Oh Violet, keep the head on the fish, because I want my eyeballs.
The Eastern Shore of Virginia, a long narrow peninsula, projects roughly seventy miles southward from the Maryland state line to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. The Atlantic Ocean bounds the two counties (Northampton and Accomack) on the east and the Chesapeake Bay on the west. The soil is sandy; the terrain is flat. Scores of tidal streams and creeks cut into the shoreline on both sides of the Eastern Shore. Vast marshes on the seaside extend to a chain of constantly shifting Atlantic barrier islands that were once home to a variety of settlements, hunting and fishing clubs, and resorts. Storms and erosion, however, forced the residents to relocate to the mainland in the 1930s, leaving the islands in the sole possession of birds and wildlife. Oyster watch houses perched on slender pilings still dot a marine landscape that changes dramatically with tidal ebb and flow. On the bayside, long necks bracket saltwater creeks and marshes. Indians, Europeans, and Africans have harvested these estuaries as long as they have occupied the land, fishing with spears and harpoons, seines, drift nets, pound nets, and hand lines. In the 1800s fish fed the inmates of the county almshouses and were shipped by rail, destined for well-to-do urban tables in Baltimore and Philadelphia.
The area’s prosperity, once rooted in farming and fishing, has faded, leaving Northampton County one of the most economically distressed and ecologically delicate locales in Virginia. Disease, over harvesting, and pollution devastated the fishery. The shift away from truck farming toward grain cultivation and the advent of industrial farming led to the closure of local canneries and packing houses. Still, a powerful sense of place and belonging defines the lower Eastern Shore. The cultivation of clams and oysters remain viable enterprises. A handful of local farmers continue to plant Hayman sweet potatoes and gardeners carefully nurture heirloom fruits and vegetables. And, always there are myriad stories surrounding food. It is precisely the specific textures of local foodways—from marsh and field to table—and their attendant narratives that define an Eastern Shore terroir and provide the core elements for sustainable economic development rooted in human ecology.
Terroir writ large is much more than the taste of place. Terroir defines the particular attributes of place embodied in cuisine and narrated through words, actions, and objects. Place alone, however, fails to translate the deeper associations that terroir projects about identity. In its literal consumption, we ingest and digest terroir, imbuing ourselves with the tastes of identity and authenticity. The body literally absorbs the substance of terroir and translates it into narratives of place and experience. It captures a consciousness of association and belonging. Terroir is experience and emotion, embodiment and immediacy, custom and invention, destiny and storytelling. It manifests itself in a constantly evolving style and synthesis of ingredients, recipes, preparations, and eating, from fancy holiday meals to workday lunches. Finally, when people speak about terroir, they speak about themselves. It is in that spirit that the following thoughts on terroir privilege the personal recollections of the residents of the Eastern Shore.
Illustrations by Jessica Fontenot
You get a recipe for fish chowder. You can find that pretty well anywhere. The drum, behind his head and gills, behind in the back there it’s an awful lot of meat. When we sided it off, we just didn’t mess with it. And the backbone, of course, when you sided it off, in between the backbone, it’s meat. And they would chop that up and boil it, and that gave you your seasoning. It was like marrow out of a cow. So they would do the same thing with fish backbone, and that would boil the meat out off it, take the bone out, and then they would chop up the meat also and boil that in there with it. And you had almost like a stew or chowder, and you’d add your potatoes. Just like clam chowder—not a whole lot of difference.
—H. M. Arnold, Bayford, Virginia (2008), on Drum Head Stew
Oh my God, that is the best eating! A lot of people go to the store or fish market, we black people. Go to the fish market and ask simply for big fish heads and fish bones, the backbones.That’s where the sweetness is, next to the bone of a fish. That’s why a lot of times we don’t like to fillet fish, we want to have fish with the bone on it, because it tastes so much better . . . but a lot of people don’t like to pick bones. I like taking fish, bake it in the oven with onion and surround that fish, bones and stuff, with white potato and sweet potato. That is so delicious.
