An Appalachian kitchen almanac
Nobody in my family ever measured anything. Mama's measure was her hand. So I wrote it both ways — real cups and spoons you can follow at a stove you've never cooked on, and beside every one of them, how she knew without either.
What's inside
Not sorted by course the way a magazine would do it. Sorted the way the work came — what you fried every day, what you made out of meal and flour, what you did when there wasn't much, what you put up for winter, and what you cooked when people were coming.
26 recipes
Everything that happened in cast iron before eight in the morning and after five at night. Bacon and the grease you save from it. Eggs fried in the drippings. Fried chicken, pork chops, liver and onions, salmon patties. Potatoes with a crust on the bottom. Fried apples, green tomatoes, okra, cabbage. Red-eye, sawmill, chocolate and tomato gravy.
24 recipes
Cathead biscuits, buttermilk biscuits, biscuits made with lard. Skillet cornbread and why there's no sugar in it. Hoecakes, corn pone, spoonbread, crackling bread. Rolled dumplings slick and thin, and drop dumplings light. Fried pies, lard pie crