The Appalachian Forest

The Appalachian forest is the broad hardwood and mixed woodland that covers the southern mountains, a country of narrow hollows, ridgelines and small bottomland farms. It was first cultivated and gathered by the Cherokee and other Native peoples, and later settled by Scots-Irish, German, English and other European families, with enslaved and free African Americans also working its land. Ronni Lundy, in Victuals, treats this highland region as a food culture in its own right, shaped by steep ground, isolation and the seasons rather than by any single market.

The mountain table was built from what the slope and the woods would give, and Lundy's account begins with that economy. Corn was the field crop that suited the small, steep plots, and it reached the table as cornbread, grits, hominy and meal, and in the distiller's still. Beans were grown among the corn, and the pole bean dried on strings, the leather britches of the mountain pantry, carried a household through the cold months. Pork, from hogs let out to forage on the mast of the forest, was cured and kept, and the country ham and the pot of greens seasoned with cured pork belong to the same practice of making a little go a long way. The forest itself was a second larder. Ramps, the wild leek Allium tricoccum, come up in early spring and were eaten as the first green after winter, and poke, wild greens, morels, black walnuts, hickory nuts and wild berries followed through the year. Lundy describes the way such foods marked time, so that the calendar was kept by what could be gathered. Apples were among the most important cultivated trees, and they were dried, stewed, pressed for cider and turned into apple butter, which was stirred for hours in a large kettle. Preservation is the discipline that unites the cooking. Vegetables were pickled and fermented, beans and fruit were dried, and the sour, salted and smoked flavours that result are the signature of the region more than any one dish. Kraut, pickled corn relish, chow-chow and canned tomatoes sat beside the cured meat, and a cook who understood salt, smoke and time could feed a family through a long winter on a hillside farm. The region has often been described in thin and condescending terms, and Lundy's purpose is to correct that. The food is varied and skilled, and it carries the marks of several peoples: Cherokee corn and bean cultivation, European techniques of curing and pickling, and African American cooks and farmers whose contributions have too often been left out of the story. The mountain table is therefore a layered one, and it is best understood as the work of many hands on difficult ground. For the cook, the lesson of the forest is restraint and use of the whole season. Few ingredients are asked to do a great deal, and the cooking relies on the quality of the corn, the pork, the beans and the wild greens, and on the patience of the preserving. That discipline remains the region's gift to American cooking, and the reason its dishes endure.

The flavour of the mountain table is sour, salty and smoky, with the bitterness of wild greens and the sweetness of corn and apple set against it. Cured pork gives depth to beans and greens, vinegar and fermentation give brightness, and the sharp green of ramps marks the spring. A meal is balanced by the contrast of the preserved and the fresh, the rich and the sour.