Episode 3834

- [Narrator 1] Tennessee Crossroads is brought to you in part by.

- [Announcer 1] Some of our biggest checks have also made the biggest difference. The Tennessee Lottery. Proud to have raised more than $7.5 billion for education. Now that's some game changing, life changing fun.

- [Announcer 2] Discover Tennessee trails and byways. Discover Tennessee's adventure, cuisine, history, and more made in Tennessee experiences showcased among these 16 driving trails. More at TNTrailsAndByways.com.

- [Announcer 3] The Co-Op system in Tennessee consists of independently owned co-ops, driven to serve farmer owners, rural lifestyle customers, and their communities throughout Tennessee and in five neighboring states. More at ourcoop.com.

- [Announcer 4] Middle Tennessee State University College of Liberal Arts helps students explore the world, engage minds, enrich lives, and earn a living. More at mtsu.edu/cla.

- This week's lineup includes a master chocolatier, a West Tennessee soda fountain, Abraham Lincoln's Library, and breakfast with Davy Crockett. Lincoln and Crockett! This is one for the history books. I'm Miranda Cohen. Welcome to Tennessee Crossroads. Is there anything better than a creamy rich chocolate? Whether it's milk, dark or white, there is a real art to making it. Laura Faber met a master chocolatier who is making the south a whole lot sweeter. She's Nashville's own Willy Wonka.

- [Laura] They are beautiful works of art, some painted with flecks of gold and mixed with the finest of ingredients. This is Tempered Fine Chocolates in the Germantown neighborhood of Nashville.

- [Haley] So during the day, we're a coffee shop and a chocolate shop. So we have a whole cafe team and they'll make like lattes and different barista drinks. And then me and my crew, we're back here making chocolate truffles, making chocolate bars and confections.

- [Laura] Haley Swartz is a master chocolatier. Born in Hershey, Pennsylvania and trained in Switzerland, you might say she was created to create chocolate.

- When I was young, I always loved like helping my mom bake. And I remember when I was in high school and I started to think what I wanted to major in in college, the first thing that came to my mind was culinary arts. And I, you know, I stuck to it and then I realized I could specialize in baking and I was like, that's what I wanna do.

- [Laura] Though Haley started her career in retail bakeries, being hired as an assistant chocolatier in this little shop on Fifth Avenue was a game changer.

- I mean, I just thought Tempered was so cute. And I remember just really wanting to specialize in every aspect in baking and pastry arts. I had some background 'cause like, with my schooling in college, so I knew how to make truffles, I knew how to make chocolate bars, I knew how to make ganaches.

- [Laura] For years, Haley honed her skills in all things sweet and then got the opportunity to train in Switzerland at the historic Felchlin Chocolate Company to earn her master chocolatier certification.

- [Haley] What a master chocolatier means, it just means like somebody who is highly skilled in like each technique of chocolate making.

- [Laura] Since 1908 in Switzerland, Felchlin has been making some of the finest chocolate in the world.

- I trained with Chef Ramone and Chef Keith and we did different like truffles and bonbons. We did a few bars, we made like different ganaches. They took us through like the history of Felchlin, different like, different techniques with chocolate, like different ways to make chocolate. I knew a lot of the fundamental things already, but there were different ways that they did things that I was like, wow, that, like that would make it so much easier. They did different like flavor combinations. Like I remember they had did like a coconut curry truffle, which I thought was really unique. They did like a taco flavored truffle. It's just things you wouldn't normally think about, but it, it worked.

- [Laura] While Haley has always experimented with different flavor combinations, her sweet Swiss experience cracked open her creativity. The result, choices like lavender hibiscus dark chocolate, blackberry basil, or elderflower rose.

- [Haley] The most popular flavors would probably be the French press coffee truffle, sea salt caramel, orange balsamic's pretty popular.

- [Laura] The first step in Haley's creations, tempering the chocolate. What does that mean exactly?

- [Haley] So tempering chocolate is when you cool the chocolate down rapidly to a desired temperature. And what that means is like the chocolate will be shiny and it'll have a snap when you bite into it.

