30 Coal Country Kitchen Secrets Mountain Women Cooked Every Night (Most of Them Are Forgotten)

🔗 The Coal Country Kitchen Guide — 40 additional recipes, the complete drippings-can method, chow-chow and stack cake recipes handed down through three generations, and the soup bean technique my grandmother used that you won't find anywhere else: [LINK] Most people who try the soup beans recipe make it again the following week. My grandmother cooked for a coal miner for forty-one years in McDowell County, West Virginia, and never once used a recipe card. She fed six children on a miner's wages, through the Depression years and the strikes, out of a company house kitchen smaller than most people's bathroom. What she knew, she learned from the women around her — coal camp women from southwest Virginia, eastern Kentucky, east Tennessee, and half a dozen other places who had all brought different ways of doing the same thing and traded them back and forth until nobody could have said where any particular technique had started. This video is thirty of those secrets, with the story behind each one and the reason each one still works. Number nine is the one that took me twenty years to understand and that isn't in any cookbook. Number one is what my great-aunt Cora told me when I asked her what the coal camp women knew that nobody else did. CHAPTERS: 00:00 Introduction — McDowell County, 1976 01:05 #30 — The drippings can 02:00 #29 — Keeping the stove alive, not hot 02:55 #28 — Soaking the beans the night before 03:45 #27 — Pot likker as the first course 04:40 #26 — Gravy from everything 05:30 #25 — Stretching cornmeal into everything 06:25 #24 — The slow pot and the fast pot 07:15 #23 — Vinegar finish on greens 08:10 #22 — The perpetual soup pot 09:10 #21 — Biscuits by feel, not by measure 10:05 #20 — Fried fish on Friday, the right way 11:00 #19 — Cooking the whole chicken 11:55 #18 — Soup beans and where you're from 12:50 #17 — Rendering your own lard 13:45 #16 — Pickling what you couldn't keep 14:40 #15 — Stack cake, layer by layer 15:35 #14 — Sorghum instead of sugar 16:30 #13 — Salt pork, cooked right 17:25 #12 — Corn pudding the old way 18:20 #11 — The whole pig 19:20 #10 — The potato in the skin 20:15 #9 — Season the pan, not the food 21:15 #8 — Leather breeches in September 22:10 #7 — Fried pies, not baked 23:05 #6 — Chow-chow at summer's end 24:00 #5 — Buttermilk in everything 24:55 #4 — Cast iron as a tool, not a keepsake 25:50 #3 — Nothing wasted 26:45 #2 — Cooking inside the constraint 27:40 #1 — What Cora told me 28:45 Final word and CTA #appalachia #appalachian #coalcountry #westvirginia #kentucky #southernfood #mountaincooking #castironcooking #homesteading #forgottenskills #oldways #grandmarecipes #soupcooking #cornbread #selfreliance #nostalgia #americanhistory #mountainliving #foodhistory #heirloomrecipes #simplelife #depressionerafood #farmlife #cottagecore #traditionscooking