Spoonful of Love
Our Whitesburg Soup Beans were inspired by Chef Jared Richardson’s Eastern Kentucky hometown. Jared was our opening chef at Wallace Station and his parents, Bill and Josephine D’Amato Richardson, founded Appalshop in 1969.
Whitesburg Soup Beans is the one dish that’s on nearly all our menus, all the time. It’s pure Kentucky – humble beginnings transformed by heat and seasoning and care into a bowlful of sustenance for body and soul. In Silas House’s poem “Hazel Dickens”, he prepares a mess of soup beans to soothe his soul after news of her passing.
As Chef Ouita Michel says in the short film “Souped: The Pinto Bean Story”, she wanted to offer a tasty meal that was affordable and accessible and could be enjoyed by multiple generations. And she loves the way that newcomers to Kentucky have added their own twists to the tradition; swapping out black beans and tortillas, or refried beans and rice, for pintos and cornbread.
Soup beans, not to be confused with bean soup (another animal altogether), are an Appalachian tradition. Made with close-at-hand ingredients, they could be a snack or an entree, rounded out by greens and fried potatoes, with a jar of homemade chowchow standing by.
We’ve served them to horsemen and -women, grandparents and youngsters, out-of-towners and hometown neighbors.
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Art Aid for Appalachia
Hundreds of houses and countless possessions and memories were lost in the recent flooding. Phoebe Wagoner, daughter of our good friends David Wagoner and Arwen Donahue, owners of Three Springs Farm, was interning at Appalshop when Eastern Kentucky’s catastrophic floods hit. So she is seizing this opportunity to raise funds for the relief effort through the sale of her Appalachian paper-cut series.
