STay tuned for information about Virginia FOlklife performances for 2020’s virtual celebration

2020 folklife demonstrations

Cooking Demonstrations

Tune in to our livestream, Oct. 9-11, to catch cooking demos by some of our favorite Virginia cooks. They’ll demonstrate local dishes that are unique to our area.

Frances Davis

Fried Dried Apple Pie
Rocky Mount, Virginia

Known as “Fried Apple Pies,” “Dried Apple Pies,” or even “Fried Dried Apple Pies,” these locally made pies seem to have a ubiquitous presence throughout Southwest Virginia, appearing on the counters and shelves of country stores, gas stations, and community festivals. The defining characteristic of the pie is its intense flavor, accomplished through the use of dried apples rehydrated through a long simmering process with brown sugar. While each community likely stakes a claim for one of its local pie makers, Frances Davis, of Rocky Mount, takes the title as the ultimate “Fried Apple Pie Lady.” Her delicious fried-dough pies have been featured at festivals around the state, including the National Folk Festival. Frances was one of six children born to a sharecropping family. She learned to cook from her mother, and by the age of twelve was responsible for cooking for her entire family, as well as caring for other children too young to go to the fields. “I had to get up each morning around four, get the fire started to heat the house, and then be sure to have three full meals ready when the grownups came in from the field. Honestly, I didn’t really have a life as a child, because I had a big responsibility.” This responsibility led Frances to become one of the most respected and creative home chefs in the region. “You had to be very resourceful,” she told us. “You had to learn to work with what you had.” 

Chef Ida MaMusu

kelewele medley
Richmond, Virginia

In 1980, Ida MaMusu fled war-torn Monrovia, Liberia, and came to the United States. Her grandmother, Ida Williams, was originally from Reston, Virginia, and went to Liberia as part of the American Colonization Society, a movement sending freed slaves back to Africa. Under her grandmother’s tutelage, Ida learned the art of cooking, sometimes without even going near the kitchen. When Ida MaMusu fled the war, she had no choice but to leave her entire family behind. She arrived in Richmond in 1986 and worked for the next decade to bring her two children and parents to the United States. After opening Braids of Africa on Broad Street in 1996, Ida found herself not only doing hair, but cooking meals for her customers. Inspired, she opened her first restaurant space next door in 1998, eventually moving to a smaller, better-located space on Main Street. Ida’s grandmother always told her that the things she learned from her were not hers to keep—that she must pass them on to keep her memory alive. In 2002, Ida started Chef MaMusu’s Cultural Cooking School to pass her knowledge on to young girls.

Sondus Asad Moussa

baklava
Harrisonburg, Virginia

Harrisonburg, with a population of just over 50,000, is one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse cities in Virginia. Today, the Harrisonburg–Rockingham County community includes refugees and immigrants from all parts of the globe. In the 2016 school year, students in Harrisonburg City Schools spoke forty-eight different languages at home and English became a minority language for the first time, spoken by less than 50 percent of public school families. Arabic is the second most spoken language in the public schools, as Harrisonburg has welcomed large populations of refugees from Iraq and Syria in recent years.

One of Harrisonburg’s recent arrivals is Sondus Asad Moussa, owner of the Baghdad Market, a Mediterranean specialty store. Several times each week, Sondus layers up delicate leaves of phyllo dough, brushing clarified butter between each, sprinkling on her special blend of walnuts, almonds, and cardamom to make baklava, a true culinary art form. Sondus grew up following her mother and grandmother around the kitchen asking a myriad of questions. “My grandmother put butter in everything!” she recalls. “So I use local, organic butter from Mount Crawford Creamery. It’s the best!”

Her grandfather migrated from Turkey to Nineveh/Mosul in Iraq during World War I and she attributes her family’s taste for baklava to this Turkish heritage. Her taste for exquisite baklava intensified as a child because her father would stop on his way home from work on Karrada Street at Abu Afif, the best sweets shop in the city. Between her father’s habit of eating half a tray of baklava in one sitting and her mother’s baking at home, Sondus developed a love of the multi-layered Middle Eastern treat.

Deborah Pratt and Clementine Macon Boyd

Oyster Shucking Champions
Middlesex County

For communities on Virginia’s Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula, the oyster fishery was perhaps the largest and most influential industry from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. Men and women employed by the industry worked a variety of jobs, from boat cook, captain, and crew, to shore-based scow gangs and shuckers. Shucking in particular provided many employment opportunities for African Americans throughout the Chesapeake region. Sisters Deborah Pratt and Clementine Macon Boyd, whose parents met while working in one of the many small oyster houses that dotted the Northern Neck coastline, are two of the top shuckers in the world, each capable of deftly opening two dozen oysters in less than three minutes.

Though the oyster industry has declined since the mid-1990s, shucking remains a highly competitive sport. Deborah and Clementine have each won the prestigious Virginia Oyster Shucking Competition, held annually at the Urbanna Oyster Festival, and the National Oyster Shucking Championship in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, where they earned the right to compete in the International Oyster Opening Championship in Galway, Ireland. 

The two sisters have battled it out in six epic contests on the Virginia Folklife Stage at the Richmond Folk Festival, with Clementine pulling off the upset in the first match, Deborah taking the next three, and Clementine winning the next two.

Mary Stuart

Tangier Island crab bisque
Tangier Island, Virginia 

Tangier, Virginia, a small island of just more than one square mile in the Chesapeake Bay, is one of the most unique communities in the country. Once a summer refuge for the Pocomoke Indians, humans have long been drawn to Tangier and the neighboring islands for their natural beauty and rich bounties of the Bay, particularly soft crabs and oysters. Crabbing and oyster fishing have fed and sustained the island’s residents for centuries, and still remain a critically important occupation and way of life. Even in this new digital age of unprecedented connectivity, Tangier remains remarkably isolated. The island sits 12 miles out from the mainland in the Chesapeake Bay, and is reached only by boat from Virginia’s Northern Neck and Maryland and Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Most of Tangier’s 470 or so residents trace their families back on the island for generations.

Mary Stuart Parks grew up with a passion for cooking, and in 2000 joined four other women in purchasing the popular Fisherman’s Corner Restaurant, which she still owns and operates. The restaurant is a legendary institution on the island, and is known for its take on traditional Tangier dishes such as crab cakes, fried soft shell crabs, and its famous crab bisque.