15 Forgotten Appalachian Survival Foods That Kept Mountain Families Alive 

15 Forgotten Appalachian Survival Foods That Kept Mountain Families Alive 

If your grandmother ever fed a whole family on what’s in most people’s junk drawer today, and you couldn’t do it now to save your life, sit down, neighbor. I’ve got something that belongs to you. In the winter of 1932, in a two-room cabin above Wallins Creek in Harlan County, Kentucky, a coal miner’s wife named Della Sargent fed nine people for a full week on $2.40.

Cash money. That was the whole grocery. The rest came off the mountain, out of the cellar, and out of a black cast iron pot she hung over the fire before daylight, and didn’t take down until the men came in from the shaft after dark. Beans, greens, a knuckle of side meat somebody’s cousin had smoked in October, cornmeal ground at the mill down the branch, apples from a tree her grandmother had planted before the Civil War, nine bellies, $2.40.

Nobody went to the table hungry, and nobody at that table thought of themselves as poor. Today, most of us couldn’t feed our own household for a weekend on what she fed nine people for a week, and we couldn’t do it out of a full grocery store, much less a mountainside. Before we go on, there’s something coming for this country, and the news won’t say a word about it till it’s already on your doorstep.

 It comes down to one number, 3 days. That’s what the stores hold for you. Your grandfather’s pantry held a winter, and the difference was never money. It was knowing. 904 pages of that knowing in one book. Water, fire, curing, canning, the plants that heal and the ones that kill. silasmercer.shop. Links below. All right, back to it. But, here’s the twist.

 The record now says the food Della Sargent was ashamed of eating. The food her grandchildren were taught to leave behind was better than what replaced it. Cheaper, more nourishing, and somebody made money the day her family forgot how to cook it. Della’s story ain’t done yet. I’ll come back to her. I’m Silas Mercer, seventh generation on this ridge.

 My people settled it in the 1790s and never left. My grandfather Eli was born in 1918, fed eight children off the side of this mountain through the depression, and before he died at 94, he made me copy every recipe and every trick he knew into a leather journal I keep on the shelf behind me. He made me swear the old ways wouldn’t die with me.

That’s what this is. Me keeping my word. I’m counting down 15 forgotten Appalachian survival foods that kept mountain families alive when the outside world had nothing to give them. Some of these would turn a modern stomach. Some of them a university quietly confirmed beats the store-bought version you’re overpaying for right now.

Number eight, almost nobody alive still does the right way, and it kept eggs edible for eight months without a lick of electricity. Number six, you can’t legally sell in most states today. And number three, a food scientist at a land grant college spent 40 years catching up to what your great grandmother did in a crock on the porch.

None of these disappeared because they quit tasting good. They disappeared because somebody got rich the day mountain families started buying dinner instead of making it. Not a conspiracy, friend. Just how markets work. They’re good at selling. Before we start the count, tap subscribe. Not for me, because we’re pulling these old plates back onto the table, and you’ll want the next one they’d rather you forgot how to make.

15 down to one. Not what did we lose? Who got paid when we stopped cooking? And how do you take it back? Number 15. A pot of soup beans and a pan of cornbread. Della Sargent had a pot of these on the fire near every day of her married life. Pinto beans picked over on a checkered tablecloth by lamplight.

 Soaked overnight in a chipped enamel bowl. Dropped in a cast iron kettle with a chunk of salt cured side meat and one yellow onion. And left to cook slow from dawn to dark. Cornbread baked in a hot grease skillet alongside. That was supper for nine people. In 1935, dry pintos went for 6 to 8 cents a pound in the mountain south.

The 1936 United States Department of Agriculture low-cost meals bulletin said it in black and white. About 15 cents will provide the beans and pork for a family of five. 15 cents for dinner. Then in 1955, Campbell’s Soup went national with canned bean soups and pork and beans. They spent more on 1 year of advertising than every mountain grandmother earned in a lifetime.

And they taught your mother that opening a can was progress. And soaking beans was poverty. Harvard School of Public Health, 2015. I’ll quote it. Beans are inexpensive and convenient, and are considered a healthy alternative to meat as a source of protein. Harvard. Confirming what your great-grandmother had figured out with a bag and a ham bone.

Meanwhile, a food magazine in Asheville charges $34 for a bowl of what she made for pennies and calls it Appalachian cuisine. Beans, cornbread, grease in the skillet, fed nine, never a dollar. Somebody made money off you forgetting how cheap it was to feed your own friend, and it wasn’t you. That one, they only crowded off the shelf.

 The next one, they taught your grandmother’s grandmother to burn out of a cast-iron pot years before there was a shelf to crowd her off of. Number 14, corn pone, not cornbread, pone. Cornmeal, hot water, salt, a spoonful of lard, patted by hand into oblong cakes and set before the coals of a hearth fire in a greased iron skillet. That was the bread most mountain families ate for most meals of most years of the 19th and half of the 20th century.

Eli wrote it down in his journal in 1949. Two cups cornmeal, 1 tsp salt, hot water to a thick batter, two spoons of grease. His mother had taught him standing in front of a fireplace in 1925. Her mother had taught her the same way in 1878. In 1938, the United States Department of Agriculture said it plain, 1 lb of cornmeal provides bread for a family of five at a cost of less than 5 cents.

5 cents. Then in 1928, a fellow named Otto Rohwedder up in Missouri invented the pre-sliced bread machine. And by the mid-30s, Continental Baking was hauling Wonder Bread into every crossroads store in the mountain south. Soft, white, cotton textured, and stamped on a wrapper that said, “Modern.” They didn’t ban pone, friend.

They just made your grandmother feel like a hillbilly for making it. A pat of dough, a hot skillet, 5 cents fed the house. That was the bread. The next one was breakfast. And the same folks who sold you the bread came for your morning, too. Number 13, beans and greens with a chunk of streaked meat. This is the pot on the fire in the picture I put up.

This is what a timber man in Breathitt County, Kentucky in 1938 ate at noon out of a wooden bowl set on a stump with a black kettle steaming behind him and the ridge going up behind that. White beans simmered from morning with a ham hock. In the last hour, in went a mess of collard, turnip, mustard, or in the spring, wild dandelion or properly boiled poke greens.

Onion, salt, pepper. Nothing else. That was one bowl. That was dinner for a man who’d been swinging an axe since sunup. United States Department of Agriculture Extension 1942 said it flat, “Wild greens may be used without cost.” Without cost. A pound of beans, 6 cents. A ham hawk, a nickel. Everything green came off the hillside for free.

Then in 1960, Allen Canning down in Arkansas rolled out preseason canned turnip greens. Cheap, cracked open with a can opener. No fire, no washing, no picking. And by the time the Interstate reached the head of the holler, McDonald’s had a workingman’s lunch that didn’t take an hour to simmer. The journal called Nutrients 2019 said higher intake of leafy green vegetables is associated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease.

What the mountain men were eating out of a cast iron pot in 1938 turns out to be exactly what the cardiologist wishes you’d eat now. First pattern break. Here’s where it stops being quaint and starts being the reason somebody got rich selling workingmen their dinner instead of teaching them to keep making it.

Three more coming, and number eight is the one they hoped you’d never learn again. Number 12, hand rendered lard. Rendered by your great-grandmother in a cast iron pot behind the smokehouse from the fat trimmings of the November hog. Cut fine, set over low fire, cook slow until the fat runs clear and the cracklings float golden on top.

 Strain through cheesecloth into stoneware crocks. That was her year of cooking fat from scraps she’d have thrown out anyway. In 1911, Procter & Gamble put Crisco on the shelf, hydrogenated cottonseed oil. They spent the next 60 years running advertisements in every woman’s magazine in America telling your grandmother that her kitchen fat was dirty, backward, and would stop your heart.

Penn State published in 2018 that lard’s fatty acid profile is is healthier than the shortening that replaced it. Higher in mono unsaturates than butter, lower in trans fats than partially hydrogenated anything. Penn State said it in print. Nobody outlawed the pot on your stove, friend.

 They just made sure you’d feel like a fool for using it. There was no money in you rendering your own. Fat trimmings, slow fire, cheesecloth. A year’s cooking grease for the price of a hog you were butchering anyway. That was the fat. Next comes what she boiled in it. And the store now charges you $9 a cup for what she poured out of a bone.

Number 11, sawmill gravy over biscuits. Every man who cut timber, dug coal, or split rails in these mountains started his day on this. Bacon grease left in the skillet from breakfast meat. Two spoons of flour whisked in until it bubbles. Two cups of milk poured slow. Salt and black pepper till it bites. Poured hot over split biscuits, thick enough that a spoon would stand up in it.

 United States Department of Agriculture low-cost meals, 1936, put the cost of a serving of white gravy at about a penny. A penny on a working man’s breakfast that carried him till dark. Then in 1972, General Mills put a Betty Crocker gravy mix packet on the shelf. And by 1985, McDonald’s had a biscuit sandwich on the drive-thru board. The working man’s breakfast stopped happening at his own stove.

It happened out a window on the way to a job that no longer let him take a lunch pail. Southern Living magazine still calls sawmill gravy classic comfort. They’ll charge you $14 for a plate of it at a heritage restaurant in Nashville right now. It cost your great-grandmother a penny. Grease, flour, milk, salt, pepper.

Breakfast for a man swinging a maul at dawn. That was breakfast. The next one they took out of the working man’s supper and sold to him frozen in a tray. Number 10. Fried cornmeal mush. Simple as anything on this list. One cup cornmeal stirred slow into three cups boiling salted water. Cooked half an hour till thick.

Poured into a greased loaf pan. Set on the cold pantry shelf overnight. Come morning, sliced half inch thick and fried in bacon grease until the outside crackles and the inside stays soft. Poured with sorghum molasses or milk gravy. That was breakfast. Or that was supper. The United States Department of Agriculture said in 1924 in print, “1 lb of cornmeal will make eight liberal servings of mush.

” Cornmeal at 3 cents a pound. Less than half a cent per serving. Then Quaker Oats and Kellogg and Post spent the 1950s convincing your grandmother that cold cereal from a box was modern and hot cornmeal from a pot was the past. They painted a picture of a bright new kitchen with a cereal box on the counter. And they painted your great-grandmother’s stove as something to be embarrassed by.

Whole grain cornmeal, per a 2018 nutrition review in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, retains fiber and micronutrients that refined cold cereals do not. Cornmeal, water, salt, grease, half a cent a serving. That was the cheap breakfast. The next number you don’t buy at all. You keep in a cellar for a year without a plug in the wall.

Number nine, root cellared winter stores. Not a dish, a whole system. Dug into a bank behind the cabin, stone-lined, cool the year-round without a wire running to it. United States Department of Agriculture Farmers’ Bulletin 879, published in 1917, said a well-constructed storage cellar may be built for 10 to 25 dollars.

That was your winter grocery bill, one time, paid in labor. Down in the dark went bushels of Kennebec potatoes in dry sand. Cabbages hung head down from the joist. Apples wrapped in newspaper in wooden crates. Turnips in straw. Onions braided and strung. Sweet potatoes in a warmer corner. Come February, when the road was iced shut and no wagon was reaching that holler, your great-grandfather walked down eight steps and took supper off a shelf.

Then General Electric and Frigidaire put a white box in your grandmother’s kitchen in 1948. And by 1960, 90% of American homes had one and the cellar door on the side of the hill grew over. Nobody outlawed the hole in the ground. They just sold her a machine that had to be paid for every month forever and told her the cellar was primitive.

Mike and Nancy Bubel in root cellaring 1979 confirmed the technique still works, uses no electricity, and keeps some vegetables better than refrigeration does. A hole, some stone, straw, fed the family from November to April. Number eight, the one I promised. Water glassed eggs. Fresh unwashed spring eggs laid down point first in a stoneware crock, covered in a solution of sodium silicate or food grade pickling lime and boiled cooled water, sealed with a plate, kept in the cool of the cellar, and they came back out edible eight

months later. No refrigeration, no canning, no electricity. United States Department of Agriculture Farmers Bulletin 846, 1917, laid it out. One quart of water glass is sufficient for about 12 to 15 dozen eggs. One quart, about 18 cents in 1917, preserved 150 eggs. That’s a fraction of a penny per egg for winter storage.

Eli wrote it down in the journal in 1943. He’d learned it from his mother, who put down four crocks every May from the spring flush of the hens, and pulled the last one open at Easter the next year. Then post-war refrigeration and the industrial cold storage egg came in, and the sodium silicate quit being sold at the mercantile and by 1970 near nobody in America knew the trick.

It didn’t get banned. It just got forgotten because there was no product to sell if you did it yourself. Oregon State Extension revisited it in 2018 and cautiously endorsed the traditional lime method if fresh, clean, unwashed eggs are used. Here’s the one part you don’t skip, friend. Unwashed eggs only because the bloom is what keeps the pathogen out.

Do it wrong, you’ll wish you hadn’t. Do it right, you’ve got eggs till spring. Second pattern break. That was the one almost nobody alive still does the right way. And I’ll tell you now, number six is the one you can’t legally sell in most states today. And number three is the one Harvard hadn’t caught up to yet in 1936.

Number seven. Fried apples and salt pork supper. A supper on a plate. Winesap or Stayman apples out of the cellar, sliced thick, cored but not peeled, dropped into the grease left from frying a hand thick slab of home cured salt pork. Cooked till the edges turn brown and the sugar in the fruit caramelizes with the pork fat.

Set beside the meat on a plate with a piece of pone. Apples out of a tree your grandfather planted, salt pork out of your own smokehouse, grease out of the skillet. That whole supper cash cost was zero. Then in 1953, Swanson put the frozen television dinner on the grocery shelf. And by 1965, the American supper was a tray of gray meat and gray peas and gray potatoes eaten off a metal stand in front of a television set.

They didn’t ban the apple tree. They just made sure your mother felt sophisticated buying a tray with a picture on the box. Modern chefs at high-end southern restaurants now put pork and apples on the menu at $28 a plate. Your great-grandmother made it for zero. Apples, salt pork, cast-iron skillet. A supper worth nothing and worth everything.

Number six, souse, headcheese, the one I promised that you can’t legally sell in most states today without an inspected slaughterhouse behind it. On hog-killing day in November, every part of the hog got used. And the head went in the black kettle in the yard. Boiled until the meat fell off the skull. Picked clean by hand.

Chopped fine, seasoned with black pepper, sage, and a splash of vinegar. Packed into a bread pan and the strained cooking liquid poured back over it. Set in the cold pantry. Overnight, the gelatin from the head bone set the whole thing into a sliceable loaf. Foxfire 2, 1973, has a woman in Rabun County, Georgia, quoted straight.

We always made souse when we killed hogs. We boiled the head, picked off the meat, and poured the juice over it to set. United States Department of Agriculture Farmers Bulletin 2138 1942. A 200-lb hog may be produced at a cost of about 10 to $15 in feed. $10 a year’s meat. Then federal meat inspection tightened through the mid-20th century and the small hog killing on the family place became legally impossible to sell across the state line.

And the supermarket cold case ended most families butchering entirely. Not banned in your own kitchen, banned in commerce, which meant nobody grew up watching it done anymore. Nobody ate souse because it was gourmet. They ate it because you don’t waste a hog. But done right, in a clean kettle with fresh meat, it fed folks through February.

Here’s the one part you don’t skip. Pork to 160° refrigerate promptly. Done in a scrubbed vessel. Your great-grandmother knew that. She just called it common sense. That was the hog you couldn’t waste. The next one is what she boiled the rest of the bones in. And there’s a cafe in Brooklyn selling it in a paper cup for $9 right now.

Number five, smokehouse cured ham. The single biggest food investment on a mountain place and the one that carried a family from January clear through summer. Fresh ham off a November hog rubbed with a mix of salt, brown sugar, and black pepper. Packed in a wooden box or laid on a stone slab. Salt cured 6 weeks, then hung in the smokehouse over a slow hickory or apple wood fire for two to four weeks more.

Aged through the spring hanging from a rafter wrapped in muslin. United States Department of Agriculture Farmers Bulletin 2138 again. Home killed hog for 10 to $15 feed cost yielding 150 lb of pork. That ham on the rafter was worth six months of Sunday suppers and 100 pots of beans flavored with the hawk. Then the mid-century inspection expansion and cheap supermarket ham crowded out the smokehouse.

Somebody in Chicago figured out you could pump water and phosphate into a ham, slice it, and charge less. Your grandfather closed the smokehouse door and started buying pink slices in plastic. Here’s the one part you don’t skip if you cure meat at home. Proper cure ratios and food-grade curing salt exactly as your extension service publishes.

Guess wrong and you’ll poison the household. The old men didn’t guess, they measured. Number four, bone broth from the ham bone, not stock, broth. When your great-grandmother finished the last of the ham off the rafter, that bone did not go in the trash. It went in the black kettle covered in cold water with a peeled onion and a stalk of celery and a bay leaf if she had one.

And it simmered on the back of the stove for 24 hours till the marrow surrendered and the joints turned to jelly. Strain through cheesecloth into quart jars, kept in the cellar, poured into every soup, every bean pot, every skillet of greens for the next two weeks. She made a gallon of it off a bone she’d have thrown out.

 Cost? Zero. Now, they’ll sell you a $9 paper cup of bone broth in a coffee shop in Brooklyn. $9 for one cup of what she made a gallon of for free. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2017 notes that long-simmered bone broths contain collagen peptides, glycine, and minerals leached from bone, which is exactly what she was doing with a kettle and patience, and exactly what somebody is now selling back to you.

Eli wrote it in the journal in 1961. Bone, water, onion, 24 hours. Don’t strain until it’s cold. That’s the whole recipe. Third pattern break, and here’s where I’ll be plain with you. This isn’t prepper doomer talk. I’m not selling you fear about the grid going down. I’m telling you the ancestors ate better and cheaper than we do, and I’ll tell you where the food safety line runs before we go any further.

Number three, lacto-fermented sauerkraut in a crock, the one I promised. This is on the porch in the picture. This is what your great-grandmother made in October, kneeling on a log cabin porch with a knife and a head of cabbage the size of a baby, shredding it fine into a wooden bowl, salting it in layers as she packed it into a 5-gallon crock, weighting it with a scrubbed river stone, covering it with a cloth, and letting the bacteria on the leaves do the work of preservation for 6 weeks in the cool of the pantry.

United States Department of Agriculture Sauerkraut Bulletin 1936, From 25 lbs of cabbage, about 20 to 22 lbs of sauerkraut will be obtained. 20 lbs of live culture vitamin rich winter vegetable, cost of one head of cabbage and 3 Tbsp of salt. Then Del Monte and Libby’s put canned sauerkraut on the shelf.

 Pasteurized, dead in a jar. Convenient, shelf stable, and absolutely missing the very thing that made the mountain kraut valuable. The live lactobacillus. North Carolina State University food science research from the last decade and the broader scientific literature since about 2010 confirms lacto-fermented vegetables contain live probiotic bacteria that pasteurized canned versions do not.

Your great-grandmother was doing microbial fermentation on a cabin porch a century before the word probiotic appeared on a yogurt cup. Here’s the one part you don’t skip. The brine has to cover the cabbage. Air is what spoils it. Weight it down. That was the crock. The last one before the whole truth is the pot that started the whole video.

Number two. Apple butter from a copper kettle. Made outdoors in October in a copper kettle set on a stone ring from a bushel of drops off the family tree, cooked all day with cider and sugar and cinnamon and clove, stirred without ceasing with a long wooden paddle so the sugar wouldn’t scorch on the bottom. 10 hours of stirring.

