INTRODUCTION

Both of us come from families with roots in the Appalachian South running back over many generations. In our case, the geographical setting happens to be the mountains of southwestern North Carolina, but the culinary folkways characterizing our respective lives have a far broader reach. With a delightful spicing of local variations in cooking practices, favorite dishes and the most common crops and foodstuffs, along with other localized minor differences, they have a considerable degree of similarity across a wide region. That is what the recipes in the pages that follow endeavor to capture—the flavors and flair, traditions and tastes of southern Appalachia.

Several things need to be made clear at the outset. Neither of us is a culinary professional in any sense. We have never darkened the doors of a classroom at a culinary institute or higher learning establishment as students. Nor have we cooked in restaurants or similar settings, unless you count weekly kitchen stints for one summer in a tourist resort town in the Smokies where Jim substituted for the cook, who regularly was too hungover to work the day following receipt of his paycheck. Our training comes strictly in the practical fashion that has long typified the region’s cooking. Namely, what we know (and most of the recipes we share) derives from training by family forebears along with an essential and irreplaceable aspect of cooking, as those from whom we learned might have put it: practical, firsthand “doings in the kitchen.”

Tipper does have some background experience as a former teacher of cooking classes at the John C. Campbell Folk School along with hundreds of posts and videos on the two mediums through which she shares her expertise, her Blind Pig & the Acorn blog and Celebrating Appalachia YouTube channel. While neither is devoted exclusively to cooking, food constitutes one of the central features of both offerings. The former appears daily through the year and has done so for well over a decade, while the latter, which is of more recent vintage, is offered several times each week. It, too, explores food preparation, along with culinary folkways and closely related subjects such as gardening, on a frequent basis. She is also the author of a small e-cookbook featuring some of her all-time favorite recipes.

Jim, although he has enjoyed cooking all his life and even did a bit of kitchen work during the aforementioned summertime stint in a restaurant, became involved in culinary communication in a significant fashion when he became a full-time freelance writer focusing on hunting, fishing and the natural world. That led to a number of cookbooks coauthored with his late wife, Ann. More recently, he has written about the manner in which various aspects of food—gardening; care of livestock and utilization of the fruits of such efforts in the form of eggs, dairy products and meat; preservation of foodstuffs; and cooking—have been shaping factors in his life. That includes a regular column in Smoky Mountain Living magazine, scores of contributions of recipes and food lore to the Sporting Classics Daily blog and, most significantly, his autobiographical Fishing for Chickens: A Smokies Food Memoir. He has also given talks on cooking and done demonstrations, mostly involving wild game, for sportsmen’s groups, hunt clubs and similar gatherings.

The subject areas and recipes in the pages that follow represent a cross section of what we have eaten and prepared all our respective lives. They also typify traditional Appalachian dishes and focus on foods, whether from the garden or nature’s larder, that have formed the essence of regional diet over many generations. You will find numerous recipes covering foods lying at the heart of Appalachian foodways, the “corn and taters,” as well as “maters and other garden truck,” found on mountain tables throughout the year. Corn, a key crop not only for humans but also for barnyard beasts and fowl, is given prominent attention at the outset, while a panoply of recipes for desserts in the form of cakes, pies, cookies, jellies and more pay ample recognition to the prominence sweets have always played in regional diet. Altogether, close to three hundred recipes celebrate the enduring and endearing heritage that is cooking in Appalachia.

If this was a highly formalized cookbook focusing on haute cuisine and bandying about terms such as foie gras, au vin, reduction and remoulade, this would be the point where we wished readers bon appétit. Instead, given the nature of this book’s contents and the region of its coverage, perhaps a thought from Jim’s beloved paternal grandfather is more appropriate. Whenever Grandpa Joe sat down at a table laden with lovingly prepared foodstuffs from Grandma Minnie’s kitchen, he would bless the food in a truly heartfelt and meaningful fashion. He always concluded with the same words: “You’uns see what’s before you. Eat hearty!”

Following his line of thinking, “you’uns” see what is available in terms of recipes recognizing a regional heritage rich in the joy of good food taken from the good earth and prepared in loving and luscious fashion. We encourage you to sample and savor the wide array of foodstuffs in the pages that follow, and as you do so, it is our genuine hope that you will celebrate the wonders of the Appalachian South’s food folkways in a manner bringing an ample measure of culinary pleasure.