Gravy

In “Southern Cooking Comes to Portugal,” Gravy reporter Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong takes listeners to Porto, the second-largest city in Portugal, which anchors the northern region. Porto is famous for its wine and its hearty francesinha sandwiches. But this city of a quarter million people has a food scene whose depth might surprise you. Porto runs the gamut from picturesque century-old markets to hips...

In “We Sure Eat Good When Someone Dies,” Gravy reporter Caleb Johnson takes listeners back to August 2024, when his extended family gathered inside a Baptist church in Arley, Alabama, to mourn the loss of their matriarch—his grandmother, Celia Sampley. Before the funeral service, the church served lunch for the family, including chicken and dumplings, green-bean casserole, and plenty of desserts....

In “Virginia Public Schools Serve Indigenous Cuisine,” Gravy reporter Anya Groner takes listeners to the second annual Indigenous Peoples Feast at the College of William & Mary. The evening’s menu showcases indigenous food–foraged wild rice, duck confit, acorn grits, and a four-corn stew. But these dishes aren’t just for enjoying tonight. With the help of a USDA grant, they’ll eventually be served...

This week, Gravy is excited to share a special episode from a show we think you’ll love: Culinary Characters Unlocked. Hosted by David Page, the creator of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, the show highlights bold food makers whose stories might surprise you.  In this episode, we meet chef Marisa Baggett, a Black, Jewish, female sushi chef whose journey began in a Mississippi café where she’d never ev...

While immigration is at the forefront of today’s news cycle, it’s hardly a new issue in Southeast Texas. Since the 1800s, Galveston has been a major port of entry for foreign newcomers. That pattern continues today up Highway 45 in Houston, which ranks among America’s largest destinations for refugee resettlement. While Harris County has many resources for assistance, transitioning into the workpl...

In “What's Brewing in Memphis?” Gravy reporter Brandi Hunter takes listeners to Memphis to explore what it takes to build a craft beer brand in an industry where less than one percent of breweries are Black-owned, and systemic barriers continue to limit growth. Kelvin Kolheim, founder of Beale Street Brewing Company, is at the center of this episode. A former economic development executive for Mem...

In “There’s No Business Like Hansen’s Sno Bliz-ness,” Gravy reporter Eve Troeh takes us to New Orleans, home of the sno-ball. In the South you need strategies to beat the summer heat, and ice plays a big role. Street vendors used to shave big blocks of ice by hand and add flavored syrup—a treat that became known as a sno-ball in the Big Easy. In the late 1930s, a local man, Ernest Hansen, invented...

Few companies have inspired more fanatical devotion among Texans than the convenience chain Buc-ee’s. Described by the New York Times as both a “Disneyland of roadside capitalism” and the “through line of America’s second most sprawling state,” its iconic, buck-toothed beaver mascot has been spotted not just on billboards, but on wedding cakes and tattooed arms of its most loyal customers. Founded...

In “Oh, Snapper! Mislabeled Mississippi Seafood,” Gravy reporter Boyce Upholt takes listeners to Biloxi, Mississippi—a town that has long called itself the Seafood Capital of the World. But in May 2024, shocking news hit the community: Mary Mahoney's Old French House, an iconic restaurant, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to misbrand fish and wire fraud. For years, the iconic 60-year-old establishment...

Gravy podcast is excited to share a special episode of a new podcast called Buzzkill, from our friends at FERN, the Food and Environmental Reporting Network. Buzzkill explores the dramatic decline of pollinators, including the American bumblebee, whose numbers have plummeted by 90% in just two decades. The series, hosted by Teresa Cotsilos, delves into how industrial monocultures, rampant chemical...

The Cuban sandwich. If it’s made with ingredients different from someone else’s recipe, you might find yourself in an hours-long argument in the middle of Little Havana. In Miami and Tampa, Florida, restaurant owners, historians, and Cuban Americans recount their own memories of the Cuban sandwich, as well as the story of its origins. In this episode of Gravy, reporter Kayla Stewart explores the s...

In “A Muddy Future for Louisiana Crawfish,” Gravy reporter Eva Tesfaye traces the aftermath of the summer of 2023, when a severe drought in Louisiana devastated the 2024 crawfish season. The dry soil and extreme heat killed the crawfish while they were still burrowed underground, meaning when farmers flooded their fields in the fall, they found their harvest would be dismal for the spring. That ca...

In “Fruitcake in Space,” Gravy reporter Bronwen Wyatt explores a bizarre footnote in the annals of human space travel. In 1968, a scientist at a military research facility developed a very unusual recipe: a nutritionally-fortified fruitcake designed as an emergency ration for astronauts. It might be easy to dismiss this fruitcake, but we’re here to argue that it’s part of a larger story—one that t...

