Back With Our New Look

Hello, everyone! I am back to blogging with a whole new look and theme for the site. Welcome to "East Tennessee Food," where we will explore the history and culture that has shaped my home region's foodways. I am also pleased to announce that my newest book, Appalachian Cooking: New and Traditional Recipes is scheduled for release in 2018 from Countryman Press. In it, I will share some of the best recipes in the style of cooking that has developed in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina.

A good place to begin exploring the food of the Southern Appalachians is to examine the history of the region, which has shaped human culture ever since the first people arrived here in prehistoric times.

The people of the southern Appalachians have a proud and often poorly understood history, shaped in many ways by the natural topography of the region. People have lived here approximately 30,000 years, for much of that time sustaining themselves as hunter-gatherers. For the most part, from the mountains westward to the Mississippi River, and eastward to the edges of the Carolina piedmont, the region was covered in deciduous forest sheltering a level of biodiversity scarcely duplicated anywhere in the temperate zone. This rich panoply of plants and animals was exploited by the indigenous people in a variety of ways. Eventually, agriculture arrived, and the people grew the corn, beans and squash of Mesoamerica.

When Europeans arrived in the region in the 16th Century, they brought with them their foodways, new varieties of vegetables, and new kinds of domesticated animals, that were soon integrated with the native abundance to produce a new, neither entirely indigenous nor entirely European, but wholly American, cuisine. In his seminal work, Southern Food, the late John Egerton avers that the cuisine of the region began to be "southern" when the Spanish pig encountered the indigenous corn. Indeed, these two commodities have been important in the agricultural economy of both East Tennessee and Western North Carolina for more than two centuries.

The mountains, largely inaccessible until relatively modern times, and the fertile valleys along the rivers, their acres of farmland interspersed with remnant woods and lazy creeks, represent the two major contributions to the current regional cuisine of the Appalachian South. Mountain cooks relied upon recipes handed down by word of mouth, made do with whatever was seasonal or on hand, and practiced kitchen economy to a fault.The mountainous topography and harsh winters limited somewhat the variety of cultivated foods, while at the same time providing game, fruits, nuts, and greens in glorious abundance.

In the valleys, it is possible to grow a greater variety of food. Broad, flat expanses of land permitted grain and forage crop production that in turn fed herds of livestock. River bottoms were replenished every few years by floods when rainfall was unusually abundant, the rich topsoil permitting production of virtually any vegetable crop suited to the temperate zone. At one time, the triangle enclosed by the confluence of the Holston and French Broad Rivers, where the come together neat Knoxville to form the Tennessee River, was known as "The Asparagus Patch," because its farms produced such a variety and abundance of vegetables.