Cadiz, Kentucky: Doug Freeman, Ham Man
Editor's note: Occasionally what looks at first glance to be a conventional guidebook transcends the genre in surprising ways. John T. Edge's Southern Belly is just such a read, which is why I'm pleased that he has allowed us to excerpt selected items from it on Serious Eats, where they appear every other week. —Ed Levine
By John T. Edge | The Italians wouldn't put up with this. Imagine some governmental agency coming between the good citizens of Rome and their supply of prosciutto di Parma. And you can be sure that the French would raise a ruckus if Parisians were cut off from their artisanal sources for saucisson sec.
But for the most part, we Southerners just knuckled under when the U.S. Department of Agriculture declared that unless a ham is cured in a USDA-inspected facility, it cannot be commercially transported across state lines or served in a restaurant. In other words, Trigg County ham producers like Doug Freeman and Charlie Bell Wadlington, Tennie Vanzant, and Kerry Fowler, who, like their fathers and grandfathers before them, put up hams the old-fashioned way, could no longer ship their product to customers in the Carolinas, much less California, nor could they sell their hams to the local café.
