Appalachian Home Cooking: History, Culture, & Recipes

By Mark F. Sohn

“The 80 recipes are important, but really, this is a food-studies book written for those who feel some nostalgia for, or connection to, Appalachia.” —Lexington Herald-Leader

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. Shedding new light on Appalachia’s food, history, and culture, Sohn offers over eighty classic recipes, as well as photographs, poetry, mail-order sources, information on Appalachian food festivals, a glossary of Appalachian and cooking terms, menus for holidays and seasons, and lists of the top Appalachian foods. Appalachian Home Cooking celebrates mountain food at its best.

“When you read these recipes for chicken and dumplings, country ham, fried trout, crackling bread, shuck beans, cheese grits casseroles, bean patties, and sweet potato pie your mouth will begin to water whether or not you have a connection to Appalachia.” —Loyal Jones, author of Appalachian Values

“Offers everything you ever wanted to know about culinary mysteries like shucky beans, pawpaws, cushaw squash, and how to season cast-iron cookware.” —Our State

“Tells how mountain people have taken what they had to work with, from livestock to produce, and provides more than recipes, but the stories behind the preparing of the food . . . The reading is almost as much fun as the eating, with fewer calories.” —Modern Mountain Magazine

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 28, 2005
• ISBN: 9780813137568

Book preview

Regional and Cultural Roots

Appalachia, reflecting the diversity of its people, does not have a homogeneous style of food and cooking. Its food has neither a linear history nor a predictable shared taste. Certain ethnic foods are Appalachian because Africans, Asians, and Europeans migrated to the region. Other foods became popular because the region’s climate supported their growth. For example, settlers arriving from Ireland in 1860 traded an island for mountains and sheep for pigs. Ireland offered opportunities for fish and seafood, while the mountains offered large and small game. In order to survive, the settlers adapted quickly. They needed food, and they ate what was available. In addition, they wanted to eat as easily and efficiently as possible. This continuous, natural human tendency to adapt gives rise to the many regionally specific foods that interest those studying the culture.

Mountain food may not have a homogeneous style, but it is distinct. It is distinct because the region’s people were independent, its mountains offered an abundance of natural resources, and because its settlers mixed with the Native Americans. In short, the region was both isolated from the outside and firmly connected to foreign cultures. Food does not know county seats, state lines, or foreign boundaries. On some occasions, foreign settlers were able to recreate their root foods, and sometimes they could not. By working with what they had, and by adapting their native food traditions to the new environment, they developed rich food traditions.

In this chapter, we introduce the foods that have become most closely associated with Appalachia, and we also trace the ethnic, cultural, and geographical influences on the development of the region’s food traditions.

The Most Common Appalachian Foods

One way to get a sense of a region’s palate is to explore its most common traditional foods. While there is no absolute list of Appalachian favorites, several people, using a variety of methods, have tried to identify the region’s most authentic foods, and the overlaps among their choices give an indication of popularity. First, consider an average shopping list of the early to mid part of the twentieth century: Mountain families regularly bought 50-pound bags of pinto beans, Irish potatoes, and wheat flour. To these staples they added corn, pork, and apples.

Fifty-odd years later, much of that list might still be valid. A recent focus group held in Pikeville, Kentucky, listed a top ten most authentic Appalachian foods in order of importance. Topping the list was chicken and dumplings. The other nine items were cornbread, apple stack cake, biscuits and sausage gravy, soup beans, fried potatoes, pork chops, fried chicken, deviled eggs, and green beans.

In her spring 2000 senior thesis on Appalachian foods, Anna Ellis Bogle of eastern Tennessee focused on 12 recipes she considered important. In alphabetical order, her selections were: biscuits, cornbread, fried chicken, grits, pork, country ham, souse (a cold cut made with pork parts and gelatin), kraut, peas, poke, stack cake, soup beans, and venison.

