(Music plays) When lots of folks talk about southern food, ingredients like collards, country ham, and cornbread come to mind.

But in my south I think about air- dried, country- style sausages.

(Theme music plays- The Avett Brothers "Will You Return") I'm Vivian and I'm a chef.

My husband, Ben and I were working for some of the best chefs in New York City when my parents offered to help us open our own restaurant.

Of course, there was a catch.

We had to open this restaurant in Eastern North Carolina, where I grew up and said I would never return.

(theme music) (theme music) So this is my life.

Raising twins, living in the house I grew up in, and exploring the south, one ingredient at a time.

(Music plays) We're here at the Nahunta Pork Center.

The sign says it's America's Largest Pork Display.

I have passed signs advertising this place for years but never had any real reason to come here.

Oh wow!

I can't believe they have this, Tom Thumbs.

We eat this every holiday.

It's basically a pork stomach...

I know that sounds gross but it's really not... stuffed with fresh sausage.

It's usually smoked then and we would uhh my mom and grandma would cook it in a pot with greens so it's actually seasoning the greens and cooking this like big giant stuffed sausage at the same time.

So you would eat a pile of greens with a slice of the tom thumb on it and it's typically, at least in my family we ate it for special occasions and holidays and I haven't seen it in a retail situation ever.

So, I grew up eating this and I always thought it was a stuffed stomach.

I did too.

And it's not.

No, it's the appendix.

The appendix?

Yes.

Wow, okay so it's an appendix stuffed with fresh sausage?

Hot sausage.

Hot sausage.

It's left to hang and it cures out while it's inside the appendix.

And it's never smoked or... No, it's just stuffed up and air dried just like our sausage.

Awesome, so it's not a pork stomach, it's an appendix.

But it's all in the same general area.

Yeah.

Cool.

Thank you so much.

You're welcome.

(Music plays) My goal was to cook the tom thumbs here today.

But I don't have time to do that.

And then I wanted to cook the peas in the tom thumb liquid.

So instead we're just going to take the peas and cook them there.

So is there an amount?

Just as many as you can get in the bag.

(Vacuum sealing) So you're just going to be a vacuum sealing machine.

Today is the day that I have been waiting for, for like six months.

We had been planning for this huge lunch for the Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium in Oxford, Mississippi.

400 people.

Food writers, chefs, southern food enthusiasts, and I'm cooking a four course luncheon but now it is the day we are trying to leave and I kind of can't believe it.

The star of my lunch or what everybody is waiting to try is a tom thumb.

This is the tom thumb cooler.

Hold your nose.

It's actually not that bad.

We have tom thumbs in here that have been curing for different periods of time.

And these are the oldest ones.

These have cured longer.

They have lost more moisture.

They have more character.

They will be the tastiest and the richest ones out of the group.

And before we go I'm going to wash them off because again, this is gonna freak everybody out anyway and I don't need all that mold on there helping the situation.

If I can get them cooked in Oxford without uhhh getting arrested from the smell, I think it will make a big impact.

And we'll bring the tom thumb back.

(Music plays) (Music plays) I can't believe I'm doing this.

Serving this organy thing.

This is actually part of the intestine.

It's the appendix so you're basically stuffing a giant chitlin.

That's why it smells this way.

I want y'all to get a good ol' shot of this because on Saturday I want y'all to get a nice shot of some food editor cutting into their tom thumb slice and talking about how delicious it is because even me now, looking at them I'm questioning myself.

I'm a big believer that the American South is much like Italy or France in that it has several distinct food regions and eastern North Carolina, for me, is definitely one of the most distinct.

This tom thumb is something that says eastern North Carolina like almost like nothing else.

And you cannot find anything about the tom thumb or a dan doodle in any other part of the American south.

(Vacuum sealing) I'm just putting them in these vacuum bags so that we can put ice on top of it and they don't get wet.

We've gone to all these lengths to dry it and make it this hard cured sausage and I don't want it to sit in liquid for hours.

(Vacuum sealing) Will you put a layer of ice on the bottom of this cooler?

Just a little layer.

For a chef this is one of the biggest deals out there and I'm the least known chef to have ever cooked this lunch so I've been preparing for this event for months and months.

The theme of this symposium is women, work, and food so for the topic of my lunch I have chosen to honor all of the women in my life, the women who have made me the woman that I am.

My Grandma Hill, my mom's mom, she did a lot of canning and preserving and was an excellent cook.

I always remember her vegetables.

So we're doing a uhhh tomato pie.

We made 75 pounds of tomato pie filling yesterday.

Just the sheer volume of all this is just very overwhelming.

Four hundred people, four plates each.

That's 1600 plates that we'll be producing in the span of you know, myabe an hour and a half.

That's...

I've never done anything like that before.

We serve 400 people a week here.

Michelle is packing up broth for the chicken and rice.

That's what I grew up eating as comfort food.

We were able to get 40 laying hens to make the broth with and I've never cooked a hen in my life.

