Food Scholar, Folk Singer, Blunt Speaker: The Many Lives of Leni Sorensen
The New York Times
An irreverent historian who gets her hands into traditional cooking, farming and crafts is finally, at 79, winning fame with Netflix’s “High on the Hog.”
CROZET, Va. — You pick up a lot of skills after 79 years of being Leni Sorensen, perhaps America’s most unsung food historian.
She can spin wool, butcher hogs and can venison. If she had to, she could make money sewing clothes or selling tamales. She can sing, too. Her contralto voice landed her a spot as the only Black member of the Womenfolk, a quintet whose cover of the suburban satire “Little Boxes” spent three weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1964.
Dr. Sorensen can also talk. And talk. I learned this after pulling off the blacktop into her five-acre homestead here in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Charlottesville, Va. Over glasses of cold tea she made by poking hibiscus flowers and herbal tea bags into a bottle of supermarket seltzer, an afternoon visit stretched into the evening. One story led to the next, each a skillful mix of erudition and profanity.
