From the hills of Virginia to the South Carolina Lowcountry, open pot cooking has been a vibrant component of regional culinary traditions embraced by Native Americans, Europeans, and African Americans. This tradition is examined in Southern Stews: Traditions of One-Pot Cooking, an exhibition at the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina. The exhibition is built around video documentary work by Stan Woodward, whose 1980 video It’s Grits cracked smiles and brought grits out of the Southern cultural closet and onto the plates of mainstream America.

For the exhibition, Woodward expanded beyond the battling Brunswicks (Virginia and Georgia) and their world-renowned stews and ventured to Georgia’s wiregrass and hills and South Carolina’s Sea Islands. He took his camera and his appetite to South Carolina’s Backcountry and to Kentucky to find cooks transforming relatively mundane ingredients into culinary folk arts.

The exhibition, which highlights sequences from Woodward’s videography and artifacts of stewmaking pots, cooking tools, and accoutrements, examines the changing traditions of stew making. Southern Stews explores the relationships between the stuff of stews--their ingredients, recipes and artifacts used in their production--and the social dynamics of stew making and consumption.

Woodward met and interviewed stew masters who go to great lengths to make a case for the uniqueness of each local recipe and cooking technique. For example, makers of Carolina hash such as Rodney Long from Newberry County and Ray McLees of Union County may live in relatively close proximity, yet be remarkably divided in their choice of basic ingredients--one using only pork and the other only beef. To the burgoo makers of Owensboro, Kentucky, and the sheep stew chefs of Dundas, Virginia, the mutton in their stews defines community identity--even though the pottages differ in nearly all other respects.

Southern Stews runs through October 29. A high point in the exhibition will be McKissick Museum’s Fall Folklife Festival, Saturday, October 21 (the same weekend as the annual Southern Foodways Symposium here in Oxford), when a champion Brunswick County stew master and a Carolina hasher will demonstrate cooking methods and provide festival participants and Museum visitors with a tasty complement to the exhibition inside the gallery. For more information on Southern Stews, point your Web browser to www.cla.sc.edu/mcks/html/exhib.htm.