Welcome to Preserving the South: The Newsletter
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Hello!
My name is April McGreger, and I am a cook and writer living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after 18 years in the North Carolina Piedmont, and a childhood in rural Mississippi.
In 2007, I founded Farmer’s Daughter Pickles & Preserves with the goal of using traditional methods to create jams, ferments, & other condiments to showcase the high quality of the produce grown on small North Carolina farms. Since the beginning, I sought to honor the age-old techniques wielded by past generations of Southern housewives. Growing up in a small farming community in the Mississippi hill country, the preserves on my family’s table were made by my mother, grandmothers, great-grandmother, aunts, and other women in the community. The national narrative of the aughts was that American food was an abomination, and prominent chefs exalted the cuisines of France and Italy as inspiration for a new farm to table cuisine. In my experience, however, we didn’t have to look overseas to find high quality confitures or bubbling crocks of sauerkraut, not to mention garden fresh shell beans of dozens of varieties, tangy field-ripened tomatoes, or frost-kissed bitter greens. No, the American South had a cucina povera cuisine of its own but it existed almost exclusively in home kitchens and outside the gaze of media.
The name “Preserving the South” was the tagline of Farmer’s Daughter and is a play on words and has a double/ triple? meaning. While I preserve the fruits and vegetables and oft forgotten recipes of the American South, I am also tending the flames of traditional knowledge that pass mostly from mothers and grandmothers to daughters. These ways of knowing are rarely written down but permeate the air like the buttermilk tang of biscuits baking in the oven. Preserving the South happens no matter where I am because, for me, the South is an ethos, a homeplace, a place of grounding and connection. It is cultivating reciprocity with the land, a spirit of collective effort, and a deep connection to place. I honor place-based knowledge, the wisdom of rurality, women’s work, and all of the culture that lives in that work. My touchstone is primarily the hillcountry of North Mississippi, which my family has called home for eight generations.
What is this newsletter about anyway?
Preserving the South will first and foremost be a seasonal preserving guide where I share recipes, techniques, and approaches to preserve the best of regional produce here in - SURPRISE! not the south but - southeastern Pennsylvania. Since I travel to Mississippi and North Carolina frequently, I’ll be sure to share my adventures putting up the harvests in those locales as well. I’m a preserving generalist with practical sensibilities like our homesteading great grandmothers (and grandfathers) and pull from a wide variety of techniques to stock my home larder with the best ingredients. I’ll be in conversation with tradition but not bound by it. Expect all my secrets for the best small batch spoonable preserves; waste-saving vinegars made with fruit and vegetable scraps; raw, barrel-fermented krauts & other vegetables; bottled fruits and pie fillings for a rainy day; wild sodas and other home brews; accessible meat curing; even the occasional koji-based fish sauce or other novel ferments inspired by traditional cultures around the world. I’ll also use preserves and ferments as a lens to explore history, folklore, and science with a side of radical rural resistance.
What Preserving the South is definitively not is a nostalgic look at the South’s past. I’m a white lady from Mississippi. My people have not always been on the right side of history. While this is a newsletter about food, I don’t intend to shy away from difficult truths. I do plan to challenge stereotypes and add some nuance and lived experience to some of the south’s most complex topics.
But Who is it For? What if I’m not Southern?
Preserving the South is a newsletter for beginner or experienced canners and fermenters, for curious cooks and enthusiastic eaters, for anyone interested in the cultural and historical underpinnings of American condiments, particularly those from domestic traditions and rural places. You definitely don’t need to be Southern as long as you like to dig a little deeper into the stories behind your food. As a Southerner living in the Northeast and exploring histories here, I can tell you that many of our “Southern” traditions are really rural, agrarian histories of the nation. The South is just fewer generations removed from the farm and, thus, maintains more connections with these traditions.
History not your thing? You are also welcome to skip the stories altogether and go straight for the empowering food preservation knowledge and how-to guides that I will feature in each issue.
Wasn’t Feminism about Getting OUT of the Kitchen Though? This Sounds Regressive.
Great question! It’s taken me a long time to fully grasp this idea, but what if the kitchen is a profound source of power, influence, and contribution? My grandmother’s kitchen was a both a source of comfort and where I learned who I was. In times of stress and uncertainty, I head straight for my own kitchen where I reconnect to ancestral foods and share their importance with my child. I long simmer broths to fortify the sick and bake casseroles to console the grieving. I gather a busy, distracted family around the warmth and love in a plate of fresh baked blueberry buttermilk scones.
What if we relinquished our absolutely vital roles of cultural torch bearing and sacred home making when we allowed corporations and big business to take over our food, its taste, and our access to it? Why do we often judge women’s equality on their ability to do “men’s work” and succeed in male-dominated environments? Feminism should be about ending the invisibility of women’s work and the system of oppression that devalues these roles. And while the kitchen is an important place of connection for me as a woman, there is no reason that gender norms (or even the bounds of nuclear family) should keep anyone out of the kitchen. Just as women should be allowed to pursue whatever field and work that they desire, anyone with an affinity to caretake should absolutely be welcomed and celebrated in that role. While my mothers and grandmothers were considered the authorities in their kitchens, my father and grandfather were regular cooks, dishwashers, and caretakers of children, elders, and animals.
Why Should You Care What I have to Say?
I have made over 150,000 jars of pickles, preserves, and other condiments by hand, in small batches. I have production-level experience in a home cook, traditional style.
I have written a cookbook, a special issue canning magazine with more than 125 of my own recipes, and wrote the preserving, vegetables, and grains chapters in The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook. I have also written articles and developed dozens of recipes about seasonal eating and preserving for Southern Living, Eating Well, The New York Times, Grist Magazine, and more.
As a professional preserver my products won 13 Good Food Awards, which founder Sarah Weiner called the James Beard Awards of artisan food. My preserves have also been awarded Slow Food’s Betsy Lydon Ark of Taste Award (which sent me & my Yellow Cabbage Collard Kraut and Bradford Watermelon Rind Pickles to Terra Madre’s Salone del Gusto in Turin, Italy, 2014) and two Cooking Light Taste Test Awards, and recommended by Martha Stewart Living, Bon Appetit, Saveur, Garden & Gun, Imbibe, Eating Well, The New York Times, Southern Living, & more.
I offer expertise as both a home cook and a professional, and I have always been passionate about home cooking and preserving. I learned preserving at my mother’s and grandmothers’ elbows. I still put up all the jam, preserves, tomato sauce, salsa, sauerkraut, hot sauce & more that my family eats every year. I cook dinner (and more) for my family almost every day and love to cook for larger gatherings of friends and family as well. I have cooked professionally in James Beard Award-winning kitchens; in mutual aid-funded community kitchens; in fried-chicken-and-biscuits-style gas station kitchens; in counter culture co-op kitchens; and food-manufacturing production kitchens.
I have taught countless classes to all ages and abilities from children to James Beard Award-Winning chefs.
Different Point of View - The publishing world needs more diversity. White, yes, but rural from working class background? With progressive politics? Not so easy to find. I am inspired by Alice Walker who said she writes what she should have been able to read.
I’m so glad you’re here! Let’s get into it!
Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox. I hope it brings you joy, connection, and some newfound skills and confidence to deepen your preserving practice. I invite you to challenge me, to enlighten me, and to share your experiences, too.