- [Laura] Okay.

- So you can do the tabling method or the seating method. And here at Tempered, we use the seating method and what that means is we'll be putting the choc, the cale chocolates into the warmer and stirring it until it's gonna cool down.

- [Laura] Okay, how am I doing, Haley?

- [Haley] You're doing great. You're a natural.

- [Laura] Would you have chosen this line of work if you didn't like chocolate?

- [Haley] I think it would be hard if you didn't like chocolate. Because you're covered in it, you're gonna smell like it.

- I mean, because you can see, I mean, because you can smell it. Like I wish this was smell-a-vision. Besides the truffles and bars and other confections, Tempered offers amazing hot chocolate and drinking chocolate too. A richer, thicker chocolate made with heavy cream. This is the good stuff.

- So you're looking for actually the ingredients. The shorter the ingredient list, the higher quality it will be. And also if you like look at the appearance of the chocolate, it should be shiny. It shouldn't have like little like, because like if you look at chocolate, some chocolate will have like some white on it. It's okay, but it's just not a high quality or it went out of temper.

- [Laura] The unique thing about Tempered Fine Chocolates is while it serves coffee and chocolate by day, it's an absinthe bar at night called Green Hour, and they do chocolate pairings with local wines, whiskeys, and absinthe.

- [Bartender] This is our absinthe spoon. It's perforated, there's holes in them because we're going to put sugar on top and then let it drip through. So this is the old school way of service.

- [Laura] And why are we dripping water through the sugar cube? Why do we need this?

- So, essentially because absinthe is super strong and it's, I like to call it almost an unfinished product in a way.

- [Laura] Tommy Woodring, bar manager of Green Hour, had us pair Haley's chocolates with two samples from Nashville and a 100-year-old French absinthe.

- Haley is very magical in that all the chocolates are very good and absinthe actually tastes great with chocolate.

- [Laura] At the end of the day, this young master may go home smelling like the chocolate she creates, but Haley Schwartz wouldn't have it any other way.

- My favorite thing about the job is just creating new flavors, experimenting. Of course I love my job! I get to play with chocolate all day. I mean, it's the best thing and it's so much fun to be creative.

- Thanks Laura. Have you ever had one of those days when a thick, rich milkshake sounds like the perfect medicine? Well, coming up next, we travel to Brownsville, Tennessee to visit a place where the local doctor might just agree with you. In fact, he might just serve one up. Big juicy cheeseburgers, bacon and eggs, and the perfectly crafted banana split. If your doctor is telling you to stay away from these treats, you might be seeing the wrong doctor.

- He's the only one I try to run off and he keeps coming back.

- [Miranda] Meet Dr. Jack Pettigrew, once a family practitioner here in Brownsville. Now he is the owner of Livingston Soda Fountain and Grill.

- Most all the people that come in here that are from Brownsville, you know, at some point, I interacted with them, you know, in the, in the medical practice and they, they laugh at me because now I tell 'em, I say, "Now all those things I told you when you were coming to the clinic about you can't have this and don't eat that and avoid this." I said, "That's all out the window now." You can, you can eat anything you want. You know, milkshakes are good for ya.

- [Miranda] Dr. Pettigrew's father and grandfather were both pharmacists right here in Brownsville. You can see lots of old reminders from the pharmacy, but young Jack's favorite part of the drugstore was the soda fountain.

- [Doctor] I remember as a child, you know, going to the soda fountain, getting the cherry Coke.

- [Miranda] As the times changed, all of the lunch counters were replaced with greeting cards. But he never forgot the high countertops or malts from his youth.

- [Doctor] It broke my heart, but I always wanted to bring that back.

- [Miranda] Pettigrew followed in his family footsteps and became a pharmacist and came back to work at his dad's pharmacy. Then came a little inspiration from the man upstairs, the doctor living above the drugstore to be exact.

- [Doctor] My dream was to always be the small town doc that I knew that was above my dad's drugstore. I admired him. He was kind of one of those guys that he just watched him work and kind of wanted to be like that.

