Nina Simone and North Carolina Cookery

Brown betty and ice cream, recipe below

African American singer, composer, and civil rights activist Eunice Kathleen Waymon aka Nina Simone (1933-2003) was born and raised in Tyron, North Carolina, a southern resort town. In 1933 the Federal National Relief Agency (NRA), one of FDR’s New Deal Depression era programs, chose Tyron for one of its surplus food distribution program area depots. In my book Hog and Hominy http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14638-8/hog-and-hominy/webFeatures I talk about how many survived the Depression with the help of NGOs and government relief through the NRA. Nina Simone’s father and other men in Tyron received NRA truck-driving jobs. “Not only did the men at the depot get given a little extra food to take home, but the drivers built up a network of people who would trade food among themselves,” Simone recalls. Families would trade what they raised in excess from their gardens and the surplus food they received on the job. Drivers traded leftover “collard greens, string beans, tomatoes and sometimes eggs” with drivers who had “more sugar or flour, say, than they needed. Most of what she remembers from the very earliest part of her life “is tied up with food and music.” Her mother would stretch the family budget with “rice pudding, brown betty. And beans. Tons of beans” says Simon. “We were poor for a long time but I can’t remember ever going hungry, not once.” Here are two brown betty recipes. I choose it because it’s a traditional southern recipe but often unknown to the grandchildren of southerners born and raised here in the north like me.

Traditional brown betty recipe: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Apple-Brown-Betty-106204

Crockpot brown betty recipe: http://www.olsouthrecipes.com/crockpot/apple_betty.html

Vegan brown betty recipe: http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=14007.0