Chef Rob Connoley is Searching for America in the Ozarks

Rob Connoley is a chef, author and researcher whose work at his Bulrush restaurant in St. Louis, Missouri, is uncovering a lost Ozark cuisine and in the process, one of America’s purest and most unknown food traditions.

The Ozark Plateau, known as the Ozarks, is a vast region that covers some 47,000 square miles across the states of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Illinois. It is an immense area of rich, layered history, diverse terroir and complex cultural identity that has somehow never really been understood and represented nationally, certainly in respect to its cuisine. Connoley’s work is changing that and as he ventures deep in the thickets of Ozark history, he is uncovering a history hitherto unknown and a culinary tradition that might be the purest in all of America.

Connoley’s research digs into the history of the Ozark region, with a focus on the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. It is a very specific moment in time when the indigenous people of the region first encountered settlers, who brought with them the enslaved. It is the interaction and convergence of these three cultures that created what evolved into the food culture representative of the region’s often brutal, often inspiring story.

Connoley’s work starts by digging into the past, but it is also realised through his work in the present, in foraging for ingredients, sourcing locally. For Connoley, it’s a way of life, not a marketing tool for his restaurant. His foraging journey began back in New Mexico, where he had his original Curious Kumquat restaurant.

“My last restaurant was in the middle of nowhere, and I mean the middle of nowhere,” says Connoley. “We were three hours to the nearest city. There were a few local farmers but not many, so I started digging deep into how the indigenous people in that area live. There, it’s Apache people and before them it’s a group called the Mimbreño. They were not migratory, they were very stationary. But we were up in the mountains so my question was ‘how did they live in the winter?’ You could find things to eat, there’s cactus fruit, but digging into their past through archaeology, led me onto the path of foraging. I never represented my restaurant as an Apache-based diet or cuisine, it was just a foraged food restaurant which made sense at the time, 12-15 years ago."

From the arid, meagre landscape of New Mexico, Connoley returned to Missouri. He had a wealth of knowledge and experience in the field, and armed with a doctorate from Purdue, he began to explore the history and traditions of his home, as well as his personal history, in order to identify a more authentic and largely forgotten culinary identity. He found inspiration in the most unlikely of places.

“So I started looking at old church cookbooks. It was really interesting because all the churches have their own cookbooks and they’re delighted that someone is interested in them because they have boxes of these things. In Missouri there are two companies that entered the market and started going to all the churches and offered to put the books together for them. They would give them their recipes, the companies would add their recipes and produce the book for them. Then the church could make money. So looking through all these cookbooks I would see recipes that were authentic to the area, and then jello salad and casseroles. And I would see the same jello salad and casseroles regardless of the community. So there wasn’t much to work with."

“I started going to libraries and archives because I wanted to go way back. Of course, I was aware of what Sean Brock had done, people always say ‘oh you’re doing what Sean Brock did’, and I think that’s firstly dismissive of the Ozark culture which has a lot of rich history, and secondly, I’m not Sean Brock, I’ve got a doctorate from Purdue, I do really deep research that is nothing to do with restaurants, it’s just for curiosity.”

Connoley’s research has led him to realise a concept that is based on three distinct cultures – the Osage, the settlers and the slaves. Those three distinct cultures all came together at one particular moment in time, the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries, and what we eat today is derived from that one moment.

“This is where the project has gone way beyond anything I dreamed or wanted. I mean we’re doing genealogic tracing of freed slaves….we were just following our curiosity.”

Ask any chef about their philosophy and the same words surface every time – ‘sustainable’, 'local’, 'seasonal’. They are repeated so often that they often lose their meaning. Connoley says these words with full intention, he and his team live and breathe these practices at Bulrush.

“Right across the United States, the vast majority of chefs have experimented with the idea of local or foraged. The ones who haven’t stuck with it, their motivation wasn’t right. It’s a lot of work. When we look at our zero waste practices, it drives the new staff crazy because I’m constantly looking in the trash can and the compost bucket and saying ‘why is this in here? That should be a miso or an amino acid’. There are very few things that should go in a compost bucket. We do five gallons of compost a week, which is nothing. It’s a mind-set."

The research centred on the practices of the Osage Nation and Connoley was acutely aware of the need to seek their permission and to partner with them in a respectful way. It is there history and their story, Connoley is careful not to appropriate anything, but to conduct research that respects their history and not western interpretations of it.

“We have St. Louis University and their history department, they provide us with history interns to help with our research. They were in conversation with the Osage Nation on other projects. They are often brought on as consultants. My contact at the university connected me with their director of historic preservation, Dr. Andrea Hunter. So I reached out to her, as I said, I didn’t want to appropriate any story that wasn’t nine to tell, but I wanted to know how I could learn as much as possible and how I could honour indigenous tradition when it comes from an oral tradition. Where the only written tradition comes from the white man’s observations of the Osage people. There’s a whole genre of books about white people held captive by tribes and this is their memoir. There’s a lot of interesting information but I didn’t want to go there."