And had you attended the Mountain Heritage Festival of Whites-burg, Kentucky, in the fall of 2000, you would have seen a more extensive list of traditional mountain foods displayed on the chests of your fellow fair-goers. The souvenir tee shirt sold at that event listed the following: shucky beans, fried pies, cornbread, gravy and biscuits, fried potatoes, chicken and dumplings, bread and butter pickles, apple butter, stack cake, pickled corn, fried green tomatoes, pickled eggs, hominy, wilted lettuce ’n’ onions, soup beans and cornbread, mustard greens, fresh peas, fried okra, corn pones, pickled beans, watermelon pickles, corn fritters, molasses, drop biscuits, corn cob jelly, kraut, boiled cabbage, cooked ribs ’n’ potatoes, rhubarb, souse, blackberry cobbler, baked sweet potatoes, fat back, gingerbread, deviled eggs.

These four lists help us identify important food of Appalachia. But they really don’t go quite far enough. To both focus the definition and to suggest the breadth of Appalachian food, consider the following list of about 100 items. Foods are included here because they are popular, have historic roots, and elicit strong emotions.

These foods are of Appalachia not only because the region embraces them, but, more importantly, because Appalachians prepare them and recall them with joy. Of the foods listed below, some are symbolic while others are daily fare. Although food preparations have changed dramatically over the last 50 years, some elements of taste, styles of cooking, and cooking utensils persist causing traditional mountain foods to endure.

First 10: bacon, biscuits and breakfast gravy, chicken ’n’ dumplings, cornbread, coffee, fried potatoes, green beans, soup beans, stack cakes, vegetable soup

Next 15: apple butter, chili, coleslaw, corn on the cob, deviled eggs, dumplings, fried apples, fried chicken, gingerbread, kraut and wieners, moonshine, peanut butter fudge, pork chops, sausage gravy, sweet potatoes

Second 25: apple pie, banana pudding, blue cheese dressing, boiled greens, bread pudding, broccoli casserole, buttermilk, chow chow, cornmeal muffins, cracklings, cream pull candy, dinner rolls, fresh apple cake, fried chicken livers, fried mush, macaroni and cheese, peach cobbler, peanut brittle, ramps, shuck beans, sweet tea, turnips, venison, wilted or killed lettuce, country ham

Third 25: barbecue, cherry cobbler, chocolate fudge, chocolate gravy, corn meal gravy, corn pudding, corn relish, cushaw, dried apples, dry land fish (morels), fried liver mush, ham biscuits, hominy, honey, peach pie, pecan pie, pickled beets, poke, prune cake, pumpkin roll, sorghum syrup, souse, squirrel, tomato gravy, wild greens

Fourth 25: bean patties, blackberries, black walnut cake, bread pudding, cabbage rolls, cheese biscuits, cold pies, egg butter, fat back, fried apple pies, fried sorghum syrup, gritted cornbread, lard, mustard greens, pawpaws, pecans, pork ribs, potato cakes, potato roll candy, rabbit, rape, rhubarb pie, salmon patties, salt-rising bread, sassafras tea, sauerkraut, stuffed green peppers, succotash, trout, wine

Traditional Appalachian Meals and Seasonal Menus

While the previous section lists individual dishes, menus are also significant because a knowledge of food combinations is essential to understanding the culture’s foodways. Menus provide insight into the context of recipes. Rather than being served alone, recipes have a place that should not be separated from the farm, farmhouse, or the kitchen. Menus also reflect the season. For example, many cooks serve winter vegetable soup as the core of a winter dinner, as suggested in the second menu below.

Brief Summer-Fall-Winter Menus: Each of these might be a simple, home-cooked meal or dinner for a traditional Appalachian family. Notice the emphasis on meats and starches and that some menus include not only two potatoes, but also corn, baked beans, and biscuits.