In “Got (Raw) Milk? The Small Family Dairy Farms Behind a Big Controversy,” Gravy reporter Bianca Garcia takes listeners to Milky Way Farm, the last dairy in Anderson County, South Carolina, where raw milk sales are keeping the Peeler family afloat.   Their neighbors have succumbed to the pressures that have defined a generation of farmers. Between 2003 and 2022, South Carolina—where the state bev...

In “What’s in Store for the Pawpaw Patch?” Gravy reporter Anya Groner examines the pawpaw, a long-overlooked fruit that’s now being domesticated, making its way into farmers’ markets, restaurants, and even beer. What plant has leaves that smell like green pepper, fruit that can taste like pineapple or turpentine, and bark that can be woven into baskets? Enter the poor man’s banana, also known as t...

In “Flambéed! The Art & Theater of Bananas Foster,” Gravy reporter Eve Troeh takes listeners to Brennan’s, the iconic restaurant in New Orleans’ French Quarter, where skilled servers pull off one sensational culinary feat, table after table and day after day—Bananas Foster, flambéed tableside. Brennan’s opened its doors more than seventy years ago, and its early years coincided with a hot trend in...

In “Conch: Queen of the Florida Keys,” Gravy reporter Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong takes listeners to the Keys, where queen conch is plastered across menus: conch fritters, conch salad, even conch chowder. The shells are a visual icon in Key West, even gracing its (semi-joking) flag as a sovereign nation: The Conch Republic. Which is fascinating… because conch hasn’t been fished on the island in fifty ye...

In “South Asian Food Makes Northwest Arkansas Taste Like Home,” Gravy reporter Mackenzie Martin heads back to Northwest Arkansas (NWA), where Walmart began, to look at the retail giant’s influence on the region’s demographics and culinary landscape—specifically, spurring a boom of South Asian restaurants and food shops.   Walmart is seen by some as the king of genericness. Most of the products it...

In “Cultivating Mexico in Northwest Arkansas,” Gravy reporter Mackenzie Martin digs into the story of Yeyo’s, a vibrant family-run Mexican restaurant in Northwest Arkansas.   Here, the once-rural Ozarks are now one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country. That’s partly thanks to major employers like Walmart, Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt, but there are also many amenities the region...

The black-eyed pea is not your average bean. Like many staple foods of the African Diaspora, it’s become a powerful symbol of food sovereignty and survival. With the migration of the black-eyed pea from West Africa during the transatlantic slave trade came a superstition about good luck. This belief combines folklore from West Africa and Western Europe in the American South. Our episode follows th...

In “What Makes Gumbo...Gumbo?” Gravy producer Katie Carter King takes us all the way to Northern California to understand what folklorist John Lauden meant when he said, “Gumbo is not a word, it’s a syntax, a way of putting something together.”   Cooks and culinarians have long argued about gumbo. Is it Creole or Cajun in its roots and history? Is it a soup, a stew, or some mysterious third thing?...

In “The Joyful Black History of the Sweet Potato,” Kayla Stewart reports for Gravy on sweet potatoes, which Southern-born Black Americans have baked, roasted, fried, distilled—and long revered. Stewart takes listeners across the United States to learn how African Americans are finding new, interesting ways to enjoy sweet potatoes. Harvey and Donna Williams own and operate Delta Dirt Distillery in...

In “Eating at the End of the World,” Gravy producer Katie Jane Fernelius takes a close look at the culture of disaster prep, especially how people eat when disaster strikes. As it turns out, how people provision for disaster can differ wildly from how they actually feed themselves, and each other, once a storm blows through.   After living without power for almost two weeks following Hurricane Ida...

In “Where There's (Southern) Smoke, There's Help for Restaurant Workers,” Gravy producer Evan Stern introduces listeners to the Southern Smoke Foundation, a relief organization dedicated to providing a safety net for food and beverage workers. As the pandemic reminded us, restaurants aren’t just places where people go to satisfy hunger. The best ones reflect, anchor, and at times help define the c...

In the episode “Catch of the Day: Why Alabama Loves Red Snapper,” Gravy producer Irina Zhorov takes listeners to the fisherman’s paradise of the Gulf of Mexico, where you’ll find tuna, amberjacks, mahi mahi, swordfish, and more. There’s a commercial fishery worth nearly $1 billion annually and the Gulf has the highest level of spending by recreational anglers, which includes charter trips, in the...