Good Press

I guess I just gave it away. Let me explain ... . I had a wish come true this holiday season, two actually, sort of. I grew up occasionally wondering where my family came from but I could never get a satisfactory answer, or really much of an answer at all, about our origins, our heritage. My maiden name is Molisee. I thought maybe we were German but I settled on us being regular ol' American mutt. And I was sad. Though not sad or curious enough to dig into genealogy. My Aunt Mary was spurred by her desire to join the Daughters of the American Revolution to unearth the roots of our family tree. She ascertained that the Molisees are from the Molise region of Italy, beneath Abruzzo (kinda the Achilles heel of the boot) on the Adriatic Sea. So my first wish -- to know my heritage -- came true. And my second wish, which I am almost too shy to publish, was to be Italian. I was romanced mainly by the food, by travel stories and movies to a lesser degree, and by the rich traditions -- of w...

Sixty-five years ago, a volunteer fire department in the county where I live in West Virginia started holding a fundraising festival celebrating the area's agriculture -- a large part of which was the buckwheat that was harvested and milled into flour. Buckwheat is no longer the "insurance crop" farmers planted back then; a handful of farmers plant it now and a lot of the flour that is milled every fall for the festival starts out as buckwheat that's trucked in from a neighboring state. But a staple of the Preston County Buckwheat Festival remains: buckwheat cakes and fresh-ground whole-hog sausage dinners. Buckwheat cakes are pancakes (but don't call them that here -- the most my fellow Prestonians have ever let me get away with is "griddle cakes"). Buckwheat flour is flour but it's not from a grain; it's actually a fruit, from the rhubarb family. Doesn't taste like it though. At festival time there are lots of fund-raising dinners (plus peo...