- [Miranda] After nearly 40 years of a successful medical practice, Dr. Pettigrew was ready to revisit his nostalgic love of those old soda fountains. So he purchased one of the town's landmarks, Livingston's Furniture store, and turned it into an old fashioned soda shop with a modern twist. The concept may be from a bygone era, but Livingston Soda Shop is state of the art with lots of glass in retro teal and gray.

- I knew some things I did not want. I knew I did not want harsh red color. I knew I wanted something warm and inviting. I just wanted it to be a family friendly atmosphere, really the fifties theme.

- [Doctor] So, my wife was gracious enough to let me live out this dream. We wanted to do something that would kind of stimulate Brownsville a little bit.

- [Miranda] The Pettigrews wanted to fill their menu with homemade sandwiches, salads, wraps, and of course, it couldn't be a soda fountain without a triple decker club.

- When I judge a restaurant by its club sandwich, right? Classic club sandwich and their bacon is amazing.

- [Miranda] And remember, this is not your grandfather's soda fountain. They also serve up shrimp and grits, Nashville hot chicken and steak.

- [Doctor] But we've got about five different burgers. The Livingston Burger, we kind of fancied up with jalapeno pimento cheese and candied bacon. That's a, that's a big seller. We have a Southwest burger. We have, of course, the patty melt is kind of a burger, it's on rye bread, but the old time burger is just a hamburger with all the trimmings, the lettuce, tomato, mayo, pickle, mustard onion. And that is our number one. I'm not talking about number one burger seller. It's our number one item in the restaurant.

- Here at Livingston Soda Fountain, you know you're going to have a great milkshake, but be sure to have one of the specialty milkshakes on the menu. There are several of them and they are all named for a person or place here in Brownville. Take this one for example. It is called The Dandy and it is named after Jack Pettigrew's dad. It is chocolate, caramel and candy.

- We've sat down and talked about things in Haywood County that might be fun to attach a milkshake to. And so that's where we got the Muddy Hatchie River, which is chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. My wife put her thinking cap back on again, ended up coming up with the blue oval made out of birthday cake ice cream for the birth of Blue Oval City.

- [Miranda] A malt, a homemade pie or a big scoop of ice cream. It is all just what the doctor ordered and no one here is counting carbs or calories. The only real advice is to relax and enjoy.

- The food is great, the servers are great. It's just a a great vibe.

- It's been amazing. And I spend a lot of my time on the floor talking to people and that's a lot of fun. We had no idea it would be this busy this fast. It's, the whole West Tennessee has been wonderful to us. Brownsville particularly. We've got people that come two and three times a week, which is, to me, amazing.

- [Wife] And on any given day, Brownsville's a small town. Everybody knows everybody. But I walk out there and I do not know one person in our restaurant and you will go visit those tables and they'll say, "We drove from Dyersburg, we drove from Memphis, we drove from Jackson." So I mean, it's a really neat, so I feel like we've kind of become a destination stop for people.

- Even though Abraham Lincoln was born just up the road in Kentucky, the story is he never made it to Tennessee. So it may come as a surprise to you that one of the largest collections of his history is in east Tennessee, and that's where Gretchen Bates actually got to meet Honest Abe. Well, sort of.

- [Gretchen] It might surprise you to learn that one of our country's largest and most diverse Lincoln Collections is located on the campus of Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee.

- We are one of the best kept secrets in Tennessee and it's a shame.

- [Gretchen] Thomas Mackey is the museum director for the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum.

- [Thomas] The museum has been part of Lincoln Memorial University, really from the beginning years in 1897. General Oliver Otis Howard, who was one of the founding trustees of the university, had insisted that a Lincoln collection be established as part of the university's overall education and research programs.

- Welcome to the Abraham Lincoln Library Museum, and these are the things you'd carry around if you were a soldier in the Civil War.

