All the travel, field research and shooting Stan Woodward has conducted over the past 20 years traveling the South with various scholars and folklorists resulted in a unique set of documentaries that bring together a picture of the South and Southern folk culture through it's love of food and communal cooking. Now, for the first time,the opportunity to collect these videos as a set is possible. And in this set of videos you will come to see and understand the place of the black iron kettle community stews that are the signature of Southern Folk Heritage foodways - open air cooking that stands as a monument to Southern agrarian roots.

These documentaries weave together the threads of folk culinary artisans - stewmasters, hash-masters and burgoo kings - into a tapestry that shows how the black iron pot and wooden paddles have become icons that stand for our ancestors, their field-workers, families, neighbors and friends over the past two centuries who have passed down recipes and secret ingredients that are being kept alive and in the pots today.

 

Purchase this collection of stew documentaries shot under the singular folklife preservation aesthetic and point-of-view folklife doumentary filmmaker, Stan Woodward. You will find that an extraordinary picture of the South will form for you - a picture with great breadth, subtlety, humor, honesty and scope. This set of documentaries are one-of-a-kind. They are as much about the people of the South with agrarian roots whose ancesters worked the small farms as it is about the variety of "make-do" stews. We see that these stews are cooked today with reverence to their forebearers by church groups, volunteer fire departments, Ruritan clubs, Hunt clubs, Burgoo Kings and stewmasters, and off-the-beaten-path dining establishments  - all of which form a layer of Southern culture that has gone "unframed" by mainstream media.

 

10-DVD SET - $150 plus $10 shipping and handling