Sohn - Appalachian home cooking: history, culture, and recipes

APPALACHIAN
Home Cooking

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY

Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright 2005 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved.

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Photographs by Mark F. Sohn
www.marksohn.com

Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sohn, Mark F.

Appalachian home cooking : history, culture, and recipes / Mark F. Sohn.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-10: 0-8131-9153-X(pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Cookery, American.

2. CookeryAppalachian Region, Southern.
I. Title.

TX715.S678115 2005

641.5974dc22

2005015814

ISBN-13: 978-0-8131-9153-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

10 09 6 5

I dedicate this work to Appalachians everywhere, as well as to Appalachian cooks and food writers who have shared their food, stories, and recipes.

Specifically, I dedicate this book to two Pike County women, now deceased, who influenced my cooking: Bill Doc Newsom of Robinson Creek and Alice Kinder of Upper Chloe Creek.

Cooking my way through this book made me want to prepare huge portions of food to share with friends. The recipes made me hungry for flavors I havent enjoyed in years. They made me remember to tell my little girl the stories and songs I learned from my grandfather and to feed her the recipes I learned from my grandmother. This book and this food made me want to go home.

Historical cookbooks are much more than collections of recipes and menus; they show not only what people eat, but also how they live and what they value. The best cookbooks convey a regions concept of home and place, which is exactly what this book does as it delves into the heart of Appalachian food and culture. I had the pleasure of testing most of the recipes in this book, and I enjoyed talking about them with Mark Sohn.

For mountain people, the homeplace is not just a house, but also a sense of place, of origin, of belonging. Their beloved mountains are not just where they live, they are where they are from. I grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains eating many of these same dishes, and I found that Mark Sohns stories capture the Appalachian peoples fierce devotion to and reliance on their land. For many years, the isolated region forced mountain cooks to rely on what was local, but they were blessed with rich, diverse, natural abundance. Meals echoed the patterns of the season because mountain cooks used the best of what was at hand, and they left little to waste.

Many ethnic groups have settled in the mountains, each bringing foods from their home countries and making the region less isolated, both geographically and culturally. Current tastes have mingled local, traditional favorites with the vast variety of foods available at any grocery store. The result is a new batch of family favorites to add to the collection handed down from previous generations.

Mountain cooks have always embraced new foods and conveniences, particularly store-bought foods that enabled them to produce meals with less work. The first packaged goods were a simple respite from a lifestyle that included little leisure time. For most people, work was constant, but not always drudgery. An evening of sitting on the porch stringing and snapping beans became a social event of storytelling, singing, and laughing. You can taste that heritage and hospitality in this book.

I had a wonderful time making these recipes. Some of them, I make often. Others, I hadnt made or tasted in years. My favorites were the Sweet Potato Pie, Stack Cake, Fresh Apple Cake, and anything you can eat with a hot, fresh biscuit or crusty cornbread. Those dishes instantly transported me back to my grandmothers kitchen, returning me to the exact aromas, the familiar flavors, and the sense of well-being that food prepared with love can convey.

Ive traveled to many places around the world, dined in fabulous restaurants, and now earn my living as a professional cooking teacher, so Ive eaten many different foods. But when people ask me about my favorite meal, I answer without hesitation soup beans, mashed taters, garden vegetables, and cornbread. When I was a child, I didnt know that my grandmother was raising us on food with a rich, cultural heritage. For us, it was just supper.

Sheri Castle,
Recipe Tester,
Cooking School Instructor
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Behind the negative hillbilly stereotypes associated with the Appalachian people, I find a culture of pride. One by one and family to family, many mountaineers cook the foods that combine history, religion, and environment and reflect a glorious heritage. However, what were once daily routines are slowly becoming memories. This book documents the passing food culture of Appalachia.

Food is integral to mountain life. Today as much as ever, Appalachian cooking expresses diverse patterns of culture, and one pattern that has been particularly informative is dinner on the grounds, a traditional covered-dish meal held in a church setting. Another is expressed in community festivals (see the listing in ). At these public events, groups celebrate food history as they create the current imagination of what once was. In addition, for convenience and often to celebrate, cooks carry their favorite dishes to schools, churches, and halls of government. For Thanksgiving, Christmas, and summer picnics, families gather around their cooking.

I find this indigenous food to be balanced, flavorful, and often healthy. Boiled beans. Chicken and dumplings. Garden vegetables. Mashed potatoes. Fresh fruit. Cornbread. Fruit cobblers. And fudge. These are foods that lend themselves to family dining and healthy living. In addition, they often provide a foundation on which professional chefs build imaginative dishes and exciting menus.

When mountain home cooks gather for a dinner, they spread dishes of salad, bread, vegetables, meats, and desserts across tables, and in this book I collect both their memories and their recipes. I use narratives to present the stack cake (a many-layered apple cake), poke plant, and country ham; and I use lists to identify mountain nuts, coffee preparations, methods of preservation, and wild greens. The reference list includes almost 200 citations and the 30 or so mail-order sources link readers to mountain ingredients. The 75 recipes are in a style that allows cooks of the twenty-first century to carry on the traditions of the mountain kitchens.

How did I go about studying Appalachian food? For more than a decade beginning in 1978, I taught a Pikeville (Kentucky) College class in Appalachian studies. As part of that class, I organized Appalachian dinners, and my students and their parents or grandparents prepared traditional dishes. With as many as 50 students in a class, these dinners were grand affairs that offered great choice. Semester after semester and year after year, my Appalachian dinners were an education in mountain food, and I took notes. I learned about moonshine, shucky beans, pawpaws, and cushaw. I tasted and talked and made mental notes.