The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery

“If you're wondering what came before the Noma Guide to Fermentation . . . Open-hearth cooking. Zero-waste preservation. Nose-to-tail butchery. There are any number of new guides to these hot topics from pedigreed, of-the-moment chefs—but before you buy those, you should read this year’s beautiful reissue of the 1982 cult classic The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cooking. Put together by a small-but-mighty non-profit dedicated to preserving traditional Appalachian foodways, its recipes, essays, and black-and-white photos serve as a humbling reminder that before certain techniques were buzzwords, they were a means of survival for resourceful people in rural America—and, indeed, all over the world.”—Bon Appétit

“People who have been following the back-to-the-land food trends that have resurfaced in the past decade might find some of the recipes in [The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery] familiar and focused around a simple, self-sufficient way of life. There are instructions for making bread in a Dutch oven (specifically over coals in the fireplace.) For pork, the authors note that Appalachians 'stand by their belief that virtually no part of the hog should be thrown away,' and its recipes for homemade scrapple, hog’s head, jowl or sausage wouldn’t be out of place on a certain kind of Brooklyn menu. . . . Although foraging and using imperfect vegetables and local food are popular concepts today, they've been a way of life for generations in many cultures. Making charcuterie in-house has become a selling point for restaurants; Foxfire was one of the few books to describe how to make sausage from scratch.â.”—The Salt, NPR Books

“If you're interested in real American cooking (not the media-hyped trend), spend time with the people in this wonderful book.”—Cuisine

“The book’s essays, interviews, and techniques draw out things you don’t realize about cooking until you do it. For example, it’s easy to imagine that hearth cooking is heavy work, but you might not realize that it is also intentional and meditative; it takes hours to produce the hot bed of coals that supply sustained heat. The book digs into root cellars and spring houses, not as abstract bits of history but functioning food technologies.”—CHoW Line

“Every time I pick up The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery I learn something new. . . . This book is important and will continue to be important long after we are gone.”—Sean Brock