You would never like, fry a laying hen or roast a laying hen because the meat is just way too tough but because they're old and fat they make a really tasty broth.

Mom has been texting me this morning because she is so concerned about us driving down there.

She worries about us but John and Scarlett are meeting us down in Oxford.

I also wanted my mom and dad to be there when I honor them.

I think it will be really special for my mom, particularly honoring her mom and my dad's mom.

My dad's mom died um when he was young.

Well, in his twenties and um so I think this will be really special for both of them.

(Music plays) (Blending) The Robot Coupe is not happy with how thick I am trying to make this and it keeps auto shutting itself off.

I'm working on the fourth course that would normally be the dessert but I'm really doing kind of doing a take on a cheese plate.

Benne crusted fried green tomatoes and benne is an heirloom sesame seed with curried peach preserves and whipped goat cheese.

Ohh.

The vacuum in the vacuum sealer was too high and it boiled over and it made a huge mess.

I feel bad for Michelle but I'm glad I'm not the one that made the mess.

I've got a mess of my own right here.

Ben and I have rented a cargo van that we are going to pack up with all the ingredients for the lunch.

Just packing up this much food will take close to an entire day.

(Music plays) (Music plays) I think the uhh, the...

I think I've had too much red bull.

So this is unbelievable.

I've never done anything like this before.

We've already packed three coolers this size and that's probably not even a third of what we've got to take.

I mean to some degree this just seems a little bit insane.

Actually, those coolers are probably just gonna take what's in the truck.

We have quite a bit more.

Just let me load what we've got and we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Okay.

Duh, Duh, Dun!

Are you excited?

Everything packed up?

I don't know if excited is really the word.

Stressed.

So guineas are coming tomorrow.

Yes.

Quails coming tomorrow.

Okay.

We'll be in the car tonight and all day tomorrow.

So if you've got any questions text me or call me but then after that don't bother me.

(Laughter) I'll figure it out.

Yeah.

I'm just kidding.

Don't bother me though.

(Laughter) So now we're getting ready to leave and I feel very prepared as far as having as much work done as I could possibly have done but if we could just get everything in the van and I can go see my babies one more time before we leave.

I'm ready to get this show on the road.

(Music plays) Thank you very much, Tony.

Thank y'all all very much for your help.

Alright, let's go.

(Music plays) The idea of leaving our staff and leaving our family for what's close to five days is a little overwhelming to me, but we're going to make the most of it and I don't plan on doing an event of this scale for a long time.

It's been a long time since Ben and I have been on a road trip and this is such a long road trip that for a little while we are able to forget the important task at hand and kind of enjoy ourselves.

That doesn't happen very often.

This is not.

The water is cold but it's not... Well we'll be there in three hours.

Why don't we pour some water out and put some ice in?

A little easier said than done.

We are about four hours from Oxford and we are trying to fill up some of our coolers with ice so that they look really cold when we get there even if they aren't.

(Music plays) I'm Ben, how are you?

Alright?

If you had asked me many years ago when we opened Chef and the Farmer if I would be cooking for the Southern Foodways Alliance Saturday lunch I would have laughed in your face.

But the fact that the whole crew at the SFA have believed in me enough to ask me to do this is hugely terrifying.

Um, you know I never set out to be a Chef.

I feel like I just kind of fell into this career and that I've been fooling people all along and this could be my big reveal.

Reveal in front of 400 food writers and southern food fanatics.

That's a terrible thought.

Thank you very much.

Thanks guys.

No problem.

See you tomorrow.

(Music plays) What are you going to do with the tom thumbs?

Go straight in there.

We're going to deal with those first.

Friday morning we start prepping around 8am for a lunch that begins Saturday.

Sorry for the entourage.

I invited a friend from Chicago.

Jason Vincent was a 2013 Food and Wine Best New Chef.

And the fact that he's coming down to Oxford to help me with my lunch makes me seem very cool.

Some of these casings are definitely going to split and when that happens we can't freak out.

We may peel the casing off anyway because...

It browns better without it.

It freaks people out.

Um, so if we want we can go ahead and start opening these bags up.

Oxford, Mississippi is a very small town and there's probably eight excellent restaurants.

Several of them are run by John Currence aka "Big Bad Chef."

So the whole theme is like, a lunch at grandma's house.

We still have some nasturtium.... Just stir those into the water.

You'll have flower to eat, ice water.

Oh, I'm sorry I'm taking control.

No, I think that sounds beautiful.

That sounds great.

While I'm cooking the Saturday lunch there are a number of other very important meals being prepped.

So there are a lot of chefs in this kitchen and a lot of chefs who I admire very much.

I'm making a cheese grits casserole and I'm going to add sausage and jalapeno and then we're going to bake them off in muffin cups and it's going to be the Saturday morning breakfast.

It's a dough sculpture and so I have the SFA logo that I'm going to put in the center.

I started out with Enda Lewis's coconut cake but I wanted something a little more moist in the middle so it's kind of a hybrid of maybe four recipes that I was attached to Ta da!

(Music plays) That doesn't look good.

