Southern Regional Cookery: Appalachia

Mountainous southern Appalachia includes parts of Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. No other region of the South was as influenced by the cooking of the Amerindians, with their corn, beans, pumpkins, squash, nuts, and wild game. The region was settled mostly by English, Scots-Irish, and Germans seeking asylum in America, as well as second-, third-, and fourth-generation English, Scottish, and French descendants who moved inland from the coastal plain. A Celtic love of grains fared well in the mountains, where the Cherokees grew a hearty dent corn that could be ground into a meal or grits or distilled into whiskey. By the 1770s, tens of thousands of settlers had flowed down the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road and settled in the region. German Lutherans and Moravians brought with them their great baking and meat-curing skills. Wild greens and cornbread sustained generations of mountain folk. Cabbage became kraut, apples were dried for use in cakes and sauces, and nut cookery attained unprecedented glory, with the immense quantities of walnuts, chestnuts, and hickory nuts available. Native American grapes and beans remain favored foods in the region. The cooking is typified by the use of cast-iron pots, wood-burning stoves, and food preservation that includes salting, drying, smoking, and burying as well as the pickling and canning found in the rest of the South. While corn was grown and relished throughout the South, the dent corn of the mountains, dried on the stalk in the field, was ground on granite stones and made into corn dodgers, cracklin’ bread, hoe cakes, bannocks, fritters, muffins, dumplings, mush, grits, spoon bread, hush puppies, and pone—using “Indian meal” in Native American, German, and Scots-Irish traditions. Though many tastes of the South traveled inland from the prosperous coasts, recipes for corn cookery flowed downhill from the mountains.