A Loving Portrait of Appalachian Food, Past and Future

When Ronni Lundy was younger, and working as a music writer in Louisville, Kentucky, she read an article in a glossy magazine about Dwight Yoakam, then an emerging country-music sensation. In the piece, Yoakam—born in Pikeville, Kentucky, raised in Columbus, Ohio; a guy who called his second album Hillbilly Deluxe—said that as a child he’d eaten squirrel. The writer of the glossy-magazine article seemed not to believe him. Maybe the author thought it was a put-on.

Well, Lundy didn’t. "I went to my boss and said, 'This guy’s for real!'" she recalled recently. "'This story is for real and I could write this story like nobody’s business.' So I got Dwight on the phone, saying, 'I'm a kid of the diaspora and I ate squirrel growing up too.'"

Victuals features not just recipes but a complicated history of food and cooking in Appalachia.

The Appalachian diaspora, or "hillbilly highway," was the midcentury migration of people out of the mountains and into the industrial cities of the north; Yoakam's parents headed to Columbus and Lundy’s to Detroit and Louisville, where Lundy grew up. In her first cookbook, 1991's Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken, Lundy included a story about returning to her birthplace—Corbin, Kentucky—and getting her first taste of squirrel. And of course she quoted Dwight Yoakam, who lamented that there was, in Columbus, "nothing like my granny’s squirrel dinners."

Yoakam wrote a song about home and how it follows you: “Readin', Rightin’, Rt. 23,” U.S. Route 23 being the highway that runs through the hills of eastern Kentucky up through Toledo and to the automobile towns of Michigan. Lundy wrote Shuck Beans and now, 25 years later, a magisterial new cookbook about the food and people she grew up with: Victuals: An Appalachian Journey, With Recipes.

Even after they moved away, Lundy’s family visited their relatives in the mountains as often as they could. “People ask, ‘When did you start writing this book?’” she said. “And I say, ‘Probably at the age of three.’ A lot of the underpinnings of the book have to do with my personal journey of understanding my family, the culture that I come from, and the actual history of the Appalachians, which is different from what we’ve been told is the history.”

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Nowadays Lundy is a prominent voice in the sorts of growing conversations that resist the separation of food, and particularly Southern food, from its historical and cultural implications; she’s a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, a venue for exactly that kind of discussion. “The SFA has attempted to ask questions about this region using food as the entree, questions about race and class and gender and ethnicity and identity,” the SFA's director, John T. Edge, told me. “Ronni Lundy has been at the forefront of our work asking those questions.” In an article a couple years ago, Edge praised Lundy for her “radical inclusiveness.”

No book she’s written has ever been strictly a cookbook, including Victuals (pronounced vidls, Lundy stresses in the book’s second sentence). It’s a blend of social history, family history, and reportage that explores the melting-pot nature of a cuisine with influences as disparate as Cherokee and Scotch-Irish, African-American and Italian.

Lundy tells the story, for instance, of Malinda Russell, a free black woman and Appalachian native who, after opening a bakery in East Tennessee, fled to Michigan during the Civil War. There she published A Domestic Cookbook, a compendium of recipes from the region where she’d spent most of her life. “To my knowledge, the first Appalachian cookbook is written by a free black woman who is a business entrepreneur,” Lundy told me. “That just flies in the face of every Granny Clampett, Mammy Yokum stereotype you’ve ever heard.”

Ronni Lundy is a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Pableaux Johnson

Lundy sorts chapters of the book mostly by ingredients ("Corn," "Apples"). “Roots and Seeds” includes recipes for roasted root vegetable salad with bacon and orange-sorghum vinegar—sorghum syrup being another local specialty—and sallet, a preparation for sturdy, spicy spring greens that involves wilting them in hot bacon grease. In researching the book, Lundy logged about 4,000 miles in a “reliable but rough-countenanced” Chevy Astro. (She focuses on the southern Appalachians, which stretch from West Virginia and southern Ohio down to northern Georgia.)

