Celebrating Southern Appalachian Food

If you are a fan of Tipper Pressley of the Blind Pig and the Acorn, her blog website, you will really enjoy the cookbook she and Jim Casada, another western NC native, have created. I ordered the book from City Lights Books in Sylva, NC, and immediately began reading it. The book is more than a cookbook. It is a history of southern Appalachia foodways. 

This is the blurb on the back of the book, Celebrating Southern Appalachian Food

High-country cooking fit to grace any table.

Southern Appalachia has a rich culinary tradition. Generations of passed-down recipes offer glimpses into a culture that has long been defined, in considerable measure, by its food. Take a journey of pure delight through this highland homeland with stories of celebrations, Sunday dinners, and ordinary suppers. The narrative material and scores of recipes offered here share a deep love of place and a devotion to this distinctive cuisine. The end result is a tempting invitation, in the vernacular of the region, to “pull up a chair and take nourishment.”

Excerpt from a review: Chicken and dumplings. Biscuits and gravy. Beans and fatback. To any list of wonderful culinary partnerships, add the duo of Casada and Pressley. In “Celebrating Southern Appalachian Food: Recipes & Stories from Mountain Kitchens,” Jim Casada and Tipper Pressley combine wide knowledge, hands-on experience, and a conversational approach into a sure-fire recipe for enjoyable reading and fine dining. 

You can order it on the Etsy Channel or find it on Amazon. It will also be available in big stores around the country. 

Although I don't cook big meals anymore since I don't have anyone to cook for now, my mouth watered when I read recipes for some of my favorite dishes my mother used to cook. Tipper and I met back in 2007 when one of her twin daughters, Katie, came to our Coffee with the Poets group and read some poems she had written. The girls were still in elementary school then, I think. 

Tipper used the downtime during the pandemic to create a very popular YouTube channel called Celebrating Appalachia. She has done so well with it that she quit her job and stays home to do what she loves, gardening, canning, and cooking meals for her family. She posts on her blog every day and does the same with the videos. She is a busy person who loves what she is doing now.

She has a huge following on her blog and her YouTube channel. Her followers say watching Celebrating Appalachia is like being home with Tipper, her husband, Matt, and Katie and Corie. She shares her life and the lives of her family with her viewers and I watch every new video she puts up. Even though I have cooked for more than 45 years, I still learn new things from watching Tipper prepare food in her kitchen. 

A bonus is watching the twins, in their twenties now, who make their YouTube videos and they are loved also. You will find them at the Pressley Girls. 

Tipper and Jim have been signing books every weekend and their fans love seeing them, talking to them, and giving them gifts. I told Chris at City Lights Books in Sylva to be prepared for a huge crowd when Tipper and Jim are there signing books. Chris didn't know what a following Tipper has and he emailed me after the book signing saying he was glad I gave him a heads up about the crowd that filled his store that Saturday. 

Hope you enjoy visiting the YouTube channels and the blog website that Tipper has maintained for many years.   Leave a comment if you do.

I Have Been Reading These Books

Books I recommend:

I have been reading a book by a Southern writer, Bill Lightle, who grew up in my hometown of Albany, Georgia, and witnessed racism for the first time when his family moved there from a small all-white town in the mid-west.

The title of Bill's book is Race and Politics in the American South - A Personal History.

He was witness to those early days of school integration when white people, who feared what their lives would become if their children had to interact with Black children, did all in their power to stop the process ordered by the Federal Government. Bill, as I did, experienced the upheaval in southwest Georgia and later in his work as a reporter for the Albany Herald Newspaper when the races clashed. 

He goes on in his book to show how race has been a large compelling factor in all politics in the deep south. Although Bill is recalling history, this is a timely book because the run for governor at this time in 2022, is between a white man, a Republican, and a Black Woman, a Democrat. Their values and ideas for the state are very different. 

This writer keeps you glued to the pages of this nonfiction book because Bill Lightle is a good storyteller and that makes a good book.

Another book I am enjoying at this time is a John Grisham novel, The Boys from Biloxi about the growth of underworld crime along the coast of Mississippi a few years ago.

The main characters are two boys who grew up together doing what teenage boys do. But their lives took drastic turns as one became a lawyer who planned to clean up the Biloxi coast where gambling, prostitution, and drug use had become the norm. The other boy was the son of a major crime boss who headed a group known as the Dixie Mafia. And there lay the conflict of the book. As usual John Grisham keeps the reader turning pages to see how this all ends. 

I have always liked Grisham legal thrillers.

They are surprisingly clean books but have that built-in tension we readers thoroughly crave in his books. To me, that is the skill of a major storyteller.

I have come to like this author not only for his books but for the kind of human being he is. I learned this from watching YouTube videos where he is interviewed or where he is speaking before an audience. He has a dry sense of humor and a self-deprecating way of charming his listeners. He is honest about himself and his feelings about how we human beings can do better.

I also like the way he gives his wife so much credit for his writing success. She is his first reader of everything he writes. He listens to her critique of his books even when she tells him, "Your female characters suck." They have been married for several decades now and they are expecting their first grandchild.

What are you reading now? Got any recommendations?