“Family legend has it that in 1868, at the age of fourteen, Charles Henry Darden walked into Wilson, North Carolina. He had no money, no relatives, no friends there, and no one knew where he had come from — he wouldn’t say.”
For anyone who picked up a copy of a new cookbook titled “Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine” in 1978, those words and the accompanying portrait on Page 1 of a distinguished Black man with a penetrating gaze and a perfectly knotted silk tie instantly signaled that this was not simply a collection of family recipes. Indeed, the book was the result of seven years of interviewing dozens of relatives and family friends, sifting through a century’s worth of family photos and testing recipes as varied as scrambled brains and rose petal jelly. The project ended up taking sisters Norma Jean and Carole Darden on a journey through Alabama, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia, opening up memories and long-held secrets on both sides of their family, a tale worthy of a television miniseries.
