Crystal Wilkinson‘s Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts illuminates the lives and culinary culture of Black Appalachians over five generations through a blend of family recipes, memoir and regional history. According to Nadra Hashim, Wilkinson’s captivating food-centred narrative honours the Black ingenuity and resilience so often erased from mainstream histories and cultural representations of Appalachia.
When people with roots in Appalachia, a mountainous region in the eastern United States running south from New York to Mississippi, write their stories, they capture literary attention. This is true of Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America (2015), Erik Reece’s Lost Mountain (2006), J.D. Vance’s Hill Billy Elegy (2017), and is now evident in the national acclaim for Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts by Crystal Wilkinson, published earlier this year. Wilkinson, a well-known Kentucky author and poet and Director of the Division of Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky, conjures a unique part of Appalachia’s (and her own family’s) story in a volume that is part memoir, part recipe book.
Wilkinson joins an ensemble of Black Appalachian authors – including US Black History Month founder Carter G. Woodson and Civil Rights Movement activist Julian Bond – who write their community’s stories into the broader regional narrative.
The subtitle – Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks – summons and pays homage to her ancestors. Praisesong is a collection of nearly forty recipes passed down through generations of women, but it is also a critical treatise on Kentucky’s racial, economic and political development. It offers a thoughtful chronicle of a frequently overlooked part of the region’s history: Black Appalachia. Wilkinson challenges the myth of the region’s homogeneity in her introduction and first chapter, discussing difficult topics of American race relations and Black land-inheritance, as well her own family’s experience of adversity and anguish (2-3; 239). Her voice is both bright and bracing, matter of fact and often amusing. Wilkinson’s main subject is the daily life of generations of Appalachians who embrace rural isolation, and as a result, endure chronic food insecurity, but face it with resolute cheer.
The mountains of Appalachia are between 250 -500 million years old and its trails, valleys and creeks are named for the tribe of Apalachee people, indigenous to Florida for thousands of years, now disappeared or removed. Thus, the very name of the region speaks to disorientation. Current and residing tribal communities include the often hidden and migratory Cherokee, Choctaw, Seneca and Iroquois tribes, among others. European settlers, mainly Scottish and Irish, but also many Germans, began arriving in the early eighteenth century, shortly before the beginning of the coal mining industry in that area. By the 1880s, Kentucky produced one million tons of coal annually, and the Eastern Appalachian Basin coal field was the largest. The risks and adverse health effects miners faced were stark: the spectre of early death preceded by penury, black lung, and the threat of mine collapse.
The woman whose photograph graces the book’s cover, Patsy Riffe (a relative of Wilkinson) also gives it its title. Her recipe for Praisesong Biscuits is linked to a riveting story of how she used her culinary skill to purchase her husband from bondage
Despite this industry, films about Appalachia characterise it as a place cut off from modernity. Between 1962 and 1972 a popular television show, Beverly Hillbillies, ridiculed Appalachians as peculiar and absurdly quaint. The 1972 movie Deliverance set in rural Georgia became a classic, engendering a genre of movies that present Appalachia alternately as the backdrop for derision or violence. Wilkinson joins an ensemble of Black Appalachian authors – including US Black History Month founder Carter G. Woodson and Civil Rights Movement activist Julian Bond – who write their community’s stories into the broader regional narrative. It is a timely addition, as notions of Appalachia continue to suggest a wandering people stuck in the past, a simplification of a complex history. Arlie Russell Hochschild argues that Appalachian “shame” exacerbates racial and economic tensions, which are reflected in voting preferences along a red/blue state divide.
Wilkinson’s book intervenes into these stereotypes through the legacy of first-hand recollection. She provides a detailed regional history and reflects on its culture through the recipes, describing how she gathered each one, usually learning to cook a particular dish at the knee of a family member – like the Hot Milk and Caramel Cakes and Indian Creek Cornbread she made with her Aunt Edith (37, 84, 159) – then studying and adapting it as an adult. As well as baking, foraging is knowledge passed down from her grandmother, who in turn learned it from her grandmother, and so on over generations (40; 119; 130). Other recipes, such as Pimento Cheese, were acquired when Wilkinson and her husband owned a now shuttered coffee shop (112). The woman whose photograph graces the book’s cover, Patsy Riffe (a relative of Wilkinson) also gives it its title. Her recipe for Praisesong Biscuits is linked to a riveting story of how she used her culinary skill to purchase her husband from bondage (144; 156).
