"My place, in the midst of this abundance of nature, is back in a mountain hollow on a bad dirt road surrounded by forest, wild blackberries, mountain critters, wildflowers, a few neighbors, and a passel of 'dawgs.'"
So writes Joan Aller, author of this season's must-have cookbook, "Cider Beans, Wild Greens, and Dandelion Jelly: Recipes from Southern Appalachia."
And it's not like Joan Aller is an East Tennessee native who's walked the Appalachian trail with the likes of Bill Bryson or South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford. She's from the West, and might be living there still but for urban sprawl and environmental ugliness. So she first moved to Nashville, which is very much a city, and then further East.
Joan Aller is an artist by profession and fearless by nature. No soon had she painted her mailbox than she was off, photographing barns and bridges and learning the ways of her new neighbors. That led quickly to food --- and five years of research. At the end, she had gorgeous photographs of Southern Appalachia, luscious photographs of Southern food, and 8,000 pages of recipes and history.
The good news is that Ms. Aller and her editors put her work on a diet. The result is a 212-page book that was extravagantly handsome until my wife and I started dog-earing the pages. Silly us --- we want to cook almost everything here. Our only non-starters: Appalachian wine, root beer and --- no kidding --- moonshine.
See if just the names don't make you look at your watch to see if it's time for some meal or other: Kentucky "hot brown" (turkey-bacon-Colby cheese sandwich drenched in Tabasco-spiked milk gravy), Mississippi Sin (French bread, cream cheese, cheddar cheese, cooked ham, sour cream, accented with sweet onion, bell pepper and Worcestershire sauce), Butternut Squash Soup with Sweet Tea and Ginger, George Washington Carver's Sweet Potato Pie, Bourbon Sweet Potato Casserole, Corn Cob Jelly, And a dip made of equal parts chopped sweet onion, grated cheese and mayonnaise, baked for 25 minutes at 350.
And....but you see the problem --- with the possible exception of boring old blue cheese balls, this book rocks like the Allman Brothers.
