Feature article
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Making chocolate gravy now a point of pride
By Fred Sauceman
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Mildred Dearstone’s Chocolate Gravy
1 cup sugar (Mildred says maybe even 1 ½ cups)
3 tablespoons cocoa
Pinch of salt
3 tablespoons flour
3 cups milk
3 tablespoons margarine
1 teaspoon vanilla
Mix dry ingredients. Add enough milk to make a paste, then the remainder of milk, and margarine, in a heavy saucepan. Turn heat on medium and stir until thickened. Add vanilla before removing from heat. If too thick, add more milk or water. Serve over hot biscuits. |
This month marks the five-year anniversary of my column. Beginning today, the column will run twice a month, on the first and third Thursdays in GoTriCities.
Black iron skillets are crowded off the stove at Mildred Dearstone’s house in the Ottway community of Greene County, Tennessee, on Christmas Day. Her children and sister-in-law arrive armed with double boilers and visions of chocolate gravy.
The brown, sweet fluid that some have called a béchamel sauce with cocoa has been in the McAmis, Lowery and Dearstone families longer than Mildred’s memory can take her back. Mildred says she makes it “by random,” so the sweetness and intensity often vary. The constant, though, is the target for that gravy — homemade biscuits.
“When I go places and say something about chocolate gravy, ‘What’s that?’ is the usual response,” Mildred says. “We make it more times than just Christmas. I taught all my boys to cook. It sure comes in handy for men to know.”
Maybe it’s the color that shocks the uninitiated. Or the sweetness, when savory, salty gravy is expected at breakfast.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America theorizes that chocolate gravy may have been an offshoot of a trading network between Spanish Louisiana and the Tennessee valley, bringing “Mexican-style breakfast chocolate to the Appalachians.”
Even more intriguing, the encyclopedia entry suggests that it could have been preserved from Spanish colonies on the East Coast in the 16th and 17th centuries by the mixed-race ethnic group known as the Melungeons. Could chocolate gravy be the second cousin, once removed, of the mole sauces now served over enchiladas at Appalachia’s Mexican restaurants?
Origins of dishes like chocolate gravy are hard to pin down, since oftentimes the practice of making them existed long before written documentation began. My theory on chocolate gravy genesis is much simpler and less mysterious than the ones postulated by the encyclopedia. I’d guess it came about when Hershey’s Cocoa first started appearing on shelves of country stores and cooks devised ways to make meals, not just desserts, using the precious powder in the brown, silver-topped can. After all, breakfast biscuits had always soaked up sweetness. Sorghum syrup surrounded them when sugar got scarce. And when the sugar bin was full, mountain people drowned their biscuits in coffee and sprinkled them with Dixie Crystals to create “soakin’s.”
In Wayne County, West Virginia, Nancy Morrison’s grandfather, James Glenn Mayo, pulled out the soft innards of his wife’s biscuits and ate them, reserving the crusty outer parts.
“After finishing the insides, he would take his coffee cup from its saucer and place the crusts, soft side up, on it,” Nancy recalls. “Then he sprinkled sugar over them and several tablespoons of coffee and cream. He let it soak a minute or two and then, using a fork or spoon, he ate them.
“He used to slip me bites. My mother would say, ‘Pop, don’t feed that baby coffee.’ He’d say, ‘Ahhh, it’ll make her eyes black,’ which it did.”
Nancy is of Melungeon stock, and in her parents’ home, chocolate gravy covered already sweetened treats like ice cream and pound cake. Thinking about a possible connection with the Melungeons who inhabit Southern Appalachia, I posted an inquiry on a Melungeon discussion list and discovered, indeed, that among the culture, chocolate gravy is prized.
Collins is one of the most common Melungeon family names. The highest concentration of Melungeons is located in the Newman’s Ridge area of Hawkins County, Tennessee, where Don Collins’ family lived until migrating to Southeast Kentucky in the early 1800s. Don lives in New Mexico now but remembers hearing chocolate gravy stories from his father, Alfred — how it was used on popcorn, in addition to sorghum, in a family that rarely served sugar.
“When we had popcorn years later, my father tried commercial chocolate syrup and declared it wasn’t the same,” says Don. “I haven’t given chocolate gravy a thought in many years,” he told me when I contacted him about this story. “I’m so glad to see folks preserving the old ‘hillbilly’ culture, as we are losing it day by day.”
However, in places like Lee County, in Southwest Virginia, where having Melungeon ancestry is no longer a mark of shame but a point of pride, chocolate gravy is hanging on.
“I think chocolate gravy is well-remembered because, for a lot of people, it was one of the few treats to which they could look forward,” says Wayne Winkler, former president of the Melungeon Heritage Association. “It was an inexpensive way to turn ordinary bread or biscuits into something special, something people remember for the rest of their lives.”
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Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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