Wilkinson highlights the importance of sorghum as a political and cultural touchstone (162-67), a mark of displacement and a link to Africa for enslaved people and their descendants.
Throughout the recipes, readers find references to an eclectic mix of co-existing cultures, supporting and enhancing each other, “African-Rooted,” Indigenous American, and European (4; 143).The selected dishes reflect how Appalachians relied on what the land could offer them by foraging, growing seasonal “micro” greens, picking “feral” greens and serving frugal “meatless” dinners (194) and daily staples like Tomato and White Bean Soup that were simple to make with only a few ingredients. At other times, going without meat is a celebration of the flavour of the crop, like turnip, mustard and kale.
Sorghum, a nutritious crop gathered, processed, cultivated, “lost,” and then revived is indigenous to Northeast Africa which came to the region through the transatlantic trade of products and enslaved persons. Wilkinson highlights the importance of sorghum as a political and cultural touchstone (162-67), a mark of displacement and a link to Africa for enslaved people and their descendants. As such, she sweetens her Dark Crystal Latte with sorghum molasses rather than traditional molasses, a syrup left over from the process of refining sugar. Wilkinson also spotlights the yam, native both to Africa and to Appalachia, which she candies in her Harvest Celebration or Thanksgiving menu (231).
Her cookbook centres the Black ingenuity that has previously been erased from the Appalachian story
Mutton stew, quiche, “dressed” eggs, and jam cake prepared for Sundays and special occasions require more ingredients and effort, but speak to cultural infusion. Moving the tradition forward, Wilkinson offers “no piggy sausage” (199), suggested as an alternative to her grandmother’s sage sausage, used in a quiche (221). Adapting recipes with the times allows each generation to reaffirm, but also to advance the notion of Appalachian identity. While past generations grew, tended and husbanded crops and animals, the gradual transition from rural to urban life is reflected in concessions to “store-bought” items when ‘farm to table’ might be inaccessible (45, 88, 221). Being economical, while focusing on family, eventually leads to the kind of innovation that turns a rugged stew into a celebrated local ragoût. Wilkinson suggests the possible origins of Kentucky “Burgoo” as either African or Native American (180), while the name also suggests a possible mispronunciation of the French dish Boeuf Bourguignon.
The rich portrait of the Wilkinsons’ culinary habits over generations contrasts sharply with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s acknowledgement of the area’s deep deprivation in the twentieth century, acknowledged in his declaration of a “War on Poverty” (2) in his 1964 State of the Union address. In 1960, Appalachian privation meant families in the region were three times as likely to fall below the poverty line as their national counterparts. But the region benefitted immensely from LBJ’s 1965 Appalachian Regional Development Act, just as nationwide urban renewal displaced entire city districts. Today only one in seven Appalachians are low-income or have low access to food supply, a rate that reflects the national average. Still, the legacy of want, particularly in central Appalachia, continues to inform local efforts to improve access to nutrient-rich sustenance.
Wilkinson’s thoughtful book brings home the reality that food is both political and a means of connecting to past generations. Praisesong suggests that the history contained in recipes, exemplified in Wilkinson’s family legacy, is worth writing about, enabling a new way of understanding Appalachia. Her cookbook centres the Black ingenuity that has previously been erased from the Appalachian story, celebrating the culture of a region and people often disparaged, homogenised and ignored.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image: Three women skimming the boiling cane juice to make sorghum syrup at cane mill near Carr, Orange County, North Carolina by Marion Post Wolcott via Picryl.com. License: Public Domain.
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Nadra, thank you for the thoughtful insights into this book. It made me want to read it very much.
Thank you so much for this penetrating review of Crystal Wilkinson’s important new book. The long standing stereotypes of Appalachian people silence not only authentic research and writing about this complex region but also how they are reviewed. Here, Nadra Hashim resists the stereotypes and drives readers to deeper considerations of our complex history. Her only misstep is includeing the opportunistic and weak writing of J.D. Vance in the same category as Wendell Berry as legitimate chroniclers of Appalachia.
Thanks to Ms. Christian and Jennings. It’s incredible finding a great cookbook that is an entertaining read and a compelling narrative. Since Mr. Vance has captured literary attention (and critical analysis), he must be included in discussion, especially as he is now part of a popular political culture (being a Vice Presidential candidate). That said, the works of a host of ‘chroniclers of Appalachia’ can be the best rebuttal to his own particular point of view. Let the debate begin!