Calling all bakers and cookbook collectors! White Lily is offering *14 vintage cookbooks* as free downloads, filled with classic Southern recipes, baking tips, and plenty of kitchen inspiration. It’s a wonderful little collection—and you can add every one of them to your digital cookbook shelf for free! You can get 'em right here: #WhiteLilyFlour#VintageCookbooks#SouthernCooking#FreeCookbooks#AppalachianFoodways

I'll throw an apple at ya, if you pronounce it apple-ay-cha, as the joke goes.. but if I do here's something to ponder. 🍎 One Apple, Many Appalachian Traditions Apples have long been one of the workhorses of the Appalachian kitchen. Eat them fresh while you can, but when the harvest is bigger than the appetite, you find ways to make it last.

Once a week, at least, we like to spotlight the contributions of POC/immigration to Appalachian Foodways and today the first person I thought of was Chef Meherwan Irani ( @meherwanirani ). Appalachian food is not frozen in the past. Immigrants are part of present-day Appalachia, shaping its restaurants and food culture while building new relationships with regional ingredients. Irani’s famous okra fries are a wonderful symbol of that exchange—an ingredient deeply familiar in Southern Appalachia transformed through Indian spices and street-food traditions.

While you are building your Appalachian Food library, file this one under "don't argue with me, just shut up and buy it". It's one of your foundational pillars. Every cook interested in Appalachian food should have Mark F. Sohn’s Appalachian Home Cooking on the shelf. It goes well beyond recipes, putting everyday foods into the context of history, place, season, preservation, and culture—the stories behind the food are every bit as valuable as the recipes themselves.

The term **Affrilachia**, coined by Kentucky poet Frank X Walker @frankxwalker, gives voice to the Black people and communities whose lives, labor, traditions, music, agriculture, and foodways have long been part of the Appalachian story. Too often, Appalachia is imagined as culturally and racially homogeneous. It never was. Beginning this Thursday, we’re making space each week to explore the people of color who have helped grow, cook, preserve, shape, and define Appalachian foodways.

We'd like to start featuring Appalachian chefs for you once a week and if you want to understand where Appalachian cooking is going without losing sight of where it came from, follow Chef Travis Milton. @dash37board37 Raised in rural Southwest Virginia, Travis learned Appalachian foodways from his great- and great-great-grandparents—shucking beans, gardening, canning, preserving, and cooking the foods of the mountains.

May the Lord love ye, Mrs. Geo. T. Hunter who was of the congregation of Methodist Episcopal Church South in #Maysville KY. South? The Methodist Church South was a pro-slavery group after the civil war that split the original congregation into “north“ and “ south” church buildings per the established history. In any case, she would suggest you try and make her Brunswick Stew and extra points if you can get squirrel.

Sometimes a recipe is more than a recipe. Sometimes it's a map of how people moved. Most of us associate scrapple with Pennsylvania Dutch country: pork scraps and organ meat cooked until tender, combined with grain, formed into a loaf, then sliced and fried crisp for breakfast. So imagine my surprise when I found Scrapple tucked into the pages of…

Today marked an important step forward in the development of the Appalachian Foodways Archive’s Recipe Assistant. Recipe Assistant began as a simple tool to make the painstaking work of transcribing cookbook recipes a little easier. Given an ingredient such as “2 cups cornmeal,” it can identify pieces of the original text—the quantity, measurement, ingredient, and preparation instructions. But parsing a recipe is the easy part.

Much of Appalachia's food history was never written for a national audience. It survives in community cookbooks, church cookbooks, extension publications, local histories, family recipe collections, agricultural bulletins, small regional publications, and books that have been out of print for decades. Some exist in only a handful of libraries or on the shelves of people who may not realize what they possess.

Soon in #Appalachia the pawpaws will be dropping ( ripe ones will pick themselves 😉 ). #Papaya and #pawpaw may sound like cousins, but botanically they aren't even invited to the same family reunion. The pawpaw was actually named after the papaya. #Papaw are not botanically related to either but can eat of the first two. #AppalachianFoodways 

Tonight’s experiment from the archive: Beef Burgundy, page 162 of Mountain Measures. I took a few liberties with the original, adding potatoes, carrots, and pearl onions and turning it into something closer to a hearty beef stew. And “Beef Burgundy” may be related to authentic French boeuf bourguignon in roughly the same way American goulash is related to Hungarian gulyás—which is to say… not very.

