Snow Cream and Edible Memories

In her book The Month of Their Ripening, Georgann Eubanks takes readers on a flavorful journey across North Carolina, telling the stories of 12 heritage foods, each matched to the month of its peak readiness for eating.

In this excerpt she begins with January, taking us from the unenviable task of teaching middle school boys about simile to a tale of Johnny Cash stalking the Qualla Boundary for some snow cream.

Snow

In North Carolina, snow blooms in the air as suddenly as a bank of dogwoods in spring, and—like the dogwood—we can never precisely predict its coming and going. It rarely piles up high enough or lingers long enough in most areas of the state to grow gray and sooty.

In January, there is little else in nature that presents itself to us that we can eat. Snow, however, is a dessert that literally falls from the sky, and when it does, North Carolinians—particularly in the Piedmont and points east—declare it a party. For us, snow never fails to quicken the pulse and slow the pace. Snow gives us license to loosen up. It brightens the view and blankets the landscape with a flag of truce. And once the snow piles high enough, we make snow cream, a very simple treat like ice cream, which normally accompanies the most universal celebration across cultures—a birthday party.

•••

Even for mountain folk who get the most of it, snow requires an adjustment from business as usual to an almost gleeful awareness of possible hazards and the promise of certain culinary and other pleasures. One winter, teaching writing to middle schoolers in western North Carolina, I learned about the passionate stirrings that come even among those who get the most snow.

With nearly 1,700 residents, Burnsville is the Yancey County seat. The town was established in 1834, a year after the celebrated Nu-Wray Inn opened. From the Nu-Wray, where both Elvis Presley and Mark Twain allegedly dined and spent the night, you can step beyond the porch into the town square and see mountaintops in every direction. The subtle gradations of color in the peaks surrounding the village produce a visual Doppler effect: the shades of blue grow lighter the farther away the mountain. Yancey County has 17 peaks that are higher than 6,000 feet, the highest being Mount Mitchell (the tallest east of the Dakotas), where 21 inches of snow fell in 24 hours in January 2016.

Thus, despite the warm name, Burnsville is North Carolina snow country, a place where a visitor might assume that children and adults would be quite accustomed to the more-than-occasional presence of the white stuff, as abundant as the biscuit flour that was once stowed in the Nu-Wray pantry. But even here, snow is still a cause for celebration.

It was January when the local arts council hired me to teach five classes on creative writing to every student at East Yancey Middle School, about a mile from the Burnsville town square. Right after lunch period on a gray and biting afternoon, I was about to give my third lesson in the series to a rambunctious group of seventh graders—mostly boys—who had been relegated to ISS, or “In-School Suspension,” for troublemaking. The principal had warned me at the beginning of the week that this group had burned out three teachers before Christmas break. He was grateful that I was at least holding down one class period for the first week of the new year while he cobbled together substitutes to fill the rest of these students’ day. More than once, I’d caught a glimpse of him in the hall outside the room, making sure I was still there.

On this particular day, my lesson was about writing vivid description. With the fourth-period bell the students rushed to their seats, and I entered the ring. “So who can tell me,” I said, “what is a simile?”

A hand shot up. “Is that like when the whole school goes to the gym on Fridays for a program?”

It took me a minute. “No. That is an assembly,” I said.

Travis, the boy who had offered his best guess, grinned. Though he might not have known what a simile was, he knew how to get my goat. Travis was a handsome kid and a strong junior-varsity football player, I had been told. His cheeks had a perpetual flush, as if he’d just dashed in from the field. Travis also had leadership ability, but this trait was usually directed toward guiding others into his mischief.

I explained how a simile is a figure of speech that compares two unlikely things using the words “like” or “as.” Puzzled faces. I gave some examples: “Her face looked like a baloney sandwich. The wind blew like a freight train.” There was a glimmer of recognition among those who were listening.

“Okay,” I said, “so that’s a simile.” I wrote the word on the board with my back turned. Someone called out that the word looked like “smile.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, turning around to face them once more. “Now, what’s a metaphor?”

Utter silence, and then a big-wristed boy in the back row, whose arms seemed to be outgrowing his sleeves before our very eyes, threw his arm up and blurted, “Cows!”

The class laughed. I didn’t get it.

“What’s a meadow fooooor?” Travis hollered like a cheerleader and jumped up, shaking his hands loose in the air like pom-poms.

“Cows!” the class roared back. Travis then sat, crossed his arms, and stared at me.

I felt like I was pulling helplessly on the end of a long rope attached to a large, unmoving cow. This was not a new feeling in my role as guest artist in the schools.

And then, out of nowhere, chaos erupted. The students jumped out of their seats. Some desks fell over. Books hit the floor like claps of thunder. They ran for the bank of windows on the south side of the classroom. It had begun to snow outside—small but discernible flakes, flying by fast. The students examined the heavens and the earth and then, just as suddenly as they had risen, moaned and went back to their seats.

“It’s just a’blowing,” Travis declared. He explained to me that snow in Burnsville comes two ways—either “a’blowing,” meaning flurries were flying sideways but not accumulating, or “a’laying,” which meant school might get out early because it was already sticking.