When you cook it, it’s going to fall apart. It’s going to cook enough, where you are going to pick it out. The fish head, believe me, has a lot of meat. Especially the big fish, like drum heads. Oh my goodness, there’s enough meat there for four or five people to eat off one head . . . You take the gills out. The eyes. A lot of people like fish eyeballs. My Daddy used to love fish [eyeballs]. Oh my goodness! My little niece, she was raised up around my Daddy so much, and he used to love fish eyeballs, and she said, “Oh Violet, keep the head on the fish because I want my eyeballs.” Oh my God, it’s good eating. You’d be surprised the seasoning things have that you wouldn’t eat.
—Violet Trower, Bellehaven, Virginia (2008), on Drum Head Stew
Terroir maps the point where nostalgia—longing for an imagined past—and desire—longing for an imagined future—come together. Terroir is about culture and conversation revealed through food—and about how the cultural resonance of food is revealed through language. Narratives surround ingredients, preparations, and events. These are powerful memories that, shared through anecdote and recollection, evoke the sense and sensation of connection and excitement and enable us to consume vicariously the flavors and pleasures of place.
They used to sell food and wild bear sandwiches . . . We called them wild bear sandwiches. Remember those big hobo buns with icing on them . . . Well, we would slice them in half, and we had round cheese, that sharp round cheese in a box, and rag baloney. And what he would do, he would slice it and weigh it on a scale. Of course the bun cost you a nickel maybe, or whatever, and you put the big sharp cheese on there and a big slab of baloney or spiced luncheon meat, and that was your wild bear sandwich.
—H. M. Arnold, Bayford (2008), on the Wild Bear Sandwich
Terroir entails not only the distinct flavors of place, but also evokes how place “flavors” people, speech, foodways, and the multitude of objects that constitute the local. Terroir is as much about where and how stories are told as it is about the stories themselves. The recollections shared by Andrew Bunce leaning over the counter of Sand Dollar Seafood, H. M. Arnold sitting in shade cast by the old Bayford oyster house, Violet Trower standing over the stove in Ellen Rue’s kitchen, and Tim and Dorothy Bailey assembling drum sandwiches for the Juneteenth celebration at the country airfield near Weirwood recount and embody the nuances of terroir.1
Drum Head Stew
A slab of drum cut in sections
Butter and water in a pan
Cook 20 minutes
Onions, celery, potatoes to your taste, just mix it up
Flour mixed in water
Remove the fish and leave the vegetables. Stir until thick. You know when it’s done because the fish is flaky.
—Tim and Dorothy Bailey, Seaview, Virginia (Juneteenth, 2007)
Fish Stew
Two slices salt pork diced—fry golden brown
1 large or 2 small onions chopped
About 1 pound fish
Put all in a frying pan and cook slow about thirty minutes in just enough water to cover fish. Remove fish and make flour thickening and put white sauce on fish. Thin sliced onions may be added to onions and fish.
I’m partial to drum, sand mullet, and spot . . . Drum is just a good meat. A good thick pork chop. I usually fry it. I’ll usually bread it . . . I’ll cut it in good inch pieces and I’ll skin it. I’ll take the skin off of it, and we’ll bread it and sit it on wax paper and let it absorb the bread. We drop it in a deep fryer and when it’s brown we take it out. And it’s good on the grill. —H. M. Arnold, Bayford, Virginia (2008)
When it comes to local perspectives on terroir, what matters is that food always brings people together. Terroir, continually enacted and voiced through food, binds people together through kinship, community, work, pleasure, and faith. Thus, an awareness of terroir focuses on the act of tasting—tasting and experiencing food from its cultivation to consummation.
