Appalachian Home Cooking: History, Culture, and Recipes Review

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(More customer reviews)While most cook books just have recipes for the reader, most people never know where the recipe came from or what the history of the dish is. Maybe it is because I was a history major in college, but I found it so much more interesting knowing why some foods are prepared the way the are, where the dish originated, and why some of these foods are only prepared in Appalachia. Mark does a great job of explaining the background, economic forces, and reasons behind the foods widely eaten in Appalachia.
From frequenting Eastern Kentucky, I have a whole new appreciated for why vegetables are pickled, beacon is on so much food, and the corn bread in Eastern Kentucky is the best in the world.
After giving you a great background of the foods eaten in Appalachia, Mark has the other half of the book devoted to how one prepares the famous dishes and delicious staple foods of the mountains.
This is a great book for those who used to live in the mountains and forgot how to make their granny's food or for those who have only heard how good the eating is in the mountains. This book makes me miss Kay Ross's warm kitchen and the soup beans and the cornbread she always made for me when I used to live in Pikeville, Kentucky.
Andrew Dinsmore
Washington, D.C.


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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.

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Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly: Recipes from Southern Appalachia Review

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(More customer reviews)"My place, in the midst of this abundance of nature, is back in a mountain hollow on a bad dirt road surrounded by forest, wild blackberries, mountain critters, wildflowers, a few neighbors, and a passel of 'dawgs.'"
So writes Joan Aller, author of this season's must-have cookbook, "Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly: Recipes from Southern Appalachia."

And it's not like Joan Aller is an East Tennessee native who's walked the Appalachian trail with the likes of Bill Bryson or South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. She's from the West, and might be living there still but for urban sprawl and environmental ugliness. So she first moved to Nashville, which is very much a city, and then further East.

Joan Aller is an artist by profession and fearless by nature. No soon had she painted her mailbox than she was off, photographing barns and bridges and learning the ways of her new neighbors. That led quickly to food --- and five years of research. At the end, she had gorgeous photographs of Southern Appalachia, luscious photographs of Southern food, and 8,000 pages of recipes and history.

The good news is that Ms. Aller and her editors put her work on a diet. The result is a 212-page book that was extravagantly handsome until my wife and I started dog-earing the pages. Silly us --- we want to cook almost everything here. Our only non-starters: Appalachian wine, root beer and --- no kidding --- moonshine.

See if just the names don't make you look at your watch to see if it's time for some meal or other: Kentucky "hot brown" (turkey-bacon-Colby cheese sandwich drenched in Tabasco-spiked milk gravy), Mississippi Sin (French bread, cream cheese, cheddar cheese, cooked ham, sour cream, accented with sweet onion, bell pepper and Worcestershire sauce), Butternut Squash Soup with Sweet Tea and Ginger, George Washington Carver's Sweet Potato Pie, Bourbon Sweet Potato Casserole, Corn Cob Jelly, And a dip made of equal parts chopped sweet onion, grated cheese and mayonnaise, baked for 25 minutes at 350.

And....but you see the problem --- with the possible exception of boring old blue cheese balls, this book rocks like the Allman Brothers.

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There are many cookbooks about Southern cooking, but precious few celebrate the southern Appalachian food that has sustained mountain folk past and present. Thankfully, we now have Joan E. Aller's Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly.Featuring more than 150 recipes for down-home, soul-satisfying dishes, Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly is more than just a cookbook. Complete with passages on the history, places, and people of southern Appalachia, along with lush full-color photography of the food and scenery of the southern Appalachian Mountains, Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly serves as both a cookbook and a guided tour of the local lore, traditions, and culture of this uniquely American region.

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