Celebrating Southern Appalachian Food

High country cooking fit to grace any table. Southern Appalachia has a rich culinary tradition. Generations of passed down recipes offer glimpses into a culture that has long been defined, in considerable measure, by its food. Take a journey of pure delight through this highland homeland with stories of celebrations, Sunday dinners and ordinary suppers. The narrative material and scores of recipes offered here share a deep love of place and a devotion to this distinctive cuisine. The end result is a tempting invitation, in the vernacular of the region, to pull up a chair and take nourishment. Authors Jim Casada and Tipper Pressley, both natives of the region, are seasoned veterans in sharing the culinary delights of the southern highlands.

Recipes for breads, beverages, meat dishes, preserves, vegetables, and other foods from Appalachia are accompanied by a discussion of the region's culture

More than 100 recipes from Southern Appalachia's culinary renaissance The southern Appalachian Mountains are rich with produce, including wild ramps, corn, berries, and black walnuts. Drawing from these natural resources and fusing traditions of Native Americans and Scots-Irish settlers, the people of the region have developed a unique way of cooking. These foodways run in John Tullock’s blood. As a child growing up on an East Tennessee farm, Tullock helped his grandmother make biscuits and can pickles, and walked to town with his grandfather to trade fresh eggs for coffee. In Appalachian Cooking, he shares these memories and recipes passed down over generations, as well as modern takes on classic dishes. Recipes include: Sweet Onion Upside-Down Corn Bread Fried Green Tomatoes Skillet Braised Pork Chops Blackberry Crumble Vibrant watercolor illustrations throughout remind us that beautiful produce is often the best culinary inspiration.

Mark F. Sohn’s classic book, Mountain Country Cooking, was a James Beard Award nominee in 1997. In Appalachian Home Cooking, Sohn expands and improves upon his earlier work by using his extensive knowledge of cooking to uncover the romantic secrets of Appalachian food, both within and beyond the kitchen. The foods of Appalachia are the medium for the history of a creative culture and a proud people. This is the story of pigs and chickens, corn and beans, and apples and peaches as they reflect the culture that has grown from the region’s topography, climate, and soil. Sohn unfolds the ways of a table that blends Native American, Eastern European, Scotch–Irish, black, and Hispanic influences to become something new—and uniquely American. Sohn shows how food traditions in Appalachia have developed over two centuries from dinner on the grounds, church picnics, school lunches, and family reunions as he celebrates regional signatures such as dumplings, moonshine, and country ham. Food and folkways go hand in hand as he examines wild plants, cast-iron cookware, and the nature of the Appalachian homeplace. Appalachian Home Cooking celebrates mountain food at its best. In addition to a thorough discussion of Appalachian food history and culture, Sohn offers over eighty classic recipes, as well as mail-order sources, information on Appalachian food festivals, photographs, poetry, a glossary of Appalachian and cooking terms, menus for holidays and seasons, and a list of the top 100 Appalachian foods.

Part cookbook and part memoir, Southern Appalachian Farm Cooking blends staples of farm-fresh, Appalachian cuisine with stories of life on a large farm in East Tennessee, where homemade biscuits and harvest vegetables were the fruits of hard work and meager earnings. Robert G. Netherland begins with the family farm: a sprawling sixty acres of fertile, rolling hills located in the small town of Surgoinsville, Tennessee, situated between bends in the Holston River. From there, Netherland guides the reader through threshing wheat, churning butter, sharecroppers and country doctors, hunting and hog killing, and all the while sharing updated versions of his family’s recipes for authentic farm-to-table food. From biscuits to cornbread, freshly shelled beans to red-ripe tomatoes, and savory meats to the sweetest cherry pies, Southern Appalachian Farm Cooking provides the home cook with recipes and historical asides to turn any trip to the farmer’s market into a delicious family affair. In sharing his experiences, Netherland reminds us of a time when prepackaged and plastic-wrapped food didn’t line our counters and fill our cabinets, but in its place were baskets of seasonal fruit, canned vegetables, fresh baked breads, and hot-from-the-oven cobblers. Southern Appalachian Farm Cooking is more than just a nostalgic memoir of farming and food, it’s also filled with healthy, simple, everyday eats for the modern cook.

Every culture has its own unique flavor profile woven into the fabric of its history and traditions. Deep in the South, food is the focal point of our memories, the centerpiece of every occasion. What began as a humble means of nourishment has evolved into a cultural art form embraced throughout the country. Born-and-bred Southern belle Devon O’Day reminisces her way through this rich collection of the region’s signature dishes—sweet potato casserole, cornbread, country ham, and gumbo. From Sunday dinner to Christmas morning brunch, My Southern Food chronicles the moments of life that happen around the dining room table, on the back porch, and any place you can balance a plate on your knees. This collection isn’t just a catalog of recipes; it’s an album of memories you’re sure to recognize. The multi-talented Devon O’Day shares her rich Southern heritage in this collection of cherished regional cuisine. Raised in North Louisiana and settled in Nashville, Devon knows her way around a country kitchen. The recipes in My Southern Food reflect a lifetime of the places, people, and occasions that define Southern living. Devon journeys through this compilation of recipes with stories and anecdotes that enrich the experience of recreating her most treasured meals. You don’t have to be a Southerner to enjoy this cuisine. The appeal of these satisfying flavors is rooted in their simplicity. At the foundation of these recipes, you’ll find a spirited preparation of common foods. Immediately accessible to anyone longing for comfort, the meals in My Southern Food deliver a taste of something we’re all bound to savor.

Sydney Saylor Farr is a woman who knows Appalachia well. Born on Stoney Fork in southeastern Kentucky, she has lived much of her life close to the mountains, among people whose roots are deep in the soil and who pass on to their children a love for the land, a strong sense of belonging and of place. Mountain food and how it is cooked is very much a part of this sense of place. Ask any displaced Appalachians what they miss most and they will probably talk about soup beans, country ham, and homemade buscuits. They may also remember the kitchens at home, the warmth from the wood-burning stove, the smell of coffee, and the family gathered around the kitchen table to eat and talk. More than Moonshine is both a cookbook and a narrative that recounts the way of life of southern Appalachia from the 1940s to 1983. The women of Stoney Fork rarely had cash to spend, so they depended upon the free products of nature - their cookery used every nutritious, edible thing they could scour from the gardens and hillsides. These survival skills are recounted in the pages of More than Moonshine, with instructions for making moonshine whiskey, for fixing baked groundhog with sweet potatoes, for making turnip kraut, craklin’ bread, egg pie, apple stackcake, and other traditional dishes. More than Moonshine is more than a cookbook. It evokes a way of life in the mid-twentieth century not unlike that of pioneer days.

The Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English is a revised and expanded edition of the Weatherford Award–winning Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, published in 2005 and known in Appalachian studies circles as the most comprehensive reference work dedicated to Appalachian vernacular and linguistic practice. Editors Michael B. Montgomery and Jennifer K. N. Heinmiller document the variety of English used in parts of eight states, ranging from West Virginia to Georgia—an expansion of the first edition's geography, which was limited primarily to North Carolina and Tennessee—and include over 10,000 entries drawn from over 2,200 sources. The entries include approximately 35,000 citations to provide the reader with historical context, meaning, and usage. Around 1,600 of those examples are from letters written by Civil War soldiers and their family members, and another 4,000 are taken from regional oral history recordings. Decades in the making, the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English surpasses the original by thousands of entries. There is no work of this magnitude available that so completely illustrates the rich language of the Smoky Mountains and Southern Appalachia.