If you guessed, by the title of my blog, that I’m a northern
transplant to the south, you’d be correct! There are so many differences between
the culture I grew up in (think rural New York and Italian) and the South
(particularly North Carolina). I love the saying, “I wasn’t born in the South,
but I got here as fast as I could!” Please don’t take this to mean I don’t love
where I come from - I just love learning about and experiencing the history and
culture of where I live now.
Every once in a while, I encounter a southern tradition that
is completely and totally new to me. Several years ago, one of my closest
friends mentioned that we should have a chicken stew. Okay, I thought, sounds
great. I thought it meant a trip to the grocery and breaking out my slow
cooker. I wasn’t even close. What he
meant was, let’s have a big cookout that involves a black cauldron and open
fire; a chicken stew is an event as much as it is a dish – and a particular
dish, at that!
Traditional chicken stew (or mull, as it’s referred to in
some places) is a fairly plain, white or buttery-yellow stew made of chicken,
salt and pepper, butter, and thickened or served with saltine crackers. A
chicken stew is also a social gathering, often held by churches or local
groups, generally during the fall season. The stew is cooked on an open fire in
a large cast iron pot or cauldron.
Let’s just say my mind was blown. Here was a culinary and
cultural tradition I had never encountered before!
Fast forward to now - and my digital history course. I need
a project and I’m interested in exploring the origins and culture surrounding ‘chicken
stew’ or ‘chicken mull’. This week’s blog assignment is to look up a historical
topic that is in some way connected to your potential digital history project
in Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, and an internet search engine – I used
Google. I need to compare the results of those three digital treatments to a
more conventional scholarly source. We also read a great deal over the past two
weeks about the evolution of digital history, the way the internet works and
the power it affords us as historians, not to mention the pitfalls. Many of the
readings explore the idea of online collectivism and the aspects of human
versus artificial intelligence in the internet and how we use it. My favorite
read for this week (actually last week) was the article, “Googling the
Victorians,” by Patrick Leary. The article’s
implications for my genealogical research as well as this semester’s digital
history project are important.
So, here’s how the exercise played out.
In the Wikipedia search bar, I typed in “chicken stew” and
the automatic suggestion was a change to “chicken mull”. I went with it. The
resulting Wikipedia entry discussed the regional and seasonal aspects of “chicken
mull” and refers to it as both an event or gathering and the dish itself. There
are a few references to the particulars, such as a chicken mull taking place
outdoors and being cooked in a large, cast iron or steel pot on an open fire.
There are only two sources referenced; a southern chicken stew recipe and an
article by Charles C. Doyle in the journal, Midwestern
Folklore from 2003 titled, “Mulling over Mull: A North Georgia Foodways
Localism”.
Encyclopedia Britannica online didn’t provide any search results
specific to “chicken stew” or “chicken mull”. Searching for “stew” did provide
some hints at traditional preparation of stews, globally, which is rather
interesting, including the differences in ingredients and preparation. For
example, a chicken stew is made ‘a blanc’ – without browning the chicken meat
first.
Google was my most helpful workhorse, generating many recipes and media articles related to both chicken stew as a recipe and as a cultural and regional phenomenon.
I found virtually (ha!) nothing in the time I spent looking for more
scholarly sources on my topic, aside from the article referenced in the
Wikipedia entry. The closest I came was a journal on the culture of pork in
North Carolina and an article on tobacco harvesting and a mention of ‘pig-pickings’.
My ‘spidey-senses’ lead me to believe that chicken stews, as a cultural event
or gathering have their origins in the harvest, given the season in which they’re
popular.
My take away from the exercise and the readings is that my project
will be made possible primarily because of the power of the internet and the
format and forum of digital history. The ‘connection and collaboration’ portion
of Leary’s article states “how the vast reach of online searching is connecting
people, not merely with information, but with one another, often in the most
unexpected and fruitful ways.” Digital history holds so much power and promise,
particularly with history such as folklore and family history, where the
answers rest with people themselves, and a forum is needed to bring the sources
and information together.
Charles C. Doyle, Mulling over Mull: A North Georgia
Foodways Localism, Midwestern Folklore 29 (2003): 5-11
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