#Appalachian food

[intheholler]

"Turning My Snarky Appalachian Mamaw's Quotes into Inspirational Posters" from appalachopossum

[kimberly40]

To a native of Appalachia, soup beans is just a name for a pinto bean soup everyone makes. Simple, traditional, and mountain, through and through.

A pot of soup beans that are slowly simmered all day with remnants of ham fat results in soft, creamy beans. The ham bone and fat are the heart and soul of the flavor. Served up in a bowl with a side of cornbread, soup beans are both an essential source of sustenance and a comforting meal.

Soup beans refer to brown beans (such as pinto beans) that are cooked with pork for flavoring. Other types of beans can also be used such as white beans, butter beans, or black-eyed peas, but it’s the pinto bean that is the favorite of mountain folk. Soup beans are often re-cooked as fried bean cakes, or made into mountain chili the next day.

Soup beans can be a friendly reminder of growing up with family and enjoying familiar smells cooking on the stove.

(By Kim Wright)

[samantha-paige-howard]

Vlogging Appalachia- Grayson Highlands state park fall harvest festival-...

[clatterbane]

The latest pickling experiment underway: dilly beans made with thawed-out commercial frozen green beans!

It seemed worth a try. You need to blanch fresh green beans for a few minutes anyway, to neutralize weird bean chemicals. Those are already blanched, and they stay crispy enough that it might work.

I haven't tried any from fresh green beans in years, and...that never turned out well before. Every batch I have made before molded on the top. Probably because the blanching does essentially pasteurize them, wiping out the natural lactobacteria hitching a ride on basically any kind of produce.

One way to get around this, I guess: mix things up!

I have certainly known people to pickle corn and beans separately, but never together like that. Guessing that probably is an extremely old combination, for some people. Throw in some squash, and you'd have some Three Sisters mixed pickles.

My Nana regularly did make dilly beans alongside the crocks of kraut and brine dill cucumbers. Guess she really liked that flavor profile too. No idea how she kept the beans from molding.

My original workaround thought was to try laying maybe a cabbage leaf in on top, as good as it is at fermenting itself. They're also great to help keep anything else from floating up to mold.

But, I decided to go one up this time, and fish a donor starter piece of leaf out of the last still-working batch! I had enough already out, so that jar got a couple of layers anyway. Plenty to go around.

I had expected the radish skins to leach a bunch of color, but not enough to turn the brine so pink!

That hopping active cabbage did almost immediately cloud up the top of the new brine. Taking that as a promising sign

Otherwise, that's got fairly standard dill pickle type seasonings. I did throw in another of those little frozen homegrown chiles, a big clove of garlic halved, and a pretty big sprig of fresh dill tucked down in the middle. Since I'm using dill from the store and don't have any seed heads, I also threw some dill seeds in the bottom with the peppercorns, mustard seeds, allspice, bay leaf, and a few of those nice Assam tea leaves for extra tannins to help keep things crispy.

Now in what I suppose is turning into the Pickle Drawer. I guess we'll see how this turns out. With any luck, it (a) won't go moldy, and (b) won't turn too strange a texture. I'll be counting this as a success if it does manage to meet those criteria. But, we'll see.

[ireton]

Farmers from around the country are driving in feed and hay for the farm animals of the Appalachians.

The stories of farmers having to shoot starving livestock are true.

[charmwasjess]

Thank you, Claudia Gray, for giving Rael Averross that stupid accent; finally I can write some dialogue at all similar to the pattern and sound of how I speak irl. Tragically, some of us have yankee-doodle-ass cowboy hot dog mouths up in here.😔

[vampyrewinters]

So tiktok is dying by a thousand papercuts and I'm going to miss those communities. If you are part of the following communities please sound off so I can find you:

Gramdmacore

Thrifting

Gardening and homesteading

Cottagecore

Sewing

Vintage fashion

Fuck the government. Seriously. Fuck them.

Anticapitalist

Appalachian history and culture

Cooking on a budget

Canning and food preservation

Semicrunchy but still believes in vaccines

Gentleparenting

All things nerdy and dorky. Comics, dnd, video games, literature, history, you name it i probably enjoy some extent of it.

[puppy-steve]

in the three months leading up to steve meeting the rest of eddie's family, eddie has taken it upon himself to run steve through a crash course in the munson family cookbook. they'll be in kentucky the whole summer so steve has to be prepared.

tonight, eddie said he was making steaks.

when steve gets to the trailer after work, eddie's frying something in the skillet that obviously does not smell like any steak he's ever eaten.

"uh, eddie?"

eddie looks over his shoulder. "hey, sweetheart!"

steve sets his keys on the table before walking over and looking over eddie's shoulder. he's even more confused. "i thought you said we're having steak?"

"we are," eddie nods toward the skillet.

"that doesn't look like it."

eddie rolls his eyes and turns around to face him. "not steak from a cow," he says, like it's obvious (it is not, in fact, obvious). "it's bologna."

steve resists the urge to rub at his temples. instead, he puts his hands on eddie's hips and rubs his thumbs over the little tease of skin between his shirt and jeans.

"baby, i don't think bologna counts as steak."

