Old-timey foods that I miss

[theHandpuppet]

7. If you don't know beans, you don't know Appalachia

CNN - Eatocracy
If you don't know beans, you don't know Appalachia
Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of Southern food. Sheri Castle is the author of "The New Southern Garden Cookbook." She wrote this essay for the Appalachian-themed issue #51 of the SFA's Gravy quarterly.

This is a story about pinto beans. But first it’s a story about my mountain people and one of our curious traditions.

The Appalachian Mountain South is to the rest of the South what bourbon is to whiskey: It is distinguishable from the rest, yet part of the whole. That includes our food, which is rooted in our geography. Like the rest of the rural South, mountain people traditionally ate off the land. Unlike the rest of the rural South, my people live up and back in one of the oldest mountain ranges on the planet, where the landscape and climate are quite different. On a map, we’re in the South. In practice, we claim our own place.

Mountain people were, and are, notably self-reliant, eating what they can forage, hunt, or raise for themselves. Farming in the Appalachian mountains is hard now and used to be nearly impossible. The land is combative. The growing season is fickle and fleeting. The ground can be as rocky as a dry creek bed.

Old timers quip that the easiest way to plant crops in the mountains is to load a shotgun with seed, stand on the porch, and blast it into the hillside. To survive the harsh and threatening winters, people preserve what they can’t eat immediately. In short, they grow it fast, and make it last....

MORE at http://eatocracy.cnn.com/2014/05/21/appalachian-soup-beans/?hpt=ea_r2