I told them we’d listen for any important announcements about early dismissal over the intercom, which I half hoped for myself. They hushed, and I started ad-libbing. “The native people in Alaska …”

“Eskimos!” the big boy in the back shouted.

“Yes,” I said. “The Eskimos or Inuit people have lots of different words for snow, because snow can take so many forms and shapes up there near the North Pole. So let’s come up with some similes for snow. You all know already about wet snow and dry snow, right? Snow that sticks and snow that flies. Sometimes it’s big flakes; sometimes they’re small.”

Nods around the room.

A sullen girl raised a limp hand. “Are we going to have to write again today?” she whined.

“Let’s just talk this out.” I smiled. “I’ll write whatever you all say on the board.”

I asked them to complete the sentence “The snow fell like ______.”

They called out their answers as fast as I could chalk them up: “Popcorn!” “Chicken feathers.” “Salt.” “Sugar.” “Grits.” “Ice cream!”

Then their ideas began to come more slowly and grow more fanciful: “Moths.” “Q-tips.” “Ashes.” “Chalk dust.” “Stuffed animal guts,” Travis said. “My grandaddy’s beard at the barbershop!” said another boy in the back.

All excellent similes, I told them, and I hoped they might remember the concept. Their expertise with snow, because of its frequency in Yancey County, made their images and associations all the more fanciful. I noticed, too, how so many of the first similes had naturally referenced something edible.

•••

The term “edible memory” comes from the University of Wisconsin sociologist Jennifer A. Jordan. In her 2015 study, “Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods,” Jordan explains that she came to the concept as she considered the power of food as ritual in her own childhood. Even though her grandmother was an excellent scratch baker, she would always have a certain store-bought mix for spice cake whenever her granddaughter visited. The boxed mix even came with its own baking pan.

“We’d open the package, add water, and mix it up directly in that aluminum pan,” Jordan writes. “Later we’d ice it with the foil packet of bright white frosting that also came in the package. An important part of the whole experience was the time spent in the kitchen together, mixing up the cake, and then eating it washed down with glasses of milk, catching up on the important events in the lives of a nine-year-old and an 80-year-old.”

Jordan was struck by how such food memories sit deep within us, how particular meals and the preparation of certain foods—even something as banal as a boxed cake mix—can shape someone’s identity and sense of place in the world. As she put it, “Something happens when we eat: the transformation, even transubstantiation, of these molecules into energy and strength… But it can also transform into social bonds and memories, connections within families and communities and larger social groups—as well as stark divisions and distinctions, ways of resisting or oppressing, controlling and rebelling. Food—its production, consumption, and distribution—shapes and transforms a range of places as well: kitchens and dining tables, fields and forests.” She goes on: “Edible memory encompasses ways of talking about the world, but also ways of acting on and moving through the world. I found edible memory propelling people into action—to save seeds, to plant gardens, to eat meals, and tell stories.”

For North Carolinians, the ritual of making snow cream from the simplest ingredients—sugar, snow, vanilla, and cream—evokes a particular place and time for many of us. Memories of this dish, like Jordan’s spice cake, often involve grandparents, impromptu preparation, enormous anticipation, and a strong sense of belonging.

•••

In his memoir “I Was There When It Happened,” the musician Marshall Grant tells a story of longing for snow cream. Grant played bass for Johnny Cash, and in January 1957, Grant, Cash, and the guitarist Luther Perkins were driving back to Tennessee from New York City after an appearance on The Jackie Gleason Show. “We were coming into North Carolina,” Grant writes, “when John said, ‘Boy, I wish we would run up on some snow somewhere. I sure would like to have some snow cream.’”

Born in Bryson City, in the North Carolina mountains, and raised in Bessemer City, near Charlotte, Grant had often traveled the elevated stretch of highway that would eventually carry the trio up and over the Smoky Mountains into Tennessee and on to Nashville. He was pretty sure that they were not likely to find any snow until they reached North Carolina’s Soco Gap. Grant told Cash to be patient. (At an altitude of 4,340 feet, Soco Gap is a mountain pass on U.S. 19 in the Balsam Range that runs between Maggie Valley and Cherokee and marks the beginning of the Qualla Boundary of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.)

The musicians made a stop in the village of Black Mountain to prepare. They bought a dishpan, plastic bowls, spoons, sugar, milk, and vanilla and then kept rolling. In another 50 miles, at the top of Soco Gap, Grant’s forecast came true: they found the ground covered in snow. The men pulled over and walked some distance off the road into the woods to gather a clean patch, because the snow had clearly been there a while.

We filled the dishpan, went back to the car, and whipped up a fine batch of snow cream. There was a park bench nearby, and the three of us were sitting there enjoying our treat when all of the sudden we heard a strange noise coming up the bluff toward us. “What is that?” John asked, and Luther and I replied at the same time, “I don’t know!”

We found out real quick when a big Smoky Mountain black bear poked his head over the rise. I guess he’d smelled our snow cream and wanted some for himself.

The trio grabbed their gear and raced toward Grant’s ‘54 Plymouth. They watched the bear in the rearview mirror as it sniffed around the bench while they descended out of sight, their tongues still numb from the snow cream.