There’s also a section on salt, an enormously important resource that “sparked the first extractive industry in the southern Appalachians,” Lundy writes. “Its processing required the harvesting of timber, then the excavation of coal, to keep the evaporative furnaces burning. In time, those resources were exported out as well, and that became a defining moment in the history of the region.” Salt figures into an entire menu of regional food products, particularly preserved items: country ham, salt pork, pickled beans, and sour corn.

Which were also enabled by the topography and the climate of the Appalachians. Because of the uneven landscape—the hills and hollers—industrial farming never really caught on, and people continued traditions of small-scale farming and putting food up for the winter, whether via fermenting, curing, or drying. “While Appalachia is a part of the Southern garden and the Southern table, it has a real distinct difference because it has winter,” Lundy said. “So you had to preserve food. That’s why, in the Deep South, you kill a pig and you invite everybody over to pick the pig and eat it with you. You kill a pig in Appalachia and you invite your neighbors over to help you cut it up and process it immediately: start salting it down, turn it into sausage, turn it into bacon, make headcheese out of it. Because this is how you’ll eat for the whole winter.” Victuals includes recipes for Appalachian classics like apple stack cake, made with dried apples, and shuck beans, which is summer green beans that've been hung on strings to dry—in the winter when they're needed, they’re given a long simmer with salt pork or ham hock.

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The last, particularly future-focused chapter is called “Appalachian Spring.” Lundy’s book comes at a fraught time for a region trying to dig its way out of a hole—or, more correctly, a mine; sections of Appalachia, particularly where coal has been the predominant industry, suffer from deep economic distress. Lundy sees food production as a possible bright spot. In each chapter of Victuals she profiles somebody trying to sustain or advocate for Appalachian food culture, either through opening a restaurant, saving and swapping heirloom seeds, or harvesting and selling local ingredients like produce or, indeed, salt.

For instance: Travis Milton, who plans this year to open a restaurant called Shovel and Pick in Bristol, Virginia—“a hot young chef who has actually chosen to return to his homeplace in the mountains and open his restaurant there,” Lundy said. She’s served as a kind of intellectual patron of this movement to emphasize and celebrate the food of Appalachia, with a high-profile fan base that includes folks like Milton and also Sean Brock, of the Charleston restaurant Husk, and Karl Worley, of the Nashville restaurant Biscuit Love, who were influenced by her earlier book, Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken.

A lot of times the food gets represented as simple—just moonshine and soup beans and cornbread. It’s much more complicated and interesting.

"For the chefs, it validated the food that they grew up with and influenced the way that they thought about it,” said Lora Smith, who with Milton, Lundy, and Kendra Bailey Morris co-founded the Appalachian Food Summit, which promotes regional foodways and sustainability. "For me it was a really important book because it was the first time that I saw an accurate representation of the food that I grew up with—a celebration of it. A lot of times the food gets represented as simple—just moonshine and soup beans and cornbread. When you look into the stories, and the histories that that food reveals, it’s much more complicated and interesting."

Smith works at an economic development foundation in the Appalachian region, and says that food has the potential to make an impact, particularly in the coalfield region. "We’re seeing more farmers’ markets, more and more new and beginning farmers," she told me. Smith herself figures into the last chapter in Victuals. After going to school elsewhere she returned to eastern Kentucky and, with her husband, started a farm; nearby there's a community kitchen, where local residents are encouraged to create products they might be able to sell. A recent New York Times article reported that, with jobs in coal at their lowest levels since 1898, Appalachians are increasingly wondering what comes next, and exploring the possibilities of entrepreneurism. By way of example the Times profiled an internet startup called BitSource, located in Pikeville, Kentucky, as well as a tomato farmer and a hemp farmer.

"Food can’t be the only piece," Lundy conceded. "Everybody can’t be a farmer. But if we have a good core of farmers and restaurants and tourists coming to the areas where there’s music and culture and art, and then if we can extend from that into other small-scale industries, we could be in pretty good shape. It’s a much better solution than the people who look here and say, well, the answer is just get these people out of there. There’s no out there to go to anymore."

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