Where
Connected
Community
Lives

Year-round seasonal cooking workshops over live fire. Cast iron and open flame. Lee Epting as permanent storyteller, with rotating local chef-instructors guiding each session. Every workshop ends with a communal meal — spanning Dutch oven, skillet cornbread, fish on coals, and traditions from Appalachian, enslaved African, and Gullah-Geechee foodways.

Every cultural thread in Heritage Hearth carries a lineage: Dutch ovens from Appalachian trail cooking, skillet cornbread from enslaved cooks, fish on coals from Gullah-Geechee tradition. This is not reenactment — it is a return to the elemental.

Year-round, Saturdays 4:00–7:30 PM. $75 per session. All cooking equipment and ingredients provided.

Seasonal full-day journeys following food from source to table. Each trail visits working farms and producers — Red Mule Grits, Jaemor Farms, Old Country Store — returns to Taylor-Grady House for Heritage Hearth cooking, and closes with the Set Table: a communal meal where every ingredient was gathered that day.

Seed to plate to neighbor. The whole Foodways portfolio is one system. Heritage Food Trails makes that system visible in a single day.

Four seasonal trails per year, Thursday–Saturday. $150 per person. Includes transport, farm visits, cooking session, and communal meal.

A three-session intensive in the art and science of pickling. Sessions progress from quick refrigerator pickles to lacto-fermented preserves to kimchi. Preservation as heritage practice — the reason families pickled was not flavor but survival, and that knowledge is disappearing.

Food Jar exists to preserve the memory of how families once got by. Pickling is the entry point — the simplest, most forgiving preservation method — but what we’re really preserving is the knowledge itself.

July 2026, three consecutive Saturdays, 10 AM–1 PM. $95 package (all three sessions required).

Four levels of heritage food preservation, each building on the last. Pickling teaches the fundamentals — salt, acid, fermentation. Canning builds structure — water-bath methods, seal integrity, shelf stability. Smoking introduces fire and time. Curing completes the progression with salt-cured meats and fish using techniques that predate refrigeration by centuries. Together, the four levels form a complete preservation practice.

The knowledge of how to keep food — how to make summer last through winter, how to turn abundance into security — was once ordinary. Every household knew it. Within two generations, most of that knowledge disappeared. The Preservation Series recovers it, one level at a time.

Schedule forthcoming. Four progressive levels, each building on the previous.