Soup beans, kraut with wieners, fried potatoes, cornbread, greens, sliced fresh onions, coffee, buttermilk

Winter vegetable soup, cornbread or grilled cheese sandwiches, buttermilk, soda pop

Fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, fried potatoes, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, baked beans, biscuits, corn or corn pudding

Fried catfish, coleslaw, skillet corn (rake off cob, add cornmeal, fry), hush puppies, fried potatoes

Chicken ’n’ dumplings, green beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, hot rolls, pone bread (skillet cornbread)

Fried pork chops, fried green tomatoes, biscuits, sliced red tomatoes, fried apples

Steak, baked potato, green salad, dinner rolls

Summer barbecued pork ribs, buttermilk, cornbread, coleslaw, fresh sliced tomatoes, fresh cucumbers, sliced onions, cantaloupe

Desserts tend not to be matched with particular main dish items. In addition, for the last 50 years or so freezers and other means of preserving have allowed storage of rhubarb picked in the spring, blueberries gathered in late summer, and apples from the fall. Thus, many desserts are served out of season. A typical list of mountain desserts might include banana pudding, biscuits with beehive honey, blackberry cobbler, blackberry dumplings, bread pudding, cut-out watermelon, molasses stack cake, peach cobbler with ice cream, strawberry dumplings, strawberry-rhubarb pie, strawberry shortcake, rice pudding, vinegar dumplings, and vinegar pie. Popular cakes include burnt sugar cake, gingerbread served with sorghum, pineapple upside-down cake, pound cake, prune cake, red velvet cake, and scripture cake (a pound cake where each ingredient is paired to a Bible verse).

Seasonal Celeberations: At times mountaineers gather to enjoy more extensive meals. When the family drives up the hollow to the old homeplace for the last warm-weather gathering of fall, or for a mid-season meal to break winter’s monotony, the cooks will bring dishes such as those listed below. These menus illustrate traditional food combinations Appalachian families have come to expect.

Fall Menu I: Vegetable soup, chicken casserole, chicken and dumplings, fried chicken, ham, green beans, mashed potatoes, corn pudding, sorghum biscuits, white and pumpkin rolls, loaf breads, blueberry pie, black walnut cake, sugar cookies, fried apples, persimmon pudding

Fall Menu II: Chicken and dumplings, Southern fried chicken, soup beans, cabbage stew, green beans, shelly beans, pickled beets, sweet potato casserole, hash brown casserole, buttermilk cornbread, pumpkin rolls, pecan pie, dried apple stack cake, popcorn balls

Winter Menu: Buttermilk biscuits and country ham, squirrel gravy and biscuits, venison chili, broccoli casserole, shuck beans, scalloped potatoes, blackberry dumplings, lemon butter bars, coffee and hot cocoa.

Comparing Appalachian and Southern Food

Countries such as India, France, and Italy have long histories, but the United States is a young nation, and, not surprisingly, its food traditions are relatively newly formed. Even so, today America enjoys ethnically distinct foods, regionally distinct foods, chef-created foods, and even nationally symbolic foods. These flag-raising foods are potato salad, hot dogs, hamburgers, meat loaf, pancakes, and apple pie. From coast to coast, the nation embraces chili, chuck wagon stew, baked beans, brownies, and bread puddings. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, foods travel.

However, history, culture, geography, and climate do influence regional cooking styles, as is apparent in Southern and Appalachian cooking. Perhaps because of the region’s long growing season and mild climate, one of the nation’s richest food heritages developed in the South. Southern styles include soul food, Cajun, Creole, plantation, Ozark, Florida-Spanish, low Charleston, and coastal cooking. Traditional Southern crops such as rice, cane sugar, citrus fruits, peas, beans, soybeans, and sweet potatoes find their way into recipes in all of these traditions. And where the land touches the sea, recipes for oysters, shrimp, crabs, and crayfish are common.