I wonder what that is?

So, when they get out of here, Ben, my husband... he doesn't work in the kitchen and the stress of it is a lot for him so we are going to try and...

He was the one worried about the... Yeah, yeah.

Alright, ready.

Yeah just make sure you have some of the pickling liquid...

In each one.

In each one.

And each bag you open make sure you smell it.

Okay Ben, you're my guy.

It always amazes me how pleasant Ben is once we get out of the restaurant.

It's no secret that he does not love his career at Chef and the Farmer.

Allow her to do her thing and focus on what brings people into the restaurant.

Someone needs to focus on that side.

It's a real important side of the business.

It's hard.

Nobody likes doing it.

Yeah.

You know?

But he loves participating in things, making things.

He too loves using his hands and so whenever we do stuff like this it always amazes me what a good time he has.

Alright, so I'm going to post a list of our goals for today.

When you get ready for a new task, get me and I'll go over with you how we are... gonna do it.

Okay.

(Music plays) (Sharpening knives) (Music plays) This is the tomato pie filling and they give off a lot of liquid and so I'm trying to drain off as much liquid as possible to make the filling as rich and luxurious as it can be.

It's funny, you know, yesterday we spent tons of time putting all this stuff in bags and now we're spending tons of time taking it all out of bags.

(Music plays) Yeah, we also need to blind bake some pie crusts at some point.

How soon do you need it?

As soon as possible?

Um, I can have somebody set up and ready to go in there in five minutes.

I think our... let me ask our chef because I know our bread is like borderline over cooking right now.

Ok. Go ahead.

I can wait.

Cool.

Are those thumbs poached, no?

No, I can't get to a skillet yet.

You're just gonna have to lay down some law.

Yeah, lay down the law.

So no one is going in there after this, right?

No ma'am.

Okay.

I am.

You know, you're coming into a kitchen that you're not familiar with, you don't know where anything is.

Everybody else needs exactly what you need at that moment it seems so that adds a level of complexity to it all but luckily I think we have enough time to figure everything out and some good people on the task and that's really important.

And I think Ben is enjoying himself.

I am having a good time.

How much more of that do you have, Ben?

This is the last bag.

Okay.

So can I get in the skillet?

Okay.

Yes.

(Music plays) So I'm going to caramelize this and then I'm going to put my tom thumbs in here.

Is this how I add water?

Okay, great.

(Skillet sizzling) Here goes nothing.

(Music plays) So I've got my tom thumbs in the tilt skillet with the mirepoix.

Mirepoix is something we have talked about a lot.

It's a combination of onions, celery, and carrots and we're going to poach the tom thumbs until they are cooked through.

Then we're going to let it cool in the liquid slightly.

That's going to keep the sausages moist.

And then we're going to take the sausages out and let them chill so that we can slice them.

So, it's a multi step process.

And this is a very tenuous one.

That's just...

I can't help it.

I gotta to ask somebody about that.

I'm just paranoid about this because that's how our restaurant burned down.

Do you guys have any more linen bags?

Ummm....

I'll ask somebody else.

Those... infuego in a plastic bag.

(Music plays) What's in the sausage?

This is garlic, sage, thyme, there's some red wine in there, but what you're smelling is the casing.

It's basically like a stuffed chitlin.

It smells so good.

You can smell the fermentation.

Right.

The appendix is just an extension of the large intestine.... Yeah.

So it's got that specialness to it.

Yeah.

A little bit of funk.

Right.

I'm looking forward to trying it.

It's like a slice of history.

Yeah.

I've never heard of it.

Heard of it before.

It's not beautiful.

(Laughter) It is though.

(Music plays) (Music plays) We poached our Tommy T's and now we're going to strain out the mirepoix and reserve the liquid.

We're going to cook our peas and cabbage in the liquid.

(Music plays) Chef, I think you need a bigger pot.

Alright.

(Music plays) So I hate the fact that these uhh casings split.

It's not ideal and I don't know why it happened actually, but I'm afraid that it may dry my sausages out a little bit but um with 400 people it doesn't matter.

We're going to have to serve the even not perfect ones.

Okay, so this is one serving.

We need to get ten from every tom thumb.

I really feel like this is too small.

I think that's...

I mean like eating it, it's so rich.

I think that's okay.

So would you cut that one in half?

I would.

Did you taste it?

It's really rich.

Cause this is still like... That's delicious.

That's like two sausage links.

Yeah, I've gotta get this method from you.

It's amazing.

What's your eta?

Um, what time is it now?

It's time for lunch.

What time is it?

It's time for lunch.

That's a lot of food, man.

Yeah.

(Music plays) Alright so day one, I think we're in a good place.

We've got all our tom thumbs portioned.

Our peas and cabbage cooked.

Uh, everything is in place to... sorry I'm like very slow.

It's been a long day.

You know 400 people is getting bigger and bigger by the minute.

We're in good shape for tomorrow.

We're going to back here bright and early at 6am.

I'm ready to walk out of here and take a shower and have some fun.

Not too much fun.

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