Ronni Lundy's Victuals: Modern Classic Cookbooks #1
Here's the first in a series of cook and food books I consider to be modern classics. I've expanded on my original review and added further, related reading.
Matt & Ted Lee refer to Ronni Lundy as a ‘native daughter of Kentucky’ and Victuals, her latest cookbook, kicks off with a handy lesson in dialect: In Southern Appalachia, ‘victuals’ is pronounced ‘vidls’ and not ‘vittles’ which is how I might have pronounced it. It’s just one example of how misunderstood this part of the USA is.
Lundy is accustomed to providing readers with the tools required to understand Appalachia. As a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, she has always emphasised the role that culinary genealogy plays in helping to define what constitutes southern food and in doing this, she has challenged some of the more common – and inaccurate- tropes that have flourished in the minds of the lazy and those who wish to erase contributions from people based upon age-old prejudices. Lundy tells us about Malinda Russell, a free black woman and native of Appalachian who fled to Michigan during the civil war, leaving the bakery she opened in East Tennessee. Whilst living in Michigan, she published A Domestic Cookbook in 1866. The compendium of recipes she used when she ran a boarding house and pastry shop and cooked for the first families of Tennessee may well be regarded as the first published cookbook about the Appalachian South. As Lundy adds, Russell’s recipes may or may not be reflective of the recipes common to the region at its time of writing, but ‘it certainly broadens our perception of 19th century Appalachian foodways.’
Victuals is the result of Lundy’s travels around the region where she was raised, a limning of history, people and place, but it is not a regressive paean to times gone by, although Lundy has always drawn upon the rich Appalachian heritage to explain its foodways. (A previous cookbook, Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes and Honest Fried Chicken, also focuses on Lundy’s home region.)
‘People who come to and from these mountains want to know where they are when they eat,’ writes Lundy, quoting one of the great pioneers of the contemporary mountain food scene, John Stehling. In 2011 a study headed up by ethnobotanist Gary Nabham and environmental anthropologist Jim Veteto validated Stehling’s opinion when they declared southern and central Appalachia to be the ‘most diverse foodshed in North America’. She celebrates the knowledge of the local people who are farming, brewing, producing high-quality ingredients and trying to steer a course through the fiscally tricky waters of an American economy which doesn’t always seem to prize their endeavours, favouring multi-national corporations over the local and artisanal.
Many Appalachians are heafed to the land and their family ancestry but do not seek to preserve the past in amber. They have been able to help move Appalachian foodways in new and exciting directions without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This has not always been easy, but for the Appalachians in Lundy’s book, this is the literal definition of aspirational food culture. ‘See, I think assuming ‘aspirational’ for a motivation assumes that those of us living here, in the mountains, are trying to be a part of the world ‘out there’. But the truth of it is, we look ‘out there,’ at the rest of the world, and then we kind of shake our heads and say, ‘Well, I just hate it for them,” local preserve maker Walter Harrill tells Lundy.
‘Food was magical also because I got to be part of the making’, writes Lundy, and we get to read recollections of her aunt Johnnie’s garden full of half-runner beans and descriptions of local cider apple orchards which have to co-exist with nearby large-scale and homogenous commercial growers. For Lundy, the apple is rooted in her love of Little Women’s Jo, whose pockets were filled with windfalls as juicy and taffy-sweet as the ones Lundy remembers growing freely in the mountain hollers. There’s a meditation on the art of making apple butter and a description of what to aim for: ‘dark as sable, thick as pudding and deeply fragrant’ is more helpful and evocative than any photo could be. Developing the master recipe further, the reader is given mini recipes for Sherri Castle’s vinegar kiss and Lundy’s own ‘splash’ with a good glug of bourbon added ‘for the grown-ups’ biscuits’.
Local chefs Shelley Cooper and John Fleer have contributed recipes. Fleer’s buttermilk cornbread soup takes an old tradition (although not exclusive to the region) and turns it into a bowl of comfort suitable for the home cook or to eat at a restaurant. Like all simple meals, it relies on the best ingredients and slow, steady time at the stove. The value of taking twenty minutes to stir the pot cannot be overstated: it can be soothing. Does it sound overly romantic to say this is also what connects us all to the past? I don’t think so, although one must remember that harried, hurried and resentful cooking by busy people also existed then. Cooking is only soothing if one has the time to do it.
