To Appalachian Cooks, With Love

Interstate 81 bypassed their business over half a century ago, but Pam and Grant Hall keep making Dip Dogs on the Lee Highway between Chilhowie and Marion in Southwest Virginia. Those red-dyed dogs, dipped in a secret batter, fried, and painted in mustard, are so popular that customers sometimes have trouble getting into the parking lot on Friday nights to pick up their call-in orders. The Halls work seven days a week, 51 weeks a year.

In beautiful Bullock’s Hollow, near Bluff City, Tennessee, pharmacist Larry Proffitt keeps on barbecuing fresh hams, just like his enterprising mother, Grace Proffitt, once did. “Stay with the pig until he makes a hog,” she often told him. And he has. Salespeople stop by Ridgewood Barbecue just about every week to sell Larry on the idea of an electric cooker. “Push a button and forget about it,” they say. But Larry Proffitt and his employees keep cutting hickory wood to fuel the barbecue pit. They keep tending that fire. Electricity and gas have no place in the enterprise.

In Greeneville, Tennessee, Jerry and Donna Hartsell carry on a soup-bean tradition that began in the 1950s, when Britt’s Grill employee Reagan Walker decided to add a ladle of beef stew to the daily pot of lard-seasoned soup beans. With a scattering of chopped onions, Beans All the Way was born. And this iconic Appalachian meal of soup beans and corn bread continues to nourish souls and stomachs at The Bean Barn today.

Near the community of Bear Wallow in Western North Carolina, Duke University-educated Jeff and Chris Owen and their three sons forego vacations. When you raise a herd of some 60 goats, weekends at the beach are not an option. Milking must go on. And that milk is converted into artisanal goat cheese at a place called Spinning Spider Creamery.

At his self-described “hole-in-the-wall business” on Highway 411 in Madisonville, Tennessee, Allan Benton employs the most precious element of Appalachian cooking: time. Refusing to give in to the market pressures of producing country ham in six weeks, Allan ages his pork for more than a year.

At Eastern Kentucky’s Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center, Bill Best celebrates Greasy Cut-Shorts, slick and tender green beans with tightly packed seeds, and disease-resistant Vinson Watts Tomatoes, named for a former colleague at Berea College. They are among dozens of Bill’s heirloom bean and tomato varieties, named for friends, places, and families and saved from extinction by this wise man of the earth.

These heroes of the Appalachian kitchen, farm, and smokehouse, and many others like them, are true to the land, devoted to their craft, and proud of their products. They represent a work ethic that is timeless. Despite pressures to cut corners and compromise their ways, they persist, never giving up or giving in. They feed us well and make the Appalachian table a place of great joy and bounty.