- [Thomas] There are three major Lincoln galleries dealing with his life, his young life prior to the Civil War. The Civil War itself and then we call the Legacy Gallery, which looks at the assassination issues, but also how Lincoln's memory is used, particularly in art. So the early years, we look at his family, his background, and then what made him into a politician. In the last gallery, which deals very heavily with his memory and what that memory means to Americans afterwards.

- What you're looking at is a bit of technology from the 19th century. This is a rifled cannon three inch.

- [Gretchen] Perhaps the most dramatic piece of the Lincoln Collection is the walking cane that Lincoln carried with him on that fateful night. The cane is now known as the assassination cane.

- [Thomas] It is a ebony silver cane with Lincoln's engraving on it. It was carried the night he went to Ford's theater. When the night he was shot, the cane would've fallen behind the chair, was picked up by an actor that night, saved as a family keepsake and heirloom. After a while, being outta work, that actor sold it for $40 to a grocer. And then that Grocer's family donated it to LMU back in 1928. To have objects that not only do they touch and use, but that have a point in history, for an interpreter, it makes a very strong image that this item saw one of those historic moments that changed the way we are as Americans.

- [Gretchen] Also unique to the collection are dioramas built between 1938 and 39.

- [Thomas] There are five dioramas in the collection. They're originally from the Chicago Historical Society. Colonel Sanders, our trustee at the time here at LMU, and some of our administrators had connections to Chicago and were able to secure five of these original, really impressive dioramas.

- Now let me ask you a question. How many of you think women fought in the Civil War in uniform? Raise your hands. Well, actually, 400 that we know of.

- [Gretchen] There is a lot more to the museum than meets the eye. It also houses a vast collection of historical documents and rare books.

- [Thomas] Most museums have a front room and a backroom. The galleries, the gift shop, the public areas, they called the front room. Most people just see those. The backroom, since we're actually a university museum and archives research library, we have a very large backroom, but most of our space is where we house books.

- The museum and library attracts a variety of visitors from historians to students and teachers, tourists, and the occasional dignitary,

- Really?

- Honest Abe.

- In and around a small little Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg, was fought one of the bloodiest battles ever to take place on the American continent.

- [Gretchen] Meet Abraham Lincoln impersonator, Dennis Boggs.

- I'm a storyteller, period. I don't think I'm a historian. I'm certainly not a scholar, although I've been reading Lincoln and his time for about 22 years. But yeah, I'm just a storyteller and I, but I try to make sure that I use Lincoln's words. If I do that, there's not any room for argument. But it can never forget what they did here. I've fell into this museum, you know, just like a lot of people, by accident. I was on my way back from Johnson City and I told my wife, I said, "We need to go check this Abraham Lincoln Museum out." And so I've been coming here for quite a few years now.

- [Gretchen] These days when Dennis visits the museum, he comes in character.

- Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Tennessee has about the fourth or fifth largest collection of Lincoln artifacts anywhere in the country, and it's right here in our own home state of Tennessee. So I encourage people, come to LMU, and then spend time here at this museum, not only looking at the artifacts, but by asking to go into the archives department and see the tremendous treasure of written materials that this university has on hand. It's a great place to spend a day. Yeah, and get to know a pretty special man. And that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

- No matter how you spend your days in the beautiful Smokies, you might want to start out with a good breakfast. How about a place with historical ambiance and an unlimited array of delicious breakfast delicacies. Joe Elmore found just such a place a few years back.

- If you're gonna compete for the tourist dollars in a town like Gatlinburg, you better have something special, even for breakfast. That's why we decided to camp out for a while at Crockett's Breakfast Camp and see why folks say it's worth the wait. Before plunging too far into the sumptuous food fair, here's a little backstory. Crockett's Breakfast Camp is dedicated to the legacy of a 19th century Smoky Mountain Frontiersman, David Crockett Maples, an excellent cook and ancestor of the restaurant's founder, Kirby Smith.

- This gentleman wanted to provide food for the loggers and he built a little nice little place over here and fed the loggers for a good price. And that was Kirby's idea, was to build a nice looking place, give a generous amount of food at a good price and good quality.

