Food is the door through which Bernard L. Herman brings readers to deep human ecologies of the Eastern Shore of Virginia. From large, dark drum fish to little shimmery spot to eels, oysters, and corn, from “marsh to field to table,” Herman listens carefully, partakes heartily, and responds poetically to the sense of belonging food engenders in these coastal communities. His methods are ethnographic, and while his writing is delightfully free of scholarly jargon, he has honed the concept of terroir to a theoretical framework. Used by French wine growers to describe how locale affects the taste of wine, terroir has come to mean “taste of place.” For Herman terroir goes beyond soil and taste to include story and experience, a consuming process through which local residents reinforce their place-based identities and are able to share them with others. Herman’s essays about Eastern Shore foodways grow out of years of experience living, working (he raises oysters in addition to researching and writing), and being in the community.
Theodore Peed’s Turtle Party
by Bernard L. Herman“There’s only one piece of white meat in him, and that’s his neck. The rest of the meat is dark meat. If you fry it, it’s still like a white piece of meat, like a chicken breast. The rest of it looks like a chicken leg.” Two events mark the fall social season on the »
Food
Eels for Winter
by Bernard L. HermanPart I Eels rolled in crushed black pepper and chopped parsley cook in the smoker. Four more culled from the twenty or more in my eel pots chill on ice awaiting the same culinary fate. It’s September and winter holidays start early around here, and smoked eel is a part of the celebration. I always »
Food
Panfish: Spot On
by Bernard L. Herman“‘I would say the average age of most people that buy spot now is probably sixty. Nobody young comes in this door and buys a box of fish.'” Late summer the phone rings in the Bayford Oyster House on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. “Bayford,” H. M. Arnold answers. “Yes ma’am,” he says a few »
Food
The Scent of Corn
Remembering Jean Mihalyka
by Bernard L. HermanOur foraging friends on Occohannock Neck, Malcolm and Carol, assured us that there was a summer moment in which field corn achieved perfection for the plate—and then as quickly reverted to the unpalatable starches desired for animal feed. To prove their assertion, they invited us for a supper anchored with cold smoked venison, grilled fish, »
Drum Head Stew: The Power and Poetry of Terroir
by Bernard L. HermanOh 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 »
Essay
Oysters for the New Year
by Bernard L. HermanThe water in our creek and marsh on Virginia’s Eastern Shore grows colder by the day as a fading year slips away and the hopefulness of a new one approaches. Frost clings to browning marsh grasses, the tide runs winter clear, passing seabirds huddle on shoals and bars. Low tide. I wade out through the »
