Felice Bryant's pasta sauce recipePhoto: Courtesy of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Paulette Picardy, a tourist from Boston, snaps an iPhone pic at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. But she isn’t focusing on costumes or cars or even song lyrics. She wants to document a spaghetti-sauce recipe behind an exhibit’s glass — a recipe scribbled on wrinkled notebook paper and yellowed to the color of an onion skin. “I want to see how it compares to mine,” she says.
The sauce recipe belonged to Felice Bryant, who wrote songs with her husband Boudleaux Bryant. The first professional full-time songwriters in Nashville, the couple gave us “Love Hurts,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Rocky Top,” to name a few. In 1950, Felice brought her recipe — and the rest of her life — to Nashville, where the couple invited artists to their home to pitch songs directly, a practice that would be considered unconventional today. Plying their guests with Italian food and wine, the Bryants would then break out the song ledgers with lyrics and charts inside.
This wasn’t a woman-stuck-in-the-kitchen situation — sizzling onions that sound like rain on a tin roof are a sign you’re about to be wooed. But Felice’s sauce meant more than that. She was behind the stove and the pen — a woman exerting her power in a male-dominated industry. She did her work on her turf, outside the good-ol’-boys network of the music business, and she commanded respect.
“They called it their ‘pasta scam,’ and it’s a fun story,” says Brenda Colladay, vice president of museum services at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. “But it also evokes so much about what Nashville was like.”
As the Bryants’ biographer Bobbie Malone tells American Songwriter magazine: “It drove Felice crazy to go to a business environment with Boudleaux, because the men would talk over her, only to him. So she wouldn’t let the ledgers out of the house: They would have to come to her territory and deal with her.”
The sauce helped her do that, and invitations to her dinners became coveted around town.
Frist Library and Archives at the Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumPhoto: Daniel Meigs Plenty of country singers (mostly women) have written cookbooks, and the museum keeps a collection of several dozen of them in its library. Beyond just casseroles and pies, they’re a way for women in country to connect with audiences — to step right into their kitchens. While it’s not often a recipe ends up in an exhibit, you’re still apt to find food-related memorabilia sprinkled like salt in the stew, helping draw out the flavor and stories behind the music. You’ll find a sack from the 1940s, for example, that once held Roy Acuff’s brand of flour. There’s an image of Acuff on the back that folks could cut out and sew into a doll.
“Country music has always been associated with home and family,” says Colladay. “It’s a natural fit.”
More than family and brands and food stories, though, recipes — often too easily written off as fluff — can demonstrate a quiet power and independent know-how. On paper, Felice’s sauce looks simple. The recipe is scrawled in her handwriting, and it calls for just a few ingredients: onion, ground beef, tomato paste and a No. 2 can of tomatoes. But it’s an umami bomb, with loads of concentrated tomato tang balanced with the sweetness of slow-cooked onion; it has a silky texture from the rendered beef. It’s not a trophy recipe you look at and never make — it’s real-deal.
As the Bryants’ son Del says, true Italian home cooking seemed exotic in Nashville during his parents’ pasta-scam days — good olive oil and vinegar, lettuces and charred peppers, fresh-baked bread as an appetizer. Felice came by it honestly. Her grandparents, both from Sicily, didn’t speak much English. Her mother had worked in the restaurant business. Felice was raised in the Italian and Polish section of Milwaukee in what Del calls a “household very much like Moonstruck.” Food knowledge was in her blood, as was, apparently, a talent for writing songs. “She knew all the vagaries of making the sauce taste tremendous,” Del says. “Stuff you can never write down in a book.”
Another power move on Felice’s part? Leaving a few things out of the recipe. A hallmark of a good cook is to expect those reading the recipe to read between the lines — to know how to season a thing. Bay leaf is important, says Del, but it’s not listed. Colladay also heard of an oregano plant that Felice kept from a cutting her father brought from Sicily. Loretta Lynn used to tell Felice to shake that bush. (I added a tablespoon in case.)
Frist Library and Archives at the Country Music Hall of Fame and MuseumPhoto: Daniel Meigs After checking out the rest of the Bryant exhibit, which will be on display at the museum until August, Paulette from Boston came back for a chat. She had another point to make: “The scam works,” she says frankly. She knows because she uses it too. She’s part Italian and makes lasagna to wrangle family around the table. “Makes perfect sense to me,” she adds. “People can relax and be off-guard.” That’s yet another force to be felt in home cooking: Good hospitality creates a vibe. A little showbiz is made even better when there’s substance behind the sustenance. “The mood wouldn’t have worked if the songs had not delivered,” Del says.
When it comes to food and music, the beat goes on. In another section of the museum, an exhibit on 1970s country includes a video about a legendary (and now closed) bar called the Armadillo World Headquarters. Mostly a music hall, it served good Tex-Mex too, which no doubt had a hand in cultivating community. One of the musicians, reflecting on the place, said this: “Never underestimate the power of the enchilada.”
Ten bucks says a woman made those enchiladas too.
Footnote: Turns out a woman did in fact make those enchiladas, and her name was Jan Beeman — the “earth mama” of the Armadillo. According to a 2019 article in The Austin Chronicle, Beeman made the sour cream enchiladas at the venue. Van Morrison once played a second unplanned show there for a chance to eat the enchiladas again. But that’s another story — and recipe — for another time.
"Sauce" - Google News
January 30, 2020 at 06:05PM
https://ift.tt/36Cb4d6
On the Meaning Behind Felice Bryant's Spaghetti Sauce - Nashville Scene
"Sauce" - Google News
https://ift.tt/35DSBgW
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "On the Meaning Behind Felice Bryant's Spaghetti Sauce - Nashville Scene"
Post a Comment