- [Joe] That's John Sports, better known as Sporty, who oversees the ever humming, hustling kitchen. Like a well tuned machine, his staff produces made from scratch breakfast dishes from colossal size pancakes to massive egg dishes. Out in the dining room, the rustic atmosphere is a show in itself with reclaimed barnwood walls covered with artifacts that portray earlier mountain times. It's much like a Museum of Gatlinburg history. Oh, check this. All the doors use low tech counterweights and sandbags. Now, just beyond the cozy fireplace, visitors can witness the making of the camp's ever popular cinnamon rolls.

- [John] The dough, we make the day before. So when we bring it out in the morning, we let it proof, let it finish proofing and soften up, and then we'll roll. We'll get it on the table and we'll roll it out and we will get it to about a seven foot length to about three foot width and put some cinnamon, butter, and brown sugar on it. And we roll it up and we'll cut it into about four inch sections and get about 24 CIN rolls out of it. Put 'em in our pans, proof 'em in our box, and bake 'em and hope we don't run out of 'em.

- [Joe] Well over a hundred are consumed each morning at Crockett's, and more often than not, they're shared. But for the serious cinnamon roll aficionado, you can always take it a step further.

- [John] That we take the same cinnamon roll and we dip it in our made from scratch french toast batter and we put it on a flat top and press it down so it's not quite as thick as a normal one. And then we'll top it off with our caramel sauce that we make here and whipped cream and powdered sugar. And it's, it's a pretty good treat for most people.

- [Joe] Pancakes are to Gatlinburg what lobsters are to Maine, but here it's like the pancakes are on steroids.

- [John] They're probably about four times the size of a normal pancake. They're about an inch thick and about five inches in diameter. So, and they're, again, that's a pretty good size meal that we serve too.

- [Guest] I have a cinnamon swirl pancake.

- [Joe] Are you gonna make it all the way?

- I am not going to make it all the way. It is very good though.

- Our signature items are our skillets. We serve a 10 pound cast iron skillet that is with our signature items, depending on what you like. We have a variety of stuff from Mexican to healthy buck wheat pancakes to omelets, to french toast to waffles.

- [Joe] Gotta say, I never heard anyone complain about not getting enough food, but I also never heard much talk about lunch plans either.

- I think most people say that what you hear a lot is if you eat it, eat breakfast at Crocketts, you won't have lunch. You know, you'll go, you'll, you'll be fed all day long.

- [John] So while there's lots of competition for dining dollars in a tourist town like Gatlinburg, word gets around when a place has got the absolute breakfast experience.

- I think Crock is one of the, the things on their list that they do come to see, besides the aquarium.

- It's awesome.

- We like it.

- It's great.

- Yeah, it's great, very good.

- [Joe] And it's creating that special experience that makes Sporty happy to come to work.

- It's beautiful. Who wouldn't wanna work at a place like this that's people come to and see and they're smiling and they're happy and everything? You put something in front of 'em, they're just, their eyes open up, cinnamon rolls, the pancakes, the skillets, you know, they're like, wow!

- Well folks, we've run outta time, but remember to check us out online anytime at tennesseecrossroads.org or on your trusty PBS app. Until next week, take care, and thanks for watching.

- [Narrator 1] Tennessee Crossroads is brought to you in part by.

- [Announcer 1] Students across Tennessee have benefited from over seven and a half billion dollars we've raised for education, providing more than two million scholarships and grants. The Tennessee lottery. Game changing, life changing fun.

- [Announcer 2] Discover Tennessee trails and byways. Discover Tennessee's adventure, cuisine, history, and more made in Tennessee experiences showcased among these 16 driving trails. More at TNTrailsAndByways.com.

- [Announcer 3] The Co-Op system in Tennessee consists of independently owned co-ops, driven to serve farmer owners, rural lifestyle customers, and their communities throughout Tennessee and in five neighboring states. More at ourcoop.com.

- [Announcer 4] Middle Tennessee State University College of Liberal Arts helps students explore the world, engage minds, enrich lives, and earn a living. More at mtsu.edu/cla.