Buttermilk & Bible Burgers

In his latest collection of writings about the foodways of the Appalachian region, Fred W. Sauceman guides readers through country kitchens and church fellowship halls, across pasture fields and into smokehouses, down rows of vegetable gardens at the peak of the season and alongside ponds resonant with the sounds of a summer night. The scenes and subjects are oftentimes uniquely personal, and they combine to tell a love story, a chronicle of one person's affection for a region and its people, its products, and its places. Traversing Appalachia from an Italian kitchen in Pennsylvania to a soda shop in South Carolina, BUTTERMILK AND BIBLE BURGERS is a tribute to people loyal to the land and proud of their culinary heritage. Sauceman describes the common bond of breaking beans, the dignity of the barbecue pit, the nobility of the black-iron skillet, and the transformative power of a glass of Tennessee buttermilk. Sauceman also shares recipes from a teacher who lived to be 116. He explains Kentucky banana croquettes and Virginia Ju-Ju burgers. He samples trout caviar in the mountains of North Carolina and sorghum on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. From a notebook stained by Nehi, Sauceman calls forth stories of Hungarian immigrants who gather every fall to make cabbage rolls in Virginia and Cubans who converge in Tennessee to roast a pig and to remember. BUTTERMILK AND BIBLE BURGERS is most of all an expression of gratitude for the persistence of the people who feed us.