Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking by Joseph E. Dabney (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS OPINIONS AND REVIEWS Joseph E. Dabney, Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking. Nashville: Cumberland House, 1998. 493 pages with photos, bibliography, and indexes. Hardcover $27.95. Paperback $19.95. A generation ago food leviathan PepsiCo launched a massive advertising campaign to introduce to America a beverage which tasted like liquefied and gurgling hard candy. Its name was Mountain Dew, and its prophet was a bewhiskered, rag-garbed "mountaineer" who promised consumers that "it'll tickle yore innards!" This unlikely siren lured millions to the new product, securing for Mountain Dew an honored place among the fizzy drinks with which a great nation slakes its collective thirst. The all-too-familiar image of the hillbilly as a figure of fun was offensive to some, but the offended did their crying far from the halls of corporate power. The molders of popular taste in non-Appalachian America had yet to be convinced that the mountains might harbor a culture more worthy of respect than mockery. During the past three decades, however, gastronomes have discovered and extolled the traditional cuisines of several oncedespised national minorities. The African-Americans of the Southeast, the Mexican-Americans of the Southwest, and the Franco-Americans who live between these two populations are better admired at least in part because mainstream America has tried their food and liked what it ate. Can Southern mountaineers now claim a place at America's table? South Carolina native and Atlanta resident Joseph Dabney, whose Mountain Spirits and MoreMountain Spirits intoxicated readers with the lore of corn whiskey, has now turned his attention to the comestibles of Southern Appalachia. Aiming to win friends outside the region, Dabney invites the non-local reader "to try out some of the recipes in this volume and join the crusade to preserve Appalachian folk traditions." For the uninitiated, Smokehouse Ham is as effective an introduction to this cuisine ashas ever appeared in print. Itis a gutbuster ofa book, as entertaining as it is thorough. Dabney explains where the mountain people came from and how the various culinary practices they 59 inherited blended over time into a distinct regional cuisine. The book is brimming with recipes, but they appear as part of a larger cultural narrative that is always vital and readable. We learn all the ways by which a group of people has gathered food, raised it, prepared it, and preserved it, and we also learn what they think and feel about it. Smokehouse Ham benefits from an anecdotal presentation which includes the voices of scores of men and women cooks as well as Dabney's own. When Dabney put Smokehouse Ham together he may have been thinking of the maxim, "You don't know what you've got until you lose it." The book has this to say to its mountain readers: These are the things we know about, but let us make sure we appreciate these traditions while we have them. Because this is a book that looks backward, it is difficult not to suspect that the traditions it describes so lovingly are already passing away. The words "old-time" and "oldtimers " are everywhere in Dabney's prose, and most of the other voices are those of the elderly or the deceased. Although the tone of Smokehouse Ham is celebratory, it is the sort of celebrating one finds at a funeral of a man who has been specially esteemed. The mourners discuss all his good qualities by way of bidding him farewell. The life that will go on will be poorer without him, but mourning will not restore him to their midst. A self-conscious cultural crusade of the type that Dabney advocates can succeed in mummifying the folk traditions of a Southern Appalachia or anywhere else, but it cannot preserve those traditions as living entities. Folkways are shaped by the tension between the spiritual values of a people and the physical materials they have available, and when either is transformed, so also is custom. If today the young men and women of the Southern mountains are preparing for their own offspring the foods they were fed by their parents and grandparents...