Many of the iconic foods of Appalachia are equally common in the South (cornbread, biscuits and gravy, fried apples, and chicken and dumplings, to name a few), and regional commercial beverages and foods such as Jack Daniel’s, Mountain Dew, Moon Pies, and Goo-Goo Clusters have crossed regional lines to become common to both food traditions. But geography and climate limited the spread of other foods. For example, seafood is uncommon in land-locked Appalachia, and rice—associated with Charleston, South Carolina, and regions farther south—could not be grown in the mountains. The same is true of cane sugar, which grows in frost-free climate zones but not in Appalachia. This suggests why sorghum, honey, and maple syrups are the sweeteners found in cooler climates including Appalachia. Similarly, Irish potatoes are more popular in Appalachia than in the South. It is simply too warm in the Deep South for farmers to hold seed potatoes over from one season to the next.

However, one Southern tradition—soul food—is well represented in Appalachia. Soul food’s collard greens, hominy, cracklings, and ham hocks are popular, as are sweet potato casseroles, corn pudding, pork chops, coconut cream cakes, and peanut brittle. But cultural differences may have prevented the wholesale adoption of soul food traditions in Appalachia. During the time of slavery, Blacks were cooking in the big house, the center of life on great plantations. There, for the pleasure of their masters, slaves cooked beaten biscuits, fried okra, and stuffed ham steaks. They made French-style desserts such as crème brûlée, pears belle Hélène, and chocolate mousse. The grand plantation home was not only a farm center, but also a center for balls, barbecues, and soirées, and, at these special events, the host offered distinctive foods. In contrast, in Appalachia there were few slaves, smaller farms, and little of the food associated with slavery and plantations. Like other agrarian cultures, most Appalachians raised, gathered, and prepared foods within the family, and mothers passed these traditions down to their children.

Despite these differences, neither food nor food writers stay within state lines. Southern cookbooks are a mix of coastal and mountain, Spanish and Cajun, African-American and Native American, and Maryland and Georgia. This homogenization is normal and reflects the openness of American culture. Indeed, it is more difficult to separate the Appalachian from Southern cooking traditions than to combine the two into a monolithic whole.

The British Connection

Both ingredients and recipes are obvious venues for cultural understanding. On both sides of the Atlantic, foods such as moonshine, buttermilk, and potatoes suggest links between Appalachia and the British Isles.

Moonshine: The word moonshine was first used to describe white brandy that was smuggled on the south coast of England in Kent and Sussex. Early settlers from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and England came to the Appalachian Mountains with distilling tools and quickly replaced oats and barley with corn. In fact, on the American frontier they made whiskey with almost every imaginable crop, including pears, peaches, apples, grapes, elderberries, pumpkins, and parsnips. For the Scots-Irish, whiskey-making was linked to freedom. They came to Appalachia in search of freedom, and they brought not only their whiskey-making knowledge but also their worms and stills.

Buttermilk: For much of their history before the year 1500, the Irish were a pastoral people who kept enough goats, cows, and sheep so they could practically live on milk (called white meat) gathered from their herds. They used fresh milk to make cream, curds, cheese, and butter. They also drank milk fresh, sour, and clotted. And they made buttermilk.

The earliest settlers of Appalachia valued milk and milk products equally highly—when the mountains were a frontier, cow’s milk could mean the difference between life and death for children. The tradition of keeping cows for milk persisted until about 1950, when rural homes that were served with electricity slowly began buying milk rather than keeping cows.

Today in Appalachia, some mountain people drink buttermilk while eating soup beans or killed lettuce, the traditional dish of hot grease and wilted greens. Others crumble cornbread into buttermilk, and of course, many others do not drink buttermilk. (See Part Two for a recipe for buttermilk pie.)

Potatoes: White Irish potatoes, the standard grocery store potatoes, are basic to the mountain diet. Mountaineers grow them in gardens and buy them in 5-, 10-, 25-, and even 50-pound bags. Mountaineers have an expression that supports the importance of potatoes. A meal is hardly worth coming home for if potatoes are not on the table.

Just as the English, Scots, and Irish eat them baked, boiled, and fried, so do mountaineers. Potatoes are native to South America, but many people associate them with Ireland. Mountain families bake them in bread, fry them in oil, and boil them in soup. They serve them hot and enjoy them cold. Sometimes they boil them in milk and serve them with gravy as is done in the recipe, new potatoes and gravy in Part Two.

