Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, and Scuppernong Wine is my favorite kind of a writing: Perhaps it's just an attention span that only slightly exceeds a chicken's, but I've always been partial to encyclopedias, chrestomathies, and motley books. The prime example in English might be Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, in a peripatetic group that includes everything from William Blake's epic poems to Ambrose Bierce's subversive dictionary to James Agee's queer account of Alabama sharecroppers. Like the Wisdom Books of the Old Testament, each seems to offer a continuously unique, surprising, and delightful encounter, and the reading as a whole is as various and inexhaustible as experience himself.
So it was with great satisfaction I opened, at random, Joseph Dabney's “cookbook” to find instructions for bear stew combined with an anecdote about a North Carolina woman breastfeeding a cub. Smokehouse Ham is hardly a manual for cooking but a living compilation of history, biography, opinion, and folklore, which animate each chapter's recipes. Personally, I can hear my own grandfather talking about hunting squirrels and rabbits in the North Georgia foothills to supply the family's table during the Depression, and in this way the volume invites a kind of mutual action, begging for me to pull out a pencil and write in the margins as the page inscribes me.
I should add a recommendation that will touch all similar bibliophiles. Characteristically, the book has a reassuring heft. My favorite books have all been physically substantial. They're like intimate companions. Often when I've fallen asleep reading late, I've woken the next morning to find the rectangular impression in the sheets beside me wholly comforting.
This is exactly what I had in mind as a mountain complement to Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's Cross Creek Cookery. I hope Rawlings doesn't disappoint. After reading the following quote from her Cross Creek, I doubt she will:
[T]he consciousness of land and water must lie deeper in the core of us than any knowledge of our fellow beings. We were bred of earth before we were born of our mothers. Once born, we can live without mother or father, or any other kin, or any friend or any human love. We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled [sic] in man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.
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