The whole family took shifts. At the end, thick enough to spread, dark as pipe tobacco, sweet enough to eat off the paddle, ladled hot into pint jars. That was your family’s jam for the year. Eli wrote it in the journal in 1952. One bushel apples, one gallon cider, sugar to taste, spices last. I’ll tell you a story on myself.

First batch of apple butter I ever stirred, I was 11 years old, and the old man let me handle the paddle for maybe 20 minutes while he stepped away. Scorched the whole kettle. You could smell it clear down the holler. I cried. He didn’t say a word, just started the next batch. That’s how he taught. Then in the 1960s, Smucker’s and Musselman’s put apple butter in a jar on the grocery shelf, made with mechanical cookers and corn syrup.

 And the family kettle in the side yard went in the barn to rust. It didn’t get banned, it got convenient somewhere else. And the 10 hours of stirring stopped happening in your family. The 2013 Journal of Food Science Review confirms slow-cooked spiced apple preserves retain more polyphenol antioxidants than commercially produced equivalents.

A bushel of apples, a copper pot, a paddle, 10 hours, a year of sweet on the table. Number one is not a dish. Number one is the whole thing every dish above it was pointing at. Number one is the self-fed table. The competence of feeding a family of nine out of a two-room cabin in the winter of 1932 on $2.40 of cash money, and having every one of them walk away from the table warm and full and beholden to no store, no chain, no can, and no company.

It is not a recipe you write down. It is a whole way of standing in a kitchen. It is knowing your beans and your fat and your greens and your crock and your smokehouse and your cellar and your ham bone and your apple tree and your fire and your neighbor well enough that when the road closed and the paycheck stopped, supper still happened.

Della Sargent, Harlan County, $2.40. I told you her story wasn’t done. She lived to be 91 years old. Buried her husband at 49. Raised six of those nine children to adulthood in the same cabin. And every one of them, when asked, said their mother’s table was the richest they ever sat at. She wasn’t poor, friend.

She was fed, free, and beholden to no store. That’s what they sold you a replacement for. Not the beans, not the pone, the table. The whole competence of it. 15 dishes above this number, every one of them a piece of the same lost thing. Let me be plain with you before I let you go. This isn’t fear. I am not selling you a bunker.

I am not selling you a bug out bag. Some of what I laid out, home curing and home canning and pickling eggs, the health department looks at sideways, and rightly so. Follow your state extension service. Don’t guess. The old men measured. Pick one. Just one. Don’t try to become your great-grandmother by Sunday.

Do one thing this week. Put a pound of dry pinto beans in a bowl of water tonight. Simmer them tomorrow in a pot with an onion and a piece of bacon. Bake a pan of cornbread in a cast-iron skillet. Save the grease in a coffee tin by the stove. That is three of the numbers you just heard. On your table by Wednesday for less than $4 and you will know something about yourself you didn’t know Monday.

I put up 19 pints of apple butter myself this fall in a copper kettle in the side yard the way Eli wrote it down in 1952. Took a whole Saturday. Fed me from October clear to the daffodils and it never cost me but the apples off the tree and a bag of sugar. Tell me down below. Did your grandmother make any of these 15? What did she cook that nobody in your family makes anymore? What’s the one dish that disappeared with her? The name that gets the most comments is the one I count down next.

Your grandmother cooked every one of these. Somebody just didn’t get the chance to pass them down to you. Now you’ve heard them. Now they’re yours again. Don’t let them die twice. Next time on this channel, I’m counting down the 2-cent pantry staples that fed a whole holler through the winter of 1936. The ones your great-grandmother kept behind the flower bin in a labeled tin.

And the exact year the grocery chains made sure you’d forget those tins were ever on a mountain shelf. Every one of them still works. Every one of them still cost pennies. And the grandkids of the people who made them are the ones I’m counting on to bring them back. Subscribe if you’re one of us. Not for me. For the table.