Breakfast: In continental Europe, breakfast might be a roll and a cup of coffee, but breakfast fare in the British Isles is much heartier. For example, according to Mary Kinsella, author of An Irish Farmhouse Cookbook, an Irish breakfast consists of rashers (bacon), sausages, eggs, porridge (hot cereal, usually oatmeal, but also a mixture of grains), and grilled tomatoes. Compare that to the traditional Appalachian breakfast, which may include scrambled eggs, biscuits, pork chops, bacon, sliced tomatoes, fried potatoes, fried apples, and gravy. Both offer two kinds of pork, fresh tomatoes, biscuits, and eggs. If the menus included special occasion foods, the overlap would be greater. See Chapter 2, Breakfast Traditions.

Biscuits: On both sides of the Atlantic, quick breads made with baking powder or baking soda (soda bread, scones, and biscuits) are served all day long—for breakfast, morning tea, or Sunday dinner. The ingredients in the triangular, raisin-studded Irish scone are very similar to those in the cathead biscuits that mountain cooks break into odd shapes or the baking powder biscuit formed with a biscuit cutter. See the recipe for baking powder biscuits in Part Two.

Dumplings: Andre Simon believes that dumplings are one of the most characteristically English contributions to cookery. The hard dumplings from Sussex (southern England) he describes in his Encyclopedia of Gastronomy bear a marked resemblance to Appalachian slick dumplings. It certainly is possible that our flat, sinking dumplings originated in Sussex. See the recipe for mountain dumplings: slick runners in Part Two.

Apple Pie: The double crust, all-American apple pie is generally not found in the traditional cookery of continental Europe, but it is popular in Ireland. The Irish apple pies have less filling than do their American counterparts, and are cut into squares, not wedges. And while the American pie crust is savory and flaky, the Irish crust is just slightly sweet, smooth, and rich, much like the dough on a fig Newton.

Gravy: Flour-based gravies—tomato gravy, chocolate gravy, brown gravy, sausage gravy, and more—are among the great Appalachian foods. They are valued equally highly in the British Isles, where, as Alan Davidson says, Should gravy be lacking, the voice of the chief male at the table will be raised in that most terrible and touching of remonstrances: ‘Where’s t’gravy, then?’ See the three recipes for white sausage, chocolate, and tomato gravy in Part Two.

Native American Food History: Hunting, Gathering, and Modern Feasts

About 12,000 years ago, as the earth warmed and glaciers retreated, a nomadic people, likely arriving from Asia, settled the southern Appalachian region. These first human inhabitants developed food traditions that continued until the Industrial Revolution.

In the early years, they ate mastodon and giant tortoise. They hunted, fished, and gathered. Then, the earth warmed again, the mastodon and tortoise moved north, and the southern diet changed. About 10,000 years ago, native Appalachians in the southern region ate bear, elk, white-tailed deer, turkeys, squirrels, and raccoons. They also enjoyed hickory nuts, black walnuts, acorns, grapes, berries, and persimmons.

The climate differences between northern and southern Appalachia produced cultural differences between the tribes of the two regions. Life north of Virginia and Kentucky was more difficult, and anthropologists say these groups were more egalitarian and less dependent on agriculture. The smaller populations of northern tribes, those from the Maryland panhandle north, were more nomadic than those in the south, with the men who hunted eating more meat and the women who farmed eating more vegetables.

Unlike their northern counterparts, the inhabitants of the middle Appalachian regions that now include Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio gradually abandoned the hunter-gatherer traditions in favor of agriculture. They settled in one area and began to plant crops such as squash, corn, and beans. Domesticated squash was first grown as early as 5,000 years ago; corn became a dominant crop about 1,000 years ago; and the common bean arrived in southern Appalachia 800 years ago. By the sixteenth century, agriculture was well developed. In 1549, Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto recorded that Cherokee tribes were cultivating seven food plants: beans, corn, grapes, mulberries, potatoes, serviceberries, and roman squash.

