Ronni Lundy’s cookbook illuminates a land that was kept far too long from most Americans knowing almost anything about.
Some excerpted passages.
“Say it the way my people have for centuries: vidls.
Maybe you’ve seen it spelled “vittles” in a cartoon balloon coming from the mouth of Mammy Yokum. Or heard it as the punch line delivered before Granny Clampett clogs off to “roast up a mess of possum.” Maybe you thought saying it that way was wrong.
But look that word up in your dictionary. It turns out my people of the southern Appalachian Mountains, have been right about victuals all along. About the way you say them, the way you raise them, the way you cook them, keep them, and share them. About saving seeds, and working the land, and simmering pole beans, and making real cornbread. About the connections between earth and the table, and between the table and the people seated around it.
I was born. In Corbin, a railroad town in eastern Kentucky”. I explore Kentucky, West Virginia, southern Ohio, northern Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina. I searched back through history and joined others in imagining the future. I ate and cooked up a remarkable amount of really good food. This book will take you back on that journey with me.”
Norman: I first wrote about this book in 2018. It came out in 2016 and she won many awards for it. Rightfully so. She logged 4,000 miles in her Chevrolet Astro van, across state roads and back roads of seven states. This a book about present-day people and places across the southern Appalachian Mountains and the ways their stories link to the past. It’s about the foods they make and eat, the gardens they grow, the lives they create. It’s a book full of recipes and a book full of voices full of living”.
I hope you enjoy my video on it and get your own copy.
It is one of the greatest ever written on American cuisine.