Bernice Ramsey Robinson’s cookbook. Photos by Tim Barnwell
UNCA Professor Challenges Misconceptions about Appalachian Cuisine
By Lauren Stepp
Erica Abrams Locklear’s maternal grandmother, Bernice Ramsey Robinson, was not one to throw anything away. When she passed, her home on South Turkey Creek in Leicester brimmed with dusty curios like balls of aluminum foil and pie pans. None of this bric-a-brac was surprising—after all, Robinson grew up during the Great Depression when southern folk had no choice but to reuse and recycle.
But what surprised Locklear, a professor of English at UNCA, was a cookbook her grandmother had created. Made from an old photo album, the bedraggled text offered tips on stretching, mailing fruitcake and removing stains from your clothes. Then there were the recipes.
“I’m not sure what I expected to find in that cookbook,” says Locklear. “But what I found just completely upended everything I thought I knew.”
Up until that point, Locklear had an admittedly “romantic view of what mountain food was.” She imagined her grandmother killing hogs, drying apples and making leather britches. Instead, the cookbook revealed Robinson’s taste for modern, worldly cuisine.
Despite living on a rural tobacco farm, Robinson relied on store-bought products to make delicacies like pecan loaves and Kellogg’s Krispies Marshmallow Squares. She also used new-age kitchen tools like a “food chopper.” Alas, the culinary narrative Locklear believed to be true was very wrong.
Wanting to find out the real story, Locklear began delving into the history of mountain foodways. Her findings are chronicled in Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food & People.
Slated to hit shelves next month, Locklear’s book traces misconceptions about Appalachian cuisine back to the 1870s, when travel writers began sensationalizing the trope of an uncouth hillbilly. These fictional stories debuted in widely read publications, coloring how northerners perceived those living below the Mason-Dixon Line.
“The depictions of characters consuming food go right along with a lot of those negative stereotypes,” says Locklear.
Consider Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback, for example. Written in 1886 by James Lane Allen, the piece describes a “primitive society” in eastern Kentucky where a recently developed railway has introduced exotic foods to the mountains. One day, a barefoot native walks up to a fruit stand, sees a bunch of bananas and purportedly exclaims, “Blame me if them ain’t the darnedest beans!”
The interaction is meant to be humorous, poking fun at the backwardness of Appalachian people. But at a time when bananas were very difficult to transport, their mere presence in Kentucky “signals a kind of modernity and connection with the larger world that Allen seemed unable or unwilling to acknowledge,” Locklear writes.
Other historical depictions in the late 1800s describe Appalachian food as “coarse,” or difficult to digest. “With that, there’s also the implication that the people who are consuming it are somehow unsavory,” says Locklear.
Of course, times have changed. Foods once snubbed by southbound travelers (think: cornbread, poke sallet and ramps) are being lauded in James Beard Award-winning kitchens. Though this celebration is “long overdue,” says Locklear, we must still be careful to avoid generalizing the foodways of Appalachia.
“Whenever possible, we should pay homage to the varied histories of mountain cuisine,” writes Locklear. “As my grandmother’s cookbook taught me, mountain cooks may be just as prone to clip a recipe for date nut fondant or Baby Ruth cookies as they are to save one for chow chow.”
Pre-order a copy of the book at UGAPress.org or at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café. A book launch, with author Erica Abrams Locklear in conversation with chef John Fleer, will be held on Tuesday, April 18, at 6 p.m. at Malaprop’s.
