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By: Michelle Goff, Staff Writer See more articles by Michelle Goff Published: 11/07/2005

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Mark F. Sohn

Local cook, food historian and author Mark F. Sohn described his newest book, “Appalachian Home Cooking: History, Culture, & Recipes,” as a book for people who love food.

“People who like food and like to eat will appreciate this book,” Sohn said. “A lot of the material is new and fresh. It also contains more bedtime reading than my past books and is composed of only 40 percent of recipes.”

Indeed, Sohn devoted the first part of the book, “Appalachian Foodways,” to such chapters as food origins, breakfast traditions, vegetables, meats, sweets, farm starches and school lunches.

The second part of the book includes more than 80 recipes for everything from souse to chocolate gravy to sweet potato pie to fancy poke sallet.

Sohn, who named “fresh baked cornbread coming out of the skillet, biscuits and sausage gravy, 12-layer stack cake, soup beans, fried potatoes and greens” as just a few of his favorite Appalachian dishes, said he started researching the book in the 1970s.

“I have been inspired by the great food in this area since coming here in 1975,” he stated. “I taught Appalachian dinners classes in the 1970s and ’80s at Pikeville College, and the students would bring in food, so the idea developed over the years.”

He continued, “I have always enjoyed eating and observing food, and people here still cook. That makes it nice. If you go 500 miles, people haven’t heard of this stuff. That’s what’s important about this book.”

In addition to recipes and a history of Appalachian food, the book contains 32 of Sohn’s color photographs, a list of festivals and events, mail order sources, and a glossary of foods, terms and expressions.

The book, which was published by the University Press of Kentucky, is available locally at Economy Drug or online at http://www.amazon.com.

Sohn, the food editor for The Encyclopedia of Appalachia, has written 1,200 published recipes. His “Mountain Country Cooking” was a 1997 James Beard Award nominee.

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