street. Now, the Council family has a big decision to make. They have to figure out a way to continue growing the business and preserve Mama Dip’s legacy. 

Mama Dip is a brand. She is a household name around town. She was not a popular alumna of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or a star athlete—though this African American woman stood tall at 6’2”. But many students, staff, and residents have eaten her country cooking or tried to perfect a dish from one of her cookbooks. 

Mama Dip had eight children, and several of them were cross-trained to operate every facet of the business. Her youngest child, Spring Council, is north of sixty-five years old, retirement age for many folks. The asking price for Mama Dip’s Kitchen—the building, not the brand—is $3.6 million. Early conversations included talk of building a more fast-casual restaurant, with a smaller staff, specializing in the restaurant’s top sellers, like the chicken and dumplings.

While the future of Mama Dip’s Kitchen is still up in the air, the family legacy lives on. Granddaughter Tonya Council recently opened her own cookie shop in Chapel Hill. Granddaughter Erika Council in Atlanta owns Bomb Biscuit Company. And daughter Annette Council continues to sell her Sweet Neecy cake mixes. For this episode, Inge talks to Spring Council and Erika Council, as well as some of Mama Dip’s loyal followers, to explore the legacy and future of this iconic Chapel Hill institution.

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In “Tasting the South in the San Fernando Valley,” producer Rebecca Katz tells the story of how three black women created a soul food institution in one of the whitest parts of the San Fernando Valley that still thrives today.

During the Second Great Migration in the 1940s, large numbers of Black Americans traveled west to Los Angeles, California. The Black population in Los Angeles increased nearly twelvefold from 1940 to 1970. 

In this episode, we learn about the racial history of the San Fernando Valley specifically a suburb just north of the city of Los Angeles. While Los Angeles as a city was diversifying after the second great migration, certain parts of the Valley remained largely white due to its iron-clad race restrictions—some of the harshest in the nation. In the episode, we hone in on one small town at the Western tip of the valley called Chatsworth, which was 98% white in the 1980s. 

Three Black women, Clara Huling, Roda Hadi, and Willie Stanford, were each already working in the restaurant industry in the Valley in the 1980s, not far from Chatsworth. They each had different ties to the South and they all missed Southern cooking and classic soul food. One night, they decided to open a restaurant—bringing classic soul food to the largely white valley. And they did just that. They came together and opened a tiny soul food spot in the unlikeliest of all places—Chatsworth. 

Nearly 40 years after that grand opening, Clara’s granddaughter, Jessica Huling, still owns and operates the restaurant, which has been deemed some of the best soul food in Los Angeles by many reputable food outlets. 

In this episode, we hear from Jessica about how the restaurant thrived in such a white area through the years. We explore how the restaurant has overcome the odds, evolved its customer base, and greatly influenced the Black community in the Valley today.

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At this point, most of us know the Thanksgiving story about the Pilgrims and the Indians happily indulging in a joint feast is a vast oversimplification of what actually happened. But how many of us still have an idea of Native people that's stuck in the past? "People didn't believe that I was Native because I was from North Carolina," Lumbee Indian Malinda Maynor Lowery says. "The only thing they learned about Indians in school, maybe, was that we were removed from the Southeast."

In this first episode of Gravy, first shared almost 10 years ago today, meet a tribe of Indians who are very much still in the Southeast—and whose food reflects a distinct hybrid of Southern and Native history. The Lumbee's story is one that spans centuries, and includes new windows into periods you may think you know—like the Jim Crow era. Plus something you'll be eager to eat: the collard sandwich.

If you want more after that, check out these oral histories of the Lumbee community, done by the SFA's Sara Wood.

You might also want to read Malinda Maynor Lowery's book "Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South."

And, if you're dying to make your own collard sandwich, you can find a recipe for that and much more in Gloria Barton Gates' "The Scuffletown Cookbook."

Tina Antolini, Gravy's first producer, reported and produced this episode. Tina has worked in public radio for nearly 20 years. She was a senior producer for NPR's State of the Reunion, for which she won a Peabody and a national Edward R Murrow Award for her work.

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Winter mornings are serene in the cypress groves of the Mississippi Delta. There’s the glide of the canoe, and the gentle ripple of camouflage waders disappearing into waist-deep water. What finally breaks the pre-dawn quiet is the fire of a shotgun, and the splash of a Labrador Retriever. And then, there’s the laughter of a group of women. That’s the sound of Swamp Witches.

The Swamp Witches have been duck hunting together for nearly 20 years. Men are often surprised to stumble upon a half-dozen women—not in the company of fathers or husbands or brothers—out hunting. In this episode of Gravy, reporter-producer Dana Bialek goes hunting with the Swamp Witches and explores the rise in women hunters, how hunter recruitment is connected to the conservation of waterfowl habitat, and what it means to celebrate hunted game around the table.

