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(More customer reviews)Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine is my favorite kind of a writing: Perhaps it's just an attention span that only slightly exceeds a chicken's, but I've always been partial to encyclopedias, chrestomathies, and motley books. The prime example in English might be Robert Burton's The Essential Anatomy of Melancholy (Dover Books on Literature & Drama), in a peripatetic group that includes everything from William Blake's epic poems to Ambrose Bierce's subversive dictionary to James Agee's queer account of Alabama sharecroppers. Like the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament, each seems to offer a continuously unique, surprising, and delightful encounter, and the reading as a whole is as various and inexhaustible as experience himself.
So it was with great satisfaction I opened, at random, Joseph Dabney's "cookbook" to find instructions for bear stew combined with an anecdote about a North Carolina woman breastfeeding a cub. Smokehouse Ham is hardly a manual for cooking but a living compilation of history, biography, opinion, and folklore, which animate each chapter's recipes. Personally, I can hear my own grandfather talking about hunting squirrels and rabbits in the North Georgia foothills to supply the family's table during the Depression, and in this way the volume invites a kind of mutual action, begging for me to pull out a pencil and write in the margins as the page inscribes me.
I should add a recommendation that will touch all similar bibliophiles. Characteristically, the book has a reassuring heft. My favorite books have all been physically substantial. They're like intimate companions. Often when I've fallen asleep reading late, I've woken the next morning to find the rectangular impression in the sheets beside me wholly comforting.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Appalachian Cooking (10th Anniversary Edition)
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:
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.
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