THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 1, 1995 TAG: 9503010455
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
On public television the other day, several experts were discussing the phenomenon of a rapidly increasing number of outstanding women chefs.
It doesn't surprise me.
Women were the first cooks when men dragged home a mammoth.
They continued to reign for eons at domestic fires.
Now many of them, freed from the range at home, are taking command in restaurants.
It is about time, too.
On PBS, the experts listed a half dozen women chefs around the nation.
I listened, in vain, for them to mention Kathleen Sturgill, 85, in the town of Wise in Southwest Virginia.
She learned to cook while raising a family during the Depression, when women had to be resourceful in preparing unusual fare.
In a conversation last summer, she told me how to preserve ``leather britches,'' or dried string beans.
You removed the strings and put the whole beans, one by one, on a long thread and hung them to dry by a fireplace or in the attic or the sun or in the back window of a car.
Her mother hung them around the porch that embraced the house. What a glorious scene that bean-tasseled fringe must have been!
In cooking leather britches, she lets them soak overnight, then boils them with a piece of meat or seasoning.
``Lots of people love them,'' she told me. As did several people there after our talk.
I aim to try them one day.
At her table, I hope.
Lore imbues all her talk.
In making biscuits, scoop a hole in the flour in which to pour the other ingredients for mixing.
In making gravy, as she did every morning for years for her four sons, ``sometimes the sausage sticks a little and when the bits are stirred up, that makes the gravy better,'' she advises.
At the mere thought of that Elysian gravy it, your mouth begins to water.
In cutting biscuits out of dough, don't twist the cutter in your hand. ``My mother taught me that. I don't really know the reason. It works.''
When her son in Charlottesville is coming to visit, he calls ahead to make sure she'll have chicken and dumplings on the table.
Neighbors and friends watch her every step preparing a dish; yet they fail to replicate the results. Well, no wonder.
She doesn't cook by recipes.
Kathleen Sturgill cooks by feel and intuition, as do all the great chefs of the world.
She has a knowing hand.
You might as well expect someone, having watched Picasso paint, to be able to produce a masterpiece on canvas.
Cooking, too, is an art inspired by the cook's love of those she has in mind.
And, later, as they eat they become the grateful, reverent critics. by CNB