In Memory of Blackberry Farm's Sam Beall

In the small farming town of Walland, Tennesse, home to his family’s country-club genteel resort, Blackberry Farm, he reigned not as Lord Grantham but more as a fellow tenant farmer who loved the same heritage pigs and tomatoes as everybody else. “Hi, Sam,” was the greeting, as he passed along the road, not so much for the man who owned the venerable breeds but for the guy who brought them back.

Food to Beall meant culture, in the real sense of the word, which meant regional, which meant people, and that spelled f-a-r-m-e-r.

I met Beall – who died in February, at the age of 39, while skiing in Vail – on one of his many visits to the Manhattan offices of Gourmet, where I was an editor until the magazine’s demise in 2009. He was a pilgrim, just arrived in Rome, and ushering him through the test kitchen was like opening the doors to the Sistine Chapel. While he might have been the kid in the candy store, that devotion had nothing to do with snobbery. Food to Beall meant culture, in the real sense of the word, which meant regional, which meant people, and that spelled f-a-r-m-e-r. He talked a lot about food, but never for long before swinging the subject back around to the source – how food is produced.

No wonder. In his younger days, Beall had spent time in the promised land of Northern California, working briefly at the Napa shrine French Laundry, before return to Tennessee full of ideas for a new Foothills Cuisine in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains. He was farm-to-table all right, but with a difference: He had the farm – with animals, gardens, its own butcher shop, bakery, and creamery – and the tables, at Southern-accented restaurants that he loaded with the bounty from Blackberry as well as from neighbors’ farms for country miles all around.

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