Chapter 30 Further Reading: Foodways, Craft, and Material Culture

Wigginton, Eliot, ed. The Foxfire Book. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972. The book that started it all — a compilation of student-conducted interviews with mountain elders about traditional skills including hog dressing, log cabin building, soap making, and dozens of other practices. Despite the complexities surrounding its editor's later history, the book remains an extraordinary document of traditional Appalachian material culture, told in the voices of the people who practiced it. The first of twelve Foxfire volumes covering virtually every aspect of mountain life.

Sohn, Mark F. Appalachian Home Cooking: History, Culture, and Recipes. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005. The most comprehensive single-volume treatment of Appalachian food traditions, written by a lifelong mountain resident and food scholar. Sohn traces the Indigenous, African, and European roots of mountain cuisine, documents regional variations, and provides tested recipes alongside historical and cultural context. Essential for anyone who wants to understand not just what Appalachians ate but why they ate it and what it meant.

Lundy, Ronni. Victuals: An Appalachian Journey, with Recipes. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2016. A James Beard Award-winning celebration of Appalachian food by a native of Corbin, Kentucky that combines personal narrative, cultural history, and recipes. Lundy is particularly strong on the ways in which Appalachian food reflects the cultural diversity of the mountains — the Indigenous, African, and European contributions that are too often collapsed into a generic "mountain cooking" narrative. Beautiful photographs and deeply researched text.

Twitty, Michael W. The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South. New York: Amistad, 2017. While not exclusively about Appalachia, Twitty's James Beard Award-winning exploration of the African roots of Southern food is essential reading for understanding the contributions that enslaved and free Black people made to the region's foodways. Twitty combines culinary history, genealogy, and personal narrative to trace the African ingredients, techniques, and traditions that shaped what we now call "Southern cooking" — including Appalachian cooking.

Irwin, John Rice. Baskets and Basket Makers in Southern Appalachia. Exton, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 1982. A detailed study of the basket-weaving traditions of the southern Appalachian mountains, covering both Cherokee and Scots-Irish traditions and the tools, materials, and techniques involved. Irwin, who founded the Museum of Appalachia in Norris, Tennessee, combines photographic documentation with historical and cultural analysis. Useful for understanding how a functional craft tradition becomes an art form.

Hill, Sarah H. Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. A pathbreaking study of Cherokee basket-weaving that places women's craft production at the center of Cherokee cultural history. Hill traces the tradition from pre-contact through removal, the post-Civil War period, and the twentieth-century craft revival, showing how Cherokee women used basket-weaving to maintain cultural identity, generate income, and negotiate the demands of a changing world. Scholarly but accessible, and essential for understanding the Indigenous roots of Appalachian craft.

Becker, Jane S. Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. A critical examination of the craft revival movement that transformed Appalachian material culture from everyday practice into a marketable commodity. Becker analyzes how settlement schools, the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild, and New Deal cultural programs constructed an image of "Appalachian craft" that served the needs of urban consumers as much as mountain producers. Essential for understanding the tension between tradition and market described in Chapter 30.

Barker, Garry. The Handcraft Revival in Southern Appalachia, 1930-1990. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. A comprehensive history of the organized craft revival in the southern mountains, from the founding of the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild through the late twentieth century. Barker, a longtime Guild staff member, provides insider knowledge of the institutions, individuals, and tensions that shaped the revival. Particularly useful for understanding the organizational infrastructure that supported mountain craft production.

Dabney, Joseph E. Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine: The Folklore and Art of Southern Appalachian Cooking. Nashville: Cumberland House, 1998. A richly detailed account of Appalachian food traditions, organized by food type (corn, pork, game, greens, fruits) rather than by historical period. Dabney combines recipes, oral history, and cultural analysis, and his section on the hog-killing tradition is one of the most vivid accounts of this central event in the mountain agricultural calendar. Readable and warm, with a genuine respect for the people whose food traditions it documents.

Peck, Elisabeth S., and Emily Ann Smith. Berea and the Appalachian Crafts Revival: Reshaping Traditions. Berea, KY: Berea College Appalachian Center, 2016. An examination of Berea College's role in the Appalachian craft revival, from the late nineteenth century through the present. The study analyzes how Berea's craft program both preserved and transformed mountain traditions, navigating the tension between institutional goals (funding, marketing, quality control) and the organic evolution of living craft traditions. Useful as a case study of the opportunities and compromises inherent in institutional cultural preservation.

Documentary: Quilts of Gee's Bend. Directed by Vanessa Vadim and Matt Arnett. Tinwood Media, 2002. A documentary about the extraordinary quilting tradition of Gee's Bend, Alabama — a community at the southern edge of the Appalachian region whose quilts were "discovered" by the art world in the early 2000s and exhibited at major museums. The film raises questions about the relationship between folk art and fine art, about who decides when a functional object becomes an art object, and about the economics of cultural recognition. A companion to the quilt analysis in Chapter 30.

Appalachian Food Summit. appalachianfoodsummit.org. The website of the Appalachian Food Summit, which brings together chefs, farmers, food writers, and community organizers working to celebrate and sustain Appalachian food traditions. The site includes resources on Appalachian food history, profiles of contemporary food practitioners, and information about food sovereignty initiatives across the mountains. A useful starting point for students interested in the contemporary dimensions of the food politics discussed in Chapter 30.