Many Appalachian recipes and techniques have been hard-won over time; it’s important to grasp this if you want to take the principles behind Victuals to heart. One emblematic recipe – the apple stack cake- is as much building as it is baking. As Lundy says, ‘it reflects the pioneer spirit of converting something totally old (the Eastern European tradition of layered tortes, brought to the region by German immigrants) into something new with the ingredients at hand.’ Sorghum syrup-sweetened dried apples are cooked and layered onto thick, hearty disks of dough cooked in cast iron skillets. Lundy’s aunt Johnnie would pick and dry apples in June for cakes like the stack and for fried or baked hand pies, although her cake recipe comes from her great-aunt Rae who made the cake for Lundy’s father.
Maybe the stack cake began life as a wedding cake with each family contributing a layer, or maybe it didn’t, but it is at its best after sitting for a couple of days, allowing the spiced apple to seep its sweetness into the layers of cake. Necessity was the mother of invention, and the stack cake remains pretty austere in appearance and ingredients compared to the richly adorned tortes from the old country. Its flavour? Not so.
Lundy reminds us of the great traditions of home preserving. Many of her recipes use ingredients that would otherwise be unavailable to people living in a landlocked part of the USA had commercial canning not existed. Fresh-water fish and shellfish were caught and eaten regularly, but oysters would have been out of the question had it not been for the fine tradition of smoking and canning. If you grew up reading Susan Coolidge and Laura Ingalls Wilder, you would be familiar with the oyster soups made with this delicacy, transported via railroads in thin flat cans, and Lundy’s version of a smoked oyster stew for two is a reminder that no matter how bountiful a region is, sometimes what is longed for is what cannot be grown or caught there. She writes that oysters were a mineral-rich addition to an Appalachian miners’ lunchbox designed to replenish their salt levels after a hot and sweaty shift. They were added to simple potato soups or served with saltines and packed away in a tin pail for the fishers in the family. Lundy’s more luxurious version is flavoured with the olive oil the oysters are preserved in.
Alice Waters is credited with the farm-to-table movement, which champions seasonality and a locavore lifestyle. She placed California on the gastro-map, yet Appalachia and the American South have always lived by this creed, from its early Indigenous People to the population resident there to this day. James Villas has always said that where farm-to-table is concerned, the South got there first. Lundy shows us how the Appalachians got there and where they are headed.
A profile of Ronny Lundy and Victuals.
An Appalachian reading list from Ronni Lundy.
Ronni Lundy’s musings on recipes and memory make the important point that how we learn to cook and from whom is not usually a linear process. Lundy’s mother was ‘the culinary version of a boogie-woogie piano player,’ she writes, ‘riffing through her songs with a deceptive ease’ and delivering ‘old standards with a daily grace that gave these recipes a subtlety and savour that was lacking when they were reduced to their elements and rearranged as words on a page.’
Fishing for Chickens: A Smokies Food Memoir by Jim Casada also contains an excellent Appalachian-themed reading list. His only reservation about Victuals? That it ‘skirts around the edges of the Smokies,’ giving it ‘rather a short shrift.’
Appalachia doesn't need saving; it just needs respect,’ says Chef Milton Travis. ‘When the war on poverty started, we became the poster child for poverty porn and that was all anyone saw or knew of Appalachia. Then it cascaded with the opioid epidemic, people talking about 'Mountain Dew addiction… It always seems to be the narrative of Appalachia,’ he adds, taking J.D Vance and his ilk to task (which is something that Lundy has also done).
More on shuck beans and how to prepare them.
A book by Crystal King I am looking forward to. Here’s the essay that inspired it. “People are always surprised that black people reside in the hills of Appalachia. Those not surprised that we were there, are surprised that we stayed,” she begins.
Writer Kathleen Purvis on the need for more female voices in Southern food writing.
The gender non-conforming people who are farming in Appalachia.
What it means to eat ‘Affrilachian’ by Robin Caldwell.
Black artists and writers give another voice to Appalachia via Wordcrunch.
Digitised copy of Malinda Russell’s Domestic Cookbook.
Eater: The Legacy of Malinda Russell.
A previous newsletter about Appalachia and a reading list.
Victuals photography by Johnny Autry.
Really fascinating. And I want to walk that trail so much!