Bourbon, horses and ... pickles? Chef’s new PBS series explores Kentucky diversity

Diversity was Chef Vivian Howard’s objective in her new series, “Somewhere South,” and she found it in Kentucky.

Each episode in the series is framed around a food type and it was pickles that brought Howard to the Bluegrass.

The episode shows Howard exploring the Sri Lankan pickles Samantha Fore makes to add spice and crunch to her Tuk Tuk bites, pickled catfish escabeche Smithtown Seafood Agnes Marrero adapted from her Puerto Rican roots, and chow chow that home cooks in Whitesburg continue to craft from the gleanings of the fall garden to add some crunch and brightness to soup beans over the winter.

Beautifully shot and edited, the Kentucky portion also takes viewers to Airdrie Stud in Midway (“everything I imagined horse country to be,” Howard says in the show) and to Woodford Reserve Distillery outside Versailles.

“It was one of my favorite shoots of the whole season,” Howard said in an interview from her home in Deep Run, N.C.

The six-episode series premiered March 27 and it’s the fourth episode, “What a Pickle,” that brought Howard to Kentucky. The episode will air April 17 on PBS stations.

Howard met Fore at Brown in the South in Asheville, N.C., a food festival celebrating the influence and experience of South Asian chefs in the South. Being with the Asian chefs was like finding a family, Howard explains in the show, and “Sam was the fun cousin I’d never met, I wanted to spend more time with her.”

So, Howard sent Fore a message saying she’d like to visit Kentucky and come to one of her pop-ups. Other people usually just say, “sure, let me know when you want to come,” Howard said, but Fore responded with “a torrent of texts … Sam had the whole thing lined up in a matter of eight hours.”

The camera follows Fore and Howard as they meet Marrero at Mercado Aguascalientes on Alexandria Drive to shop for olive oil from Spain (“that’s what my mama used to use,” Marrero says), bay leaves, fresh garlic (“my aunties would kill me” if I used pre-peeled garlic) and other ingredients for the escabeche.

Illustrating the theme of Howard’s series, Marrero says that, like substituting catfish for the seafood she’d find in Puerto Rico “because we are in Lexington we have to be flexible, whatever is in front of you, you use it and you make it happen.”

In Fore’s home kitchen the three prepare the escabeche together and, in a very touching moment, Marrero shows the recipe she starts from in a cookbook her father gave her mother on their wedding day. “Those two women have a palpable love for each other and a warmth and a love for Kentucky that was just overwhelming,” Howard said.

In Eastern Kentucky Howard meet two home cooks, Regina Niece and Carolyn Sturgill, who show how they make chow chow, the pickled relish that Howard has traced to India where British officers came to love pickled mangoes and repatriated it to England, then to the Amercan South where it was made with peaches.

Niece takes Howard into her garden to pick the ingredients, gleaned from what’s left as the summer growing season winds down. “Eastern Kentucky’s no-nonsense frugal-minded foodways remind me of home,” Howard says in the episode.

The shoot was “very intense,” Howard said. She was in Kentucky only two nights and three days, starting as early as four a.m. to catch the sunrise at Airdrie. Her meals where what she ate on camera and “peanuts from the gas station. For that I’m not proud.”

Which left a lot unexplored.

“I was charmed by the area,” Howard said, “I would love to take my family for something that is not work-related.”

So, when will she return? “I guess whenever Sam calls me.” A pause. “Don’t print this.”

This story was originally published April 8, 2020 at 5:21 PM.