Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread & Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking

Winner of the James Beard Foundation Cookbook of the Year Award

Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, & Scuppernong Wine is a scrumptious slice of Smoky Mountain and Blue Ridge hill country foodlore handed down from Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland, Germany, and the Cherokee Nation. In addition to generous helpings of folklore, the text highlights and embraces the art of Appalachian cuisine from pioneer days to the present, providing insights that will fascinate readers everywhere.

Divided into four sections - The Folklore, The Art, The Foods, The Blessings - the book is packed with authoritative folklore and authentic Appalachian recipes, as well as old-timey photographs in the Foxfire fashion: fireplace and wood-stove cooking, hog killing, bear hunting, shuck-bean strining, apple-butter partying, dinner on the grounds, and much more.

The Folklore includes chapters on the people, seasons, and social life as it pertains to food. The Art includes chapters on growing, gardening, farming by the signs, food preparation, and food preservation. The more than 200 recipes are accompanied with stories of how the foods have been passed from generation to generation. And the Blessings include numerous hill country invocations.

All in all, the book contains 61 fascinating chapters and almost one hundred sidebars on special topics. Among the 23 chapters of recipes are such subjects as: Corn Bread: Mountain Staff of Life; From Catheads to Angel Biscuits; Moonshine: Mountain Water of Life; Hog-Killing Day: Mountain Celebration; Smokehouse Ham and Red-Eye Gravy. The result of years of research and interviews, Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, & Scuppernong Wine will remind readers of the Foxfire series of an earlier generation.