The drum somewhat resembles a large black-fish, and receives its name from a peculiar drumming noise it makes under the water, probably caused by the sudden expulsion of air from the air-sac or bladder. On a calm day their smothered thum! thum! can be distinctly heard in all directions. They are taken with a harpoon, which the fishermen throw with the greatest accuracy, striking the fish at a considerable distance below the water. When the fish is struck, the pole comes loose from the gaff of the harpoon, to which it is attached by a cord some six or eight-feet long; this then serves as a float, constantly drawing the fish to the surface until it is exhausted. The drum, strong and lusty, sometimes run for a mile or more, dragging the pole through the water with surprising velocity. Away goes fish, and fisherman in pursuit, up andthe channel, until at length, fairly tired out, the victim is captured and hauled into the boat. We were told that these fish are sometimes taken weighing over a hundred pounds.2
—Howard Pyle, “A Peninsular Canaan” (1879)
A silvery fish with brassy luster, turning grey after death. It has very strong jaws for crushing oyster shells and so forth, and has the most powerful noise-producing equipment of any of the drums . . . Its scales are also remarkable. They are large and silvery and very firmly attached, so that a really heavy blade (or even an axe) is needed to get them off . . . Young drum makes a good pan fish. Larger specimens may be treated like, say, cod, but are of less good quality.3
—Alan Davidson, North Atlantic Seafood (1980)
You knock the scales off, but you got to use a spade or a hoe and then you just hang him up on a pole by his tail. And you just cut around it like you would a fillet. You just cut down a little bit. You cut a hole right in the little tail part and then you rip the whole side right off and it comes off just like you cut it with a knife.
—Andrew Bunce, Nassawadox, Virginia (2009), on Cleaning Drum
We used to enjoy those bateaux, because I’ll tell you where we were fishing like that we’d have to go in the middle of the night sometimes on the tide. Go out with the tide, you know. Go down to Cedar Creek, we’d call it. Cedar Creek is near to where we would fish down near the inlet. We were a long ways from there, because we would stop up in the marsh where it would be protection, you know, if the wind blowed or anything. Then we’d throw our anchor along the windward shore. Throw the anchor out. Take those sails and wrap up in them and go to sleep until the next morning when it come light. Light good so you could see. Went on down the spit and fished . . . Hand lines . . . Only used one hook. That’s all we ever knowed to use. One hook . . . We caught trout, spot, hog fish. Plenty of fish, every kind then. We had a certain season for every fish, every kind of fish.
—Luther Moore, Simpkins, Virginia (1977), on Fishing
Fatbacks. The old people used to catch them. They’d gut them, cut the head off, slit him down the back, and cook him in bacon grease. Somebody like Hooksie Walker, he likes them. He’ll boil them in the morning for breakfast. I guess they put bacon in that, too.
—Andrew Bunce, Nassawadox, Virginia (2009), on Fatbacks
Jumping mullet, or they call them fatbacks. Well, I guess back then there wasn’t many outboard motors and of course we didn’t use monofilament net. We used nylon or cloth net. We’d go in the evenings, just about dark, and you’d find these jumping mullets around the shoreline . . . We’d find them. They’d kind of jump out of the water and they’d swirl. And back then you’d have to be as quiet as you could be. We’d actually put burlap on the side of the boat so when you pushed the pole to run your net out it wouldn’t make any noise, because it would spook them. And they were gone. And, I can remember being a little boy, and my old man sitting back there and the gnats eating me up and the mosquitoes—sitting back there and make a noise. And my dad would look at me not very nice!
I don’t care for them, but people that do love them . . . They used to salt them for the winter. That was one of their main fish for the winter, was salted fatback. Salt them in a brine and soak them out and eat them for breakfast or fry them for supper or whatever. They were good little fish.
—H. M. Arnold, Bayford, Virginia (2008), on Fatbacks or Jumping Mullet
Several factors can convey the importance of everyday life and commonplace things—food perhaps most strikingly. Intimacy, surely. And a quality of familiarity and affection, perhaps. Most of all, though, these things—and food in particular—offer an open-ended invitation for storytelling. Food recollections offer conversation—and this is the point of terroir: the flavor, conversation, and poetry of place. Terroir suggests that we can know, epitomize, and experience the essence of the local through the filters of language and the souvenir.4Terroir then is not only about the flavors of place, but also about how we choose to locate and consume the essence of place through food and story.
I cook drum. Bake it in the oven with onions (cut up onions) and potatoes in it. Put it in the oven and bake it for a while. Then take it out, mix up a little cornstarch, and pour it in the juice and make it a little thick. And that’s baked drum. For drum head stew: They do that same way. Put it on the stove, put water in it, put the head in it. Let it boil awhile until it gets kind of soft. Add onions and potatoes in that—and that’s it. Put a little salt and pepper in it, a little bacon grease in it—that’s it. [I learned to cook] from my grandmother and all them way back then . . . Or, you can either like stew [the drum ribs], put it in some Reynolds wrap, some butter in it, put the ribs in there, put a little salt and pepper on it, wrap it in the Reynolds wrap, put it on the grill, stew it there, let it cook down. It’s real good, too, that way . . . Or, you can fry the ribs, too. A lot of people eat them fried.
