The Foxfire Book Series That Preserved Appalachian Foodways
The Foxfire Book Series That Preserved Appalachian Foodways
March 17, 201711:00 AM ET
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/03/17/520038859/the-foxfire-book-series-that-preserved-appalachian-foodways
In an image from the first Foxfire book, students in 1969 look on as Hobe Beasley, John Hopper and Hopper's wife suspend a hog for finishing the work of scalding and scraping.
Courtesy of The Foxfire Fund, Inc.
The 1,500-mile Appalachian Mountain range stretches so far that those on the northern and southern sides can't agree on what to call it: Appa-LAY-chia or Appa-LATCH-ia. The outside perspective on the people who live there might be even more mangled. Stories about Appalachia tend to center around subjects like poverty, the opioid epidemic and coal, but since 1966 a series called Foxfire has been sharing food, culture and life as it's actually lived in the mountain region.
Foxfire started as a class project at a Georgia high school — students interviewed neighbors and wrote a series of articles, which turned into a quarterly magazine and then a book, in 1972, with other books to follow soon after. (The name of the series comes from a term for a local form of bioluminescence caused by fungi on decaying wood.) Within the first decade, more than 9 million copies of Foxfire were sold. Today, there are specialized Foxfire books that focus on cooking, winemaking, religion and music.
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 Foxfire's 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.
When Susi Gott Séguret, author of Appalachian Appetite, saw Nordic cuisine becoming a trend, she thought, "What's the big deal? It's how I grew up and how Appalachian people have approached food from the beginning." The food is defined by the mountains. "There are certain restrictions and a richness born of that mountain setting," Séguret says.
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More at the link.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/03/17/520038859/the-foxfire-book-series-that-preserved-appalachian-foodways
= new reply since forum marked as read
I bought them at a used book store a number of years back. Really interesting, the two I have had info about musical instruments (mountain banjos and such). Number 3 and 6, not sure how many there were, I'm pulling them out tonight. 