"it does for us poor folk." eddie reaches up and grabs steve's nose, gently giving it a shake. "we call it poor man's steak. real steak's expensive so we gotta use what we can afford." he gestures behind him. "so, bologna."

steve doesn't remember the last time he ate bologna, or if he did at all. all his meals consisted of whatever his mom cooked and it definitely wasn't any of the things eddie had made him so far.

(don't tell his mom, but eddie's food is way better. he can taste the love it was made with.)

"it does smell pretty good," steve concedes. his stomach gives a growl. he hadn't eaten lunch because he was so excited for a steak dinner.

eddie grins and reaches for the loaf of bread on the counter. "pick your poison, then, stevie-boy!" he sweeps his hand over the options of toppings: mustard, mayonnaise, lettuce, and tomato. "we're eatin' like kings tonight!"

[im-adrienne]

"Don't eat the food of angry people"

There's a saying in my family that goes back generations. It's this - "Don't eat the food of angry people or cook while you're mad."

What that means is that when a person cooks angry or cooks while emotional the food becomes imbued with that energy. When you eat the food you take on that emotion until it is out of your body.

And, yes, my family is Appalachian as fuck.

All I can say about this is that whenever I eat my momma's cooking I go through a 48 hr angry emotional mess. It was like this when I was a child too. Never felt that way with my dad's cooking or my grandma's cooking.

Today, my momma cooked while angry and depressed and I ate two bowls...and wouldn't you know it! I'm going through a small depression blip that has made me a crying mess. I couldn't stream tonight. I uninstalled a bunch of stuff from my computer. I asked for a refund for one game. I considered deleting my Twitch and all of my socials. I canceled my WoW subscription. My mind and body are really going through it right now.

Currently, I'm eating peaches and peanut crackers with green tea to try and get some digestive movement on the horizon. Just trying to separate the Depression Valley mess from my actual self.

AND A FULL MOON TOMORROW!?!?!?!

[intheholler]

so when i moved in with my now-wife and it snowed the second time (cause obviously you don't eat the first snow), i made some snow cream and she was like hey what the fuck are you doing lmao

it's not the first time someone has reacted that way when i mention it, so i find myself wonderin whether it is distinctly appalachian given some responses i've gotten from other irls

what say y'all

[kimberly40]

👨🏻‍🌾 Appalachian Garden Folklore:

In the mountains of Appalachia, it is said to be bad luck to say thank you if you ever receive cuttings or plants as a gift. The plant will not thrive. This is just one of many old folklore tells handed down from generation to generation. A lot of these folklores pertain to gardening. This was a way of life for many Appalachians and was taken very seriously. Their lives depended on their gardens producing well.

•Dreaming of thorns is bad luck.

•Tomatoes should be planted on Memorial Day.

•It’s good luck to steal herbs.

•A snowy winter portends a good year for crops.

•After planting a hill of beans, press the soil with your foot for good luck.

•Planting peppers when you’re mad, makes the peppers grow hotter.

•If 2 people’s hoes hit together, they will work in the same field next year.

•Trees that bloom twice in one year will have a bad crop.

•If you spit in your hands when cutting wood-you’ll have good luck.

•Don’t plant your garden until the oak leaves are the size of mouse ears.

•Always plant your potatoes on Good Friday.

•Plant your greenbeans on Good Friday.

•Anything planted on the first day of Spring will live.

•Bury nails around the roots of Hydrangea to make the blooms blue.

•To keep crows from bothering your garden, kill one and hang it nearby.

(Read more at https://growappalachia.berea.edu/2011/12/06/appalachian-garden-folklore-chad-brock-red-bird-mission/

By Chad Brock)

[samantha-paige-howard]

Fall season recipes-Apple Cinnamon oat banana nut bread-Southern recipes

[mori-girl-life]

Wild foraged Black Balsam Blueberry Tart with Wood Sorrel & Sourwood honey:

Biscoff crumb crust

Vanilla créme patissierre

Wild blueberry glaze

Wild blueberries

Lemon Zest

Wood Sorrel Leaves

Sourwood Honey

This took me 3 days to make and I'm so proud of it 🥲

[localhollerhaint]

[honourablejester]

Random, but on the topic of fantasy and food, one set of fantasy stories that I specifically remember made me very hungry was the Silver John stories by Manly Wade Wellman (what a name). They're a series of stories and novels about a ex-Korean vet with a silver-stringed guitar wandering around the post-WWII Appalachian mountains and facing down folklore/supernatural foes, and I don't even really like pork, but I remember reading some of the food descriptions in those stories and get really damn hungry. There was, for example, one very loving description of the main character making corn pone on a hot rock over his campfire, and I was like, yes, yes, magic music and devils, sure, but can I have some of your food?

Which ... might be a bad thing, when I think about it, in that I was too focused on my stomach to focus on the plot, but the stories sure made a very vivid description of setting and place and food. That I really, really wanted to try. Heh.

[wizardnuke]

like you really aren't allowed to say shit about southerners until you have firsthand seen how people live deep in the appalachian hollers because it is fucking tragic. the poverty and the food desert and the lack of resources in general is so bad. the drugs. yall dont understand