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Feature article
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Music wasn’t Sara Carter’s only legacy
By Fred Sauceman
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| (1.) Teresa Jett forms the ravioli filling. (2.) Teresa employs the ravioli roller once owned by her husband Dale’s famous grandmother, Sara Carter. (3.) Carter Family ravioli relies on garden-grown tomatoes. Photos by Fred Sauceman. |
Dale Jett inherited guitar licks and song lyrics from his grandparents, A.P. and Sara Carter. Bass fiddles fill the corners of the 150-year-old house he and his wife Teresa occupy on the banks of the Holston River’s North Fork in Scott County, Virginia. Album covers bearing the serious countenances of his famous grandparents accent the wood-paneled room.
That much is to be expected. Hanging on the kitchen wall, though, is an implement Teresa describes as looking like “a spool bed with sticks on it.” It’s a ravioli roller, used to press out squares of dough to feed the First Family of Country Music.
Sara divorced A.P. in 1936, and in 1939 she married A.P.’s first cousin, Coy Bays. In 1943 she and Coy moved to California, where they met a family of Italian immigrants who fed them ravioli. Sara liked it so much that she convinced her hosts to teach her the technique.
Sara would eventually instruct her daughter Janette in the nuances of dough, filling, and sauce. And, in time, Janette would pass the recipe to her daughter-in-law, Teresa Jett. Along with the recipe came the ravioli roller and cutter Sara had used in California.
When the family gets together for Thanksgiving and Christmas now, turkey and ham take a backseat to the storied ravioli.
“Janette gave me the recipe over the phone,” remembers Teresa. “I had to call her back several times, because I thought the dough didn’t look right. She told me if you can hardly roll it, you’ve got it right.”
In one of those phone conversations, Janette directed a deviation from the original recipe: Leave out the chicken head when making the sauce. On her copy of the recipe, she punctuated that warning with three exclamation points.
Ravioli resonated with the Carters, Teresa believes, because it reminded Janette and the family of a favorite and more familiar mountain dish, tomato dumplings.
“Janette was the tomato dumpling queen,” Teresa says.
The filling for Carter Family ravioli consists of chopped spinach, garlic, shredded cheese, diced chicken, eggs, and olive oil.
“You mash it all up together until it’s a gooey mess,” Teresa tells me. “Janette said it was right when it looked like goose droppings.”
To the sauce, Teresa adds an extra shot of chicken broth, to substitute for the chicken head. Making the sauce involves browning beef, onions, parsley, garlic and mushrooms and then cooking them in a pot with the broth and water, along with leftover chicken from the filling, salt, pepper, sugar and fresh or home-canned tomatoes from the garden.
The dough is flour, egg, warm water and salt. Teresa rolls it thinner than a pie crust, on an antique Murphy cabinet.
Although she hails from Defiance, Ohio, in the northwest corner of the state, Teresa is so ensconced in Carter Family culture that most folks assume she’s a native Scott Countian. She took up playing the bass fiddle and often accompanies her husband Dale as he plays and sings his grandparents’ music.
Yet Teresa had to overcome two childhood knuckle-rapped piano lessons and the embarrassment of her mother when she belted out the “Mabel, Black Label” beer commercial in front of the mirror at a Buster Brown shoe store. She says that put an end to her singing career, and she only sings now when Dale strongly insists. Teresa could never sing another note and still occupy an exalted place among the Carter Family, solely on the basis of her ravioli.
“Dale used to always order ravioli when we’d go out to an Italian restaurant,” says Teresa. “But he always got disgusted when he got his plate. He refuses to order it now, because it never compares with Sara’s.”
--------GoTriCities--------
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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