As the practice of gardening matured, the population increased, particularly in the warmer southern regions of Appalachia. The stability produced by access to a dependable food supply influenced the development of hierarchies, chiefdoms, and an elite class. It also gave the Cherokees the time to develop a written alphabet and tribes in Florida time to build temple mounds. But the development of agriculture was not an unmixed blessing. The diets of the men, who continued to travel and hunt for game, remained high in meats, nuts, and wild greens, while the women, who tended the crops, consumed greater quantities of starchy foods such as corn. This increase in starches is partly to blame for an increase in dental problems among women, and as villages developed, these populations experienced a general decline in health.

Whether using starches or meats and vegetables, these women also developed a distinct cuisine. In their 1951 volume, Cherokee Cooklore, Mary Ulmer and Samuel E. Beck identified historic Cherokee recipes, including the following one for succotash: Shell some corn, skin it with wood ashes lye. Cook corn and beans separately, then together. If desired you may put pieces of pumpkin in, be sure to put the pumpkin in in time to get done before the pot is removed from the fire. Ulmer and Beck’s book also includes directions for preparing such dishes as bean bread, chestnut bread, hominy soup, barbecued fish, ramps, bean salad, dried cabbage, dumplings, parched corn, hominy corn drink, honey locust drink, succotash, and parched yellow jackets (made with bees).

Native Americans also adopted American, African, and European foods. European foods that eventually became popular were pork, wheat, barley, apples, turnips, cabbage, and various kinds of liquor including beer, wine, brandy, and rum. Europeans also brought horses, cattle, sheep, and chickens, while Africans brought cowpeas, okra, watermelons, and collard greens. From Central and South America came potatoes, tomatoes, lima beans, and chocolate.

This admixture of styles is reflected in the menus of the Indian feasts the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, North Carolina, sponsored in the 1950s. Including the Native American foods that were often dominant, these dinners were a melding of the food of four continents. The menus included: boiled corn mush, baked cornbread pones, cornmeal gravy, rolled flat flour dumplings boiled with dry beans or chicken, boiled chestnut bread, succotash, flavorful dried leather breeches (dried green beans) boiled with side meat, fresh ramps (a type of wild onion) fried with crease greens (a leafy spring green), and squirrel gravy served over biscuits, as well as dishes made with wild and cultivated fruits and berries.

The Appalachian Frontier: History, Attitudes, Tools, and Food

Appalachia might be considered America’s first frontier. Those who struck out from the established coastal colonies in the eighteenth century were among the first Europeans on the trail, the first to see the new territory, and the first to settle. For those who settled, the frontier became a way of life that, Joe Gray Taylor maintains, lasted into the twentieth century. They established communities, built churches, and, at times, fought the Indians.

These European immigrants brought wheat, cattle, pork, guns, and cast-iron cookware to the area. They also brought the technology required to smelt iron, and its impact on the frontier was vast. Eventually they used iron not only to cast cauldrons, ovens, and fryers, but also to forge rails, tools, and rifles.

Even more significant than the technology and goods they brought, these settlers also brought attitudes and values. From the beginning of the nineteenth century and until the coming of railroads and industry 80 to 120 years later, Europeans were drawn west for land, freedom, and challenge. For them, conquering the frontier was a goal much like space exploration was for Americans of the latter part of the twentieth century. Frontiersmen were isolated and their survival took hard work, but those challenges allowed the expression of values that included self-reliance, industry, and individualism. If one accepts William Jackson Turner’s thesis that the frontier shaped democracy, then the early settlers of Appalachia had an enduring impact on the American spirit. Like those who conquered the western frontier, fur-trade frontier, the gold-rush frontier, and the grazing frontier, the settlers of the Appalachian frontier contributed to the formation of the American character. For some people, this Appalachian-American spirit was embodied in Daniel Boone, for others it was country ham or moonshine, and for others it was the enduring spirit of the Cherokees and the beauty of their mountains.