Dana Bialek is a radio producer based in Brooklyn, New York.

A special thanks to Allison and Jim Crews for their hospitality and for making this story possible.

The music is this episode was from the album Mississippi Number One by Eden Brent of Greenville, Mississippi.

Some of Lila Sessum’s favorite recipes for game can be found in John Folse’s cookbook After the Hunt. 

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In “Czech Out Texas Kolaches,” Gravy producer Evan Stern invites listeners to join him on a return trip to his native Texas to explore the history, origins, and evolutions of kolaches through the voices of bakers of varying backgrounds and perspectives. This episode complements the oral history project Stern created for SFA, The Keepers of Kolaches: The Evolutions of Texas-Czech Baking.

Few pastries are more intertwined with the fabric of Central Texas than kolaches. With roots in the Czech Nation and owed to 19th Century Moravian immigrants, these soft, pillowy confections of yeasty dough with open centers of fruit, poppyseed or sweet cheese fillings have long provided humble links to the old country in small Texas towns like Halletsville, La Grange, West, and Schulenburg. Yet kolaches have also weathered many transformations under the Lone Star flag and have developed an identity that continues to change—and is, at times, challenging to define.

Historian and blogger Dawn Orsak explains how meat filled “klobasnikys” emerged and eventually came to become interchangeable with kolaches in the eyes of the broader public. She argues that Texas-Czech baking should be afforded the same respect as its European ancestors. “Fifty or sixty years after people started immigrating to Texas, what does traditional mean?” she asks. Acclaimed ninety-year-old baker Lydia Mae Faust also speaks to these traditions. She grew up preparing kolaches on her family farm with hand churned cottage cheese, and continues to share and teach her recipes to ensure their preservation.

Meanwhile, there’s Laos-born, Houston-based Vatsana Souvannavong. The owner of the bakery Koala Kolache, she’s on a mission to make kolaches nationally known, and has found in them a vessel for flavors as bulgogi and kimchi, chicken marsala, and Thai chicken and basil.

While these bakers’ cultural backgrounds vary, their stories ultimately reveal kolaches as emblematic of a changing, increasingly diverse Texas, South, and nation. The group is united in their enthusiasm and hopes for this doughy indulgence’s continuity.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Vatsana Souvannavong, Dawn Orsak, Lydia Mae Faust, Denise Mazal, and Jerry Haisler

For Lydia Faust’s kolache recipe, click here.

Gravy is proud to be a part of APT Podcast Studios

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In “North Carolina Pottery from Clay to Kiln” Gravy producer Wilson Sayre invites us to consider the vehicles that our food sits on—plates. In this episode, she takes us to central North Carolina, where the story of the hand-thrown pottery and its relationship with food is told with gusto. 

If you eat with your eyes, then the “plating” of food is an essential component of a meal and the stories that surround it. In North Carolina, the history of baking clay into utilitarian—and beautiful—plates and bowls is an ancient one. That tradition has been handed down for generations and interpreted by each potter who chose to let the clay get under their fingernails. Today, Seagrove, in the central part of the state, is home to the largest concentration of studio potters in the United States.

Each potter has their own journey, but as Mark Hewitt explains, it’s all a bit “mad.” 

He, like many potters, spends weeks or months turning lumps of clay into beautiful vessels. One by one, pots, pitchers and plates take shape on the pottery wheel, receive decoration, and are set into a kiln to undergo their final transformation from brittle dried clay into gleaming vessels.

But that transformation is also a gamble, especially for those who fire with wood. Pots can explode, destroying everything in a kiln, or the firing temperature gets too hot (or not hot enough), causing glazes to turn unappealing colors. And yet they take that gamble over and over again. It’s how they tell stories, of place and of their artistic journey.

Plates are also our story as eaters, says Glenn Hinson, professor of folklore and anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Whether paper or porcelain, plates shape our relationship with the food they hold, as well as our memories of a meal.

In this episode, Sayre speaks with Hewitt and Hinson, as well as Delores J. Farmer, founder of Durham’s first Black-owned pottery studio, to learn more about the synergies between dirt, food, and plate. With the spotlight shifted to what’s underneath our food, we hope listeners will see this whole other canvas for story. Because in the end, when our food is gone, when we’re gone, it’s from our plates that people will learn about our foodways.

Thanks to guest Mark Hewitt, who opens his pottery twice a year for kiln openings. Thanks also to guest Delores Farmer, who offers classes at her studio to folks in Durham, NC, who are interested in getting a bit of clay under their fingernails.

Glenn Hinson and his wife, Amy Bauman, were kind enough to welcome the reporter into their home, share a meal, and provide some of the most beautiful plates for the feast.

Although they were not featured in this episode, special thanks to professor Bernie Herman for help in pointing us in the right direction and potter Matt Hallyburton, for providing background context and making beautiful work.

Gravy is proud to be a part of APT Podcast Studios.

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