Looking for a new way to support The Food Section? Read on to learn how you can keep quality food journalism alive in the South by baking a pan of cornbread!
One of the few upbeat journalism stories of the past several years came out of Marfa, Texas, that weird sliver of Miami’s Design District just north of the Mexican border.
In 2019, the new owners of The Big Bend Sentinel opened a coffee shop in a former dance hall, with the dual goals of generating revenue and giving area residents a place to tell their own stories. “Their dollar is going to support something larger,” one of the owners told the New York Times.
Local news leaders across the country hailed the café as the ultimate example of reader engagement, saluting the paper for providing its community with a vibrant third space.
While that’s very cool, it’s not what I liked best about the operation. What struck me as brilliant was underwriting journalism with something buyers weren’t about to eliminate from their spending budgets.
The reality is there’s not a single paid media source that people can’t get by without. As much as I’d like to think that nobody’s life is complete unless it includes The Food Section, I fully understand why readers let their subscriptions lapse when they lose jobs or receive a costly medical diagnosis.
Still, even in those times of crisis, readers who were well enough off to purchase a subscription in the first place usually keep buying essentials—such as coffee.
When I first heard about The Sentinel, I started thinking about what boring items I could sell to keep our food journalism going. I seriously contemplated toothpaste. You don’t want to know how much time I plowed into trying to devise a profitable dish soap strategy.
But because my friends and family get depressed whenever I bring up dish soap, I realized I’d have to find another approach. (To be fair, when I bounced the dish soap gambit off an owner of The Sentinel, he wasn’t crazy about it either.) And I think I may have hit upon a solution, although it’s up to you to decide if I’m right.
Today, The Food Section is proud to unveil TFS Mercantile, a curated collection of pantry necessities produced by other small businesses across the American South. Regardless of whether you’re in the market for sea salt or grits, you can be assured that its maker shares our esteem for the region’s rich physical landscape and vibrant culinary history—and that a portion of your payment will support The Food Section’s journalism.
At least, that’s the plan. Right now, there’s just one product on our shelves: Jimmy Red Skillet Cornbread Mix from High Wire Distilling Co. in Charleston. A longtime favorite at the distillery’s tasting room bar, the cornbread has just been made available to the non-visiting public in the form of a 16-ounce bag.
“The flavor nuances we find in our Jimmy Red Bourbon translate just as beautifully in this cornbread,” says High Wire owner Ann Marshall, who recommends pairing the finished product with sorghum butter and country ham.
What’s unique about this cornbread mix, developed by Marshall’s husband and distillery co-owner, Scott Blackwell, is it features Jimmy Red corn. A one-time moonshiner’s favorite nicknamed for its popularity on James Island, Jimmy Red has been slowly revived from one last set of cobs by Marshall, Blackwell, Anson Mills founder Glenn Roberts, and other champions of Southern flavors.
As Marshall points out, before Southerners were turning corn into bourbon, they made bread. In this region, cornbread is foundational. We hope it is for us.
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