These first settlers also brought food traditions that persist to this day. Pork, because it was easily preserved, was a valued frontier food. Farmers killed mature pigs, laden with lard, in late fall or winter. They boiled the fat for use in cooking and soap making, and they salted and dry-cured the meat, boiled bone and head parts to make souse, and simmered pigs’ feet for soup. The pork lard that settlers used on the frontier dominated mountain cooking until the end of the twentieth century, and today, pork remains a favorite meat. In addition to pork, frontiersmen raised cattle and used the milk to make cheese, buttermilk, butter, and cream. They planted corn, beans, and squash, picked apples, peaches, and grapes, and gathered nuts, berries, and greens.

In the early homesteads, the stone fireplace was central to the cabin; it provided heat for both the house and the cooking. Around 1825 in progressive areas, wood-burning or coal stoves began to replace the hearth; stoves did not become common in most of Appalachia until well after the Civil War.

A grand mountain dinner during the mid-nineteenth century might include elk backstrap steaks, venison stew, greens fried in bear grease, and ashcakes—cornbread rolled in ashes and baked directly on the coals on the hearth. Corn on the cob, as well as Irish and sweet potatoes, were cooked in the same fashion. After a dessert of fruit pie or sweet cake, pioneers passed a jug and enjoyed a splash of corn whiskey. While the environment was harsh, Appalachian settlers prided themselves on quality foods, and often included with this high-fashion frontier dinner were hot biscuits, fresh butter, honey, strawberry preserves, mixed pickles, rich milk, cream, teas, and coffee.

A dinner of this style might be prepared in, and served on, cooking and tableware crafted by the pioneers themselves. The well-established frontier home was equipped with items crafted from stone, wood, tin, clay, and iron. Pioneers used wood to make boxes, bowls, barrels, churns, trays, spoons, stirrers, hooks, rolling pins, and mashers. Tinware was light and easy to fashion, and tinsmiths made cups, candlesticks, graters, simple saucepans, cake pans, and pie plates. The round tin cup with its flat bottom and curved handle was the standard vessel for cold beverages.

In areas either to the east or west of the mountains, early craftspeople also mined clay and made pottery. In some ways this material was not as durable as cast iron, tin, or wood, but items such as crocks, bowls, and pitchers found a place on mountain farms. Settlers made pottery with redware, a kind of clay, or the stronger gray stoneware clay. Wealthier settlers also had more valuable materials such as pewter, copper, and silver in their frontier homes. Pewter was associated with the wealthy and given for wedding gifts. Between 1750 and 1800, pewter was most commonly used for dinnerware such as plates, but pitchers and other tableware such as cups were also made.

The Appalachian Frontier: European Settlement

While we might associate frontiersmen with independence, they were in fact quite dependent on other settlers. In many cases, newcomers owed the very roofs over their heads to the efforts of established families, who helped them build cabins and provided other support. To establish their land position over the Indians, they built quickly, and, as they worked, they kept their rifles close at hand in case of Indian attack. The first log cabins were single-room dwellings that may have measured a mere 16 by 20 feet. The fireplace and open hearth provided heat for both the house and the cooking.

Once established, families were able to take advantage of Appalachia’s rich soil and its abundance of wild game. As they prospered, they added rooms onto their cabins and worked hard to preserve food. For emergencies and hunting trips, they made jerky and hardtack, a hard biscuit made with flour and water. At home they used the popular food storage methods such as drying, salting, and pickling. In addition, frontiersmen stored dry foods such as corn, flour, and beans aboveground, and in cool underground storage areas they saved potatoes, beets, turnips, carrots, and parsnips. From this period, dried apples, peach leather (a sheet of dried fruit purée), and shuck beans have remained popular.

From the Native Americans, settlers learned to identify wild greens such as creases, fiddleheads, lamb’s quarters, poke, purslane, ramps, and watercress. However, wild meat and animal fats were more important to the pioneer diet than greens. Wild game remained abundant well into the nineteenth century. In the late eighteenth century, J.F.D. Smythe toured the region and in his book, A Tour of the United States of America, said that he saw wild turkeys in flocks of 5,000. However, to supplement wild game, even the early settlers raised pork and beef that, for most of the year, could forage in the wilds.

Industrial Period: Steel, Logging, and Ethnic Foods

Industry came early to Appalachia. First, the region was close to the population centers of the East and products were easily shipped to the east coast. Second, Appalachia’s abundant resources of water, timber, and coal attracted manufacturing. And finally, its many hot springs and other resources for leisure attracted the wealthy.

In about 1750, when Englishmen Thomas Newcomen and James Watt were inventing the steam engine, a new wave of settlers began their push into Appalachia. Often they were looking for resources to support the industrial development. Appalachia held an abundance of fossil fuels, and after 1840 coal was used as fuel for making iron. From 1750 to about 1850, forges were small and charcoal was used for heat. Once coal became the fuel source, however, Appalachia became a magnet for industrial development. Towns such as Johnstown and Altoona in Pennsylvania, and Morgantown, Fairmont, and Clarksburg in West Virginia, fed supplies to Pittsburgh, allowing it to become one of the world’s leading cities of the time. The development of the Carnegie Steel Corporation in the 1870s and 1880s was dependent on Appalachia’s coal and iron resources.

At about the same time—1870 to 1910—the systematic cutting of Appalachia’s gigantic hardwood forests began, and timbering provided many jobs. Those who farmed in the warm months of the summer could cut and float timber in the cool rainy months of the winter. After 1910 forests continued to provide employment, but at a lower level.

Working loggers were served by male bull-cooks or boilers who prepared large meals that were served from early morning to late evening. Loggers’ food reflected the common fare of the region and included smoked ham, squash, cabbage, potatoes, and cornbread. Breakfasts included pies, biscuits, eggs, tomatoes, potatoes, and pork chops. Those moving logs down river carried foods such as cornbread, bacon, smoked ham, sausage, chow chow, fox grape jelly, sorghum syrup, and moonshine. In The Encyclopedia of Appalachia, Deanne Moskowitz notes that the loggers of this period coined terms for many foods, and coffee became jerkwater and milk was white line. Donuts were fried holes, and apple butter was Pennsylvania salve. The term sawmill gravy may have been coined by a logger who was eating country gravy with cathead biscuits and about a dozen fried eggs.

Like the logging camps and unlike the large industrial centers such as Pittsburgh, most of Appalachian industrialization took place in small towns. As industrialists built mines and factories, new work centers attracted farmers who left their land for better jobs and places to live. While some miners and factory workers moved to company towns, others stayed in the country and worked in mines. Those who moved brought with them their agricultural skills, and they planted gardens.

Food in these communities reflected the nationalities of not only those who had been living in the mountains, but also of new immigrants. During the Industrial Period, the Appalachian region attracted people from eastern and western Europe, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent. The myriad ethnic influences on the cuisine are illustrated over and over in community-based cookbooks. The Poles who came to work in the mines and mills brought recipes for pierogies, crullers, and pickled herring; Russians brought sweet nut and poppy seed breakfast rolls; Italians cooked gnocchi and stromboli; and many other nationalities added their own favorites. Many of these recipes, while associated with particular ethnic groups, are still available in Appalachia as well as other parts of North America.

As the new immigrants were bringing new foods to the region, new kitchen equipment was entering the market. Between 1840 and 1870, hundreds of foundries began making ranges used in hearths as well as freestanding stoves. In addition to a range or stove, well-equipped kitchens now included large worktables, china closets, pie safes, and dry sinks, and, after the 1860s, perhaps even ice chests. The Industrial Revolution also brought changes in kitchen gadgets. Cast-iron apple peelers and cherry pitters, as well as tools used to squeeze lemons, stuff sausage, crack nuts, chop onions, shell peas, and slice beans made work at home more efficient. Because they simplified