Vintage Derby: Sullivan students prepare meal using only Courier Journal archive recipes

Culinary students can change the world. At Sullivan University, chef Alison Settle is on a mission to show them how.

Ever flip through your grandparents' old box of recipe cards and marvel at the handwriting, the thought of how many times the hands that penned that recipe made the meal from scratch? Or have you ever wondered why "from-scratch" became a luxury?

When Settle, a James Beard-nominated chef formerly of Barn8 Restaurant and Red Hog Restaurant and Butcher Shop, started a new position at Sullivan University (where she graduated in 2014) she found the jackpot. The Courier Journal donated decades’ worth of cooking content to the school when its building at 525 W Broadway in downtown Louisville was sold.

"I don't know if anybody else has that desire to go into their grandparents' house and just find all their tucked-away treasures," Settle says. "But that’s just kind of how [the archives] felt to me. I mean these were people's treasures, this was their livelihood. These things were important to them, and they put in a lot of work to preserve it, and I just think it's so special."

The countless vintage recipes and preserved print copies of elaborate photo spreads in The Courier Journal sparked something in Settle. I joined her in the archives a few weeks ago to thumb through my predecessors’ work —literally.

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I rarely peek at my work in print and here was the tangible result of so many who wrote food articles and whipped up recipes in The Courier Journal's test kitchen. Though not all the headlines held up — "It’s Fun Cooking For a Man," proclaimed one — it was fascinating, we agreed, to get a birds-eye view of nearly a centuries' worth of food writing in Louisville.

It was exciting to see just how long Louisville has been a city of food lovers and to recognize the base foundation that the food writers relied on the home cooks to possess (apparently everyone once knew how to make a stock from scratch!). To realize that everyone had a regular butcher shop where they knew you. To see how the writers and readers understood food as a source of health (not to be confused with weight loss!).

Settle knew she had to do something with this piece of Louisville food history. So she used it to speak to young culinary students and diners in 2023 with the voice of our collective past.

A special dinner, Derby Through The Ages, was born. Settle recruited students to join her at Sullivan to prepare dishes she selected from these archives. She invited food writers past and present, farmers, and industry professionals to gather on a cool Sunday evening of Thunder Over Louisville weekend, leveling it up by encouraging vintage Kentucky Derby wear among the diners.

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Sullivan University Librarian Jackie Young curated an exhibit that brought the decades — years of war, social upheaval, and changing mores — to life with recipes, Courier Journal print editions, cookware, and even table linens. Honestly, it was humbling to walk through the exhibit, reflecting on the 13 years I’ve been part of this long line of writers and to wonder what future generations might think of the stories we shared during the pandemic.

Culinary students volunteered their time to prepare some classic dishes that could have been lost to time but instead shone as examples of how we used to cook, and how, in Settle’s dreams, we could again. In the students’ hands, and under her leadership with chef instructors Rob Beighey, Mike Cunha, and Ann Currie, the vintage dishes wove a story of Louisville’s love of food and the support of local growers.

My favorite dish of the evening, sous vide duck — meltingly tender and deeply savory — sang with the simple and perfect accompaniment of sweet, tart candied kumquats. This wasn’t an Alison original, I wondered. Nope, straight out of 1981. But the twist for this evening was the farmer who raised the duck at Groce Family Farms sat at a nearby table with his family.

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A lot of chefs are on board the local bandwagon. Many are passionate like Settle. And their decisions to buy from local farmers can have an incredible impact, she says, in steering us away from a future of factory-made-patty-littered environmental destruction.

But looking back over these decades, it’s clear that a path has to be forged, and forged now. Otherwise, we risk generations losing a connection with where food comes from, losing the knowledge of how food works, how cooking works, to be replaced by an ability to mimic the steps of, say a blanquette de veau with no intrinsic understanding of what makes it a classic and how to create a new dish with that foundation.

That’s Settle's hope at Sullivan. She’s not an instructor, she explains, but more of a brand ambassador for the school that set her on her path.

"This is not the Alison show anymore, and I don't really want it to be," she says. "I want to use what I've learned … in my career to then help shape [students] and guide them… showing them how intrinsically linked food is to the city, how intrinsically linked it is to agriculture."

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The pandemic forced many of us to look anew at our food supplies, ignited an interest in cooking at home, from scratch, and Settle is "trying to capitalize on that," she says, to build on the base knowledge that we're starting to regain of where food comes from and how to make it.

"And playing off of that, in order to send these kids— they’re not kids — send these cooks out into the world ready to change it."

Tell Dana! Send your restaurant "Dish" to Dana McMahan at thecjdish@gmail.com and follow @elleferafera on Instagram.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Sullivan students prep Derby meal using Courier Journal archive recipes