While we finish catalogging "More than Moonshine", we can't help but talk about the *legendary* book Mountain Measures printed by the @jlcharlestonwv ( Junior League of Charleston WV ) *Mountain Measures* is exactly the kind of cookbook that makes Appalachian foodways worth preserving. More than a collection of recipes, it captures the foods, ingredients, techniques, and everyday cooking traditions of mountain communities—documenting knowledge that was often passed from one kitchen to another rather than formally recorded.

🥭 PAWPAW BREAD — Have you ever made it? While cataloging recipes from Sidney Saylor Farr’s More Than Moonshine: Discovering the New Appalachian Cuisine, I came across this recipe for Pawpaw Bread. It calls for a full cup of pawpaw pulp — about six pawpaws — along with chopped nuts, with the wonderful instruction that at least one-third should be black walnuts…

A small but exciting milestone at the Appalachian Foodways Archive: We’ve finished cataloging every recipe in “Biscuits, Cornpone and Cracklin’ Bread,” a chapter from Sidney Saylor Farr’s More Than Moonshine. This is exactly what building a foodways archive looks like—one cookbook, one chapter, and one recipe at a time. And already, the cataloging is turning up things that make us want to know more. Next up: Pawpaw Bread. #AppalachianFoodways #AppalachianFood #FoodHistory #Appalachia #DigitalHumanities #CookbookHistory

The first book @appalachianfoodways is catalogging is "More Than Moonshine" by Sidney Saylor Farr. Farr (1932–2011) was a special collections librarian at @bereacollege in Kentucky, and also the editor of Appalachian Heritage ( @appalachianreview ) from 1985 to 1999. Her writing appeared in Mountain Life & Work, Appalachian Journal, Organic Gardening, and other publications. We picked this for good reasons, It is a scholarly narrative cookbook.

If you have any interest in Appalachian history, culture, or foodways, Fred W. Sauceman is simply indispensable. His work combines meticulous historical research with genuine warmth and respect for the people and traditions of the Appalachian region. Rather than relying on stereotypes, he tells the stories behind the food—connecting recipes to families, communities, and the history that shaped them. His writing is engaging, insightful, and filled with fascinating details that make you appreciate the richness of Appalachian heritage.

The aroma alone tells a story. Sweet apples simmering for hours, transforming into the rich, dark spread that has sustained Appalachian families for generations. Now, that story is being preserved and celebrated through a new exhibit series at East Tennessee State University’s Archives of Appalachia. “Appalachian Foodways: Apple Butter” marks the first installment in a series exploring the deep connections between food, culture and identity in the region.

Today marked an important turning point for the Appalachian Foodways Archive. For the past several development sessions, our work has focused on building the foundation: designing the database, creating the taxonomy, developing archival models, and building the tools that will allow us to preserve Appalachian culinary history for years to come. Today, we stopped building the archive and started using…

One question we've been asked is, "When will you start adding cookbooks?" The answer is... we're already working on it—just not in the way you might expect. Before a single recipe is indexed or a single page is digitized, we're beginning something we call the Cookbook Discovery Campaign. Our first goal is to answer a surprisingly difficult question: What Appalachian cookbooks actually exist?

When people think about preserving history, they often imagine shelves of old books, handwritten recipes, and faded photographs. What they don't usually picture is database design. This week we've been working on something that may never be visible to most visitors, but it will become one of the most important parts of the Appalachian Foodways Archive: building the foundation that will preserve thousands of recipes and the stories behind them.

When people think about a food archive, they often imagine recipes. Recipes are certainly part of the story—but they are only one piece of a much larger picture. One of the questions we've been asking ourselves is: How should an archive understand Appalachian food? Consider something as simple as cornbread. Cornbread isn't just a recipe. It's connected to cornmeal, milling traditions, cast-iron skillets, wood-fired ovens, church suppers, family gatherings, regional variations, and countless personal memories.

A long time ago ( disclaimer: I'm old ), I created a chatbot. It was a far cry from the modern chatbots you see today that use Natural Language Processing, Tensorflow, etc... it would take a line of input, key on certain words, chop and store a fragment, do a verb and sometimes subject conjugation, and spit it back out to the user.

Behind the Archive: Teaching the Archive to Think Every archive begins by collecting things. We're taking a slightly different approach. Before we begin adding thousands of recipes, cookbooks, photographs, oral histories, and historical documents, we're teaching the archive how those things relate to one another. Think of it like organizing a library. Simply putting books on shelves isn't enough. You need a system that knows that "poke sallet," "pokeweed," and "poke" all refer to the same Appalachian plant.