—Vera Williams, Nassawadox, Virginia (2009), on Cooking Drum
I’ll say that up until the last ten years we never ate them. Black folks ate them. We used to clean drum down here. We’d have fifty, seventy-five drum a day, and we’d clean them right here on the dock. The colored folks would come down and get the backbone, the head, and they’d get all kinds of meat off that and make soup and stews, you know. And ribs, of course, when we’d sell it by the side, we always left the ribs on. Well, most people that I knew [that] bought it, they’d always cut the ribs off. Never ate them. In the last ten years, everybody’s fighting for them now. I never knew they were that good. My dad would eat them sometimes, but he never told me how good they were.
—H. M. Arnold, Bayford, Virginia (2008), on Drum Ribs
Gertrude and Viola Bell, Oyster, Virginia (1979)
Born and raised in the long vanished Broadwater community on Hog Island, sisters-in-law Gertrude and Viola Bell saw the Fourth of July as the most celebrated holiday, an occasion that marked the homecoming and reunion for Hog Island families. Their combined recollection, each interrupting the other as they added detail after detail, epitomizes terroir as a form of homecoming to which all of us are invited.
Viola: The Fourth of July, well, they would prepare from one year to the next, and then when the Fourth of July would come, they would move big tables. Evidently, I think the tables they built—it would be like on these horses, you know.
Gertrude: You know, like these big picnic tables that you buy.
Viola: That you buy today.
Gertrude: Well, they were tall tables.
Viola: And, you know they built them! And, they would just have long benches. They wouldn’t no have chairs.
Gertrude: They would just be as long as—near about as long as this porch. Yes. They would. The table and the benches.
Viola: Yes!
Gertrude: They would have several set up. White table clothes on them.
Viola: Probably sheets, half of them were—but that’s neither here not there. And they didn’t have paper plates.
Gertrude: No! They didn’t have paper plates then.
Viola: They had regular china dishes. People would—like, say if your mother lived there, she would probably bring out a set of dishes, and my mother, and this one. You know, they would bring their dishes.
Gertude: And their cooking utensils.
Viola: And then they would take their range, wood range, out of the house. And they would take them down there . . .
Gertrude: There was five or six wood ranges.
Viola: And they would set them up and then they would do all the cooking.
Gertrude: They’d roast all the . . . they had roasted . . .
Viola: . . . lamb.
Gertrude: They had roasted beef and all the fried chicken. Everybody had fried chicken.
Viola: Hams.
Gertrude: And ham sliced. But when they got ready to fix their oyster flitters . . .
Viola: Clams . . .
Gertrude: That’s the reason they had to have the wood stove. They’d have to fry their oyster flitters hot and their clam flitters hot.
Viola: And bake their bread.
Gertrude: And bake their bread hot. And have the potatoes hot. And they’d cook all that on the stove outside. You could go near about from one end of that island to the other and smell all that stuff a-cooking. And people would make all these great big bowls of salad, you know. And all this home made, don’t you understand?
Viola: And years ago when you got lard, you know, lard, it would come in fifty-pound lard tins. And they would save them from the stores and clean them out, you know, and keep them nice and clean, and that’s what they would keep their lemonade in.
Gertrude: Make their fresh lemonade.
Viola: And put their ice in it. And sell the lemonade. And then they had big ice cream freezers, because I remember grandmom . . .
Gertrude: They were tall.
Viola: And they would start that ice cream the day before to get it all frozen cold. And then they would sell homemade ice cream. And they’d have cake, some pies, you know, whatever you wanted.
Gertrude: Plenty of hot coffee.
Viola: And where they had it was all these big, big, big pine trees!
Gertrude: Everything was shaded.
Viola: And it was like this opening here. Big clearing. And they had everything set up here. Everything was in the shade. It was really nice if you could’ve seen it.
Viola: And then all these people would come. Some would come in their own boats and a lot of people would come on the mail boat . . .
Gertrude: Or hire boats to bring them.
Viola: Like say the day before and, if they didn’t have no friends or anybody, they would pay to spend the night there. And then they could go to the beach if they wanted to go in swimming, they could walk over, whatever they wanted to do, just walk on the beach. And then in the afternoon, they would leave. Get on the boats, whoever brought them, and then they would go back. And people would come from every place—we had company all week. People from Hog Island actually is scattered all over, from California to Maine to Florida. All over. And they would wait until that time to have their vacation to come back there. You know, it was like a homecoming to them.
Gertrude: The Fourth of July morning, where we lived, you could look across that bay and it was just like it is out here on this highway today. You’d see nothing but boats coming. That’s the truth . . . And all you could see was nothing but boats. Just boats coming to the island.
Terroir suggests that through food people actually can consume a place and by doing so acquire a connoisseur’s knowledge of a locale. In this light, terroir can be a form of metaphoric communion in which food offers not just the embodiment but also something analogous to a transubstantiation of a locale. It makes it possible to believe in the transformative power of the local, the intimate, the pleasures of distinction, and the promise of recollection and conversation.
The fishing was very good, some fine sea trout and mullet being caught, while from forty to fifty drum-fish were hooked, ranging all the way from thirty to one hundred pounds. The angling for them was conducted by casting long lines out beyond the surf, and rather troublesome and tiresome it was too.
—Fishing, Forest and Stream (1878)5
One of the funnest ways to catch [drum] is using gill nets again, what we call drifting for them. We’ll take about two fifty-pound shots of net. We’ll run them out on the seaside in the inlets right before dark. You’ll run them out. Sit there and drift in your boat. Stop and have a little cocktail while we’re waiting. If it’s real still and the drum are there, you can hear them. Drumming on the bottom, what they call it. You can hear them, Bhoomm, bhoomm, bhoomm. You can sit there and listen to them. It’s pretty neat. You’ll sit there for about an hour, you’ll drifton out of the inlet with the ebb tide. Sometimes you’ll [catch] the flood tide. Sometimes you catch some, sometimes you don’t.
—Andrew Bunce, Nassawadox, Virginia (2009), on Drum Fishing
Fish Fry July 26th. An old time fish fry will be given next Wednesday, July 26th, at the grove at Macon Union Chapel, Wilsonia neck, beginning at 11:30 a.m. The fish fry will be all you are looking for; there will also be included in the fish fry an old time dinner, with all kinds of meats, chicken, vegetables, bread, butter, etc, with fish in abundance. Ice cream and cake will be served during the day. A most enjoyable day may be expected by all who attend. Come one, come all. Proceeds for benefit of Macon Chapel, Prices 35 cents. Children 25 cents. Cream and cake extra. If rainy, come next fair day.
—“Fish Fry July 26th,” Eastville Eastern Shore Herald (1905)6
The people of the Eastern Shore have enjoyed Christmas Day in the usual style. There is an abundance of hog meat, turkeys and potatoes and with all these no one need go unprovided. The ground was covered with snow Christmas morning and it was an ideal looking Christmas day. Later, however, it turned to rain and the snow all disappeared.
—Norfolk Landmark (December 28, 1909)7
When Andrew C. Kellam recounted the midday dinner of his childhood— stewed tomatoes, fried white potatoes, fried fat meat, and “spider cake bread”—he looked as if he might weep. The poetry of terroir reflects the lyricism of memory and association—moments of complete affective pleasure. Far more than our consuming the flavors of place to gain some deeper connection, terroir is about a very particular brand of interiority—an essence of the local discovered within sensations, grasped through the senses, shared through words. Terroir, in the end, is about powerful memories and narratives that, shared, enable us to consume the flavors and pleasures of a place.
Bernard L. Herman is the George B. Tindall Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His books include Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper (2011), Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830 (2005), and The Stolen House (1992). He has published essays, lectured, and offered courses on visual and material culture, architectural history, self-taught and vernacular art, foodways, culture-based economic development, and seventeenth and eighteenth-century material life.
