Come join the Graham family on May 1, 2021 from 2-6PM for the Graham Family Derby Festival! Whether it’s your first time watching the Kentucky Derby or you’ve watched it so many years you can’t keep track anymore, all are welcome to join in the celebration and the fun!
We have multiple events you can be a part of while you are here! At 2:00, join us for “Everybody Loves a Good Cookout,” where we will have a live cooking demonstration. You will see how many of the main staples of the party are prepared and learn the significance of these foods and why they are present at our party. From 2:00 to 5:30, you can explore a plethora of tables, each featuring a different dish for you to sample and learn more about the significance of each dish. From 3:00 to 5:00, we will have 30 minute sessions where you can learn about the history of our party, when it started, who hosted it, and how the party evolved over the years. At 4:00, join us for an interactive demonstration of what we call our “Jackpot Cups.” Learn how our family bets on the races in a unique way that is very different from the stereotypical betting you may be accustomed to. Make sure to bring some pocket change and get involved yourself, and maybe if you’re lucky, you can make some money after the main Derby race! At 5:30, join us in watching the Derby race, and if you participated in the “Jackpot Cups” event, find out if you’re a winner!
Everybody Loves a Good Cookout
Who doesn’t love a good cookout? Grab yourself a burger, hot dog, or bratwurst, and fill the rest of your plate with an assortment of delicious side dishes and desserts! There’s something here for everyone. Join us at 2:00 and learn about some of the primary dishes served at the party like Grandmama’s cheese grits, Derby Pie, sausage balls, and obviously the burgers, brats, and hotdogs. Watch as these dishes are prepared in front of you and stroll around to all the various stations and sample each of the unique dishes that have shown up at our parties in the past! You’ll also learn about how the food was presented, as one of our cousins recounts the plates the food is served on:
“We always had the little Derby plates and napkins, and many years we’d have leftover plates and napkins from years before, so they had the wrong Derby number on them!”
After the cooking demonstration, and most of the afternoon, you will be able to walk around to many various tables with all of the dishes you would find at our party. Take some time to learn more about the dishes and sample them! There’s so much for you to try, so if you leave the event hungry, you’ve done something wrong! As my mother recalls from the numerous parties we’ve had over the years:
“There would always be so much food…there was always so much that I don’t know that I’d get everything each year.”
History of the Party
The origins of the Graham Family Derby Party trace back a few decades to the 1980’s, and the party started out as a small family gathering. In 1989, the party was hosted by my father, and has been hosted by him ever since. The party grew in size over the years, with church friends joining in through the 1990’s and into the early 2000’s, and once myself and my brother started school in the mid-2000’s, many of our friends from school and their families started showing up, and the party continued to grow in size. For many of us, the focus was not on the Kentucky Derby itself. Many of us didn’t care at all about the races, nor did we really know much about the races, but they would be on in the background all afternoon. As my dad recalls from the many years we’ve hosted the party:
“I never really cared about the horse racing itself, it was just an opportunity to have a party and have people over.”
One of our cousins shares a similar sentiment to my dad regarding the party:
“In all reality, it was the getting together with family that was more important than the race itself. Just getting to hang out and spend time with the family. That was really the best thing about the Derby party.”
McNeill (2013:47) writes that a party such as this “can often appear in institutional forms that are celebrated in folk ways (a family’s Fourth of July BBQ tradition while observing the city’s fireworks display overhead).” The party has never really been about the Derby itself, but Derby Day provides a great opportunity for us to all come together and enjoy each other’s company and spend time with family and friends, especially those family members we do not see much throughout the year.
Jackpot Cups!
Interested in how our family’s way of betting differs from most other Derby betting? Join us at 4:00 for an interactive demonstration of our Jackpot Cups, where we will explain how the cups work, and why we do it. Our family is not big on betting, so instead of betting the big bucks, we bet pocket change. It wasn’t about trying to win big on the race, but just for fun. Here’s what one of our cousins had to say about our cups:
“We always did the little dime nickel quarter cups just for the fun of it.”
You have the opportunity to join us in this tradition as we watch the Derby race later in the afternoon. After taking part in the demonstration, put some of your own pocket change in and find out during the Derby race if it’s your lucky day!
Significance of the Food
We have always grilled burgers, hot dogs, and bratwursts for the party, but some other common dishes that are usually present are my grandmother’s cheese grits and Derby Pies. She has used her cheese grits recipe for years, and aside from maybe Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners, this is the only other time throughout the year she makes a Derby Pie. Many of the other side dishes and desserts are brought by those who attend the party, making the meal unique each year, as no two parties have the exact same food. The food itself was never really anything super special, much of it was your stereotypical southern-style cookout type of food, but what it represented was bigger than just the food. Twitty (2017:66) writes about the familial connections that can be evoked from the food: “Famliliensinn: German, the feeling and sense of family connection. I longed for it.” Our food was no gourmet steak dinner, but it was a meal that everyone enjoyed, and the food was always good. It was a meal that represented the strong connections in our family, that even if you were not a blood relative, you felt like family when you came to the party. Everyone who showed up to the party had good food as well as good fellowship with friends and family, and that was more important than the Derby race. It didn’t matter that everything served there could easily be made at home or bought from the store, what mattered was the person who brought the dish. Lundy (2016:296) writes that “people still unite around food because food taps into much deeper values.” Could you get the same food at a grocery store and cook it yourself? Sure. But the fellowship with friends and family that the food represents far surpasses the stereotypical “cookout” nature of the food. Our party is all about family and gathering to eat good food. One of our cousins sums it up pretty well:
“That’s the kind of food I enjoy, and it’s always good to get together and eat comfort foods I guess you could call it.”
Sources
Lynne McNeill. 2013. Folklore Rules. Boulder: University Press of Colorado
Michael Twitty. 2017. Selections from The Cooking Gene. New York: Harper Collins.
Ronni Lundy. 2016. Selections from Victuals: An Appalachian Journey with Recipes. New York: Clarkson Potter.
