APPALACHIAN COOKING (The Countryman Press, 2018, 196 pages, ISBN 978-1-68268-100-8 $22.95 USD paperbound) is by John Tullock, who teaches food gardening courses for the University of Tennessee. These are both new and traditional recipes for a specific USA region: mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina (also known as Southern Appalachia. Here the greens are cooked with ham hocks, but they may be turnip greens rather than collards. More local black walnuts are used than Georgian pecans. Pintos are more common than black-eyed peas. BBQ is different. It's a cuisine reflective of local ramps, berries, greens, nuts and game as used by both the Indigenous and the Scotch-Irish traditions. Tullock has 100 or so classics with new variations. Arranged by food groups – preserved foods (such as jams and pickles), beans-squash-corn (Three Sisters), potatoes and other veggies, meat from sticks and cricks, and desserts. And of course, biscuits. The book could have been improved if it also used metric in the recipes, or at least had a metric conversion chart.
Audience and level of use: collectors of regional cuisine cookbooks
Some interesting or unusual recipes/facts: summer vegetable casserole; bread-and-butter sweet pepper relish; blackberry crumble; sweet whiskey butter; Knoxville full house beef; ultimate meatloaf sandwich; cracklin corn bread; hog-jowl and black-eyed peas; peppercorn pork roast with mornay sauce.
The downside to this book: I really wanted more
The upside to this book: a good assortment of foods, coupled with excellent illustrations. No photos.
Quality/Price Rating: 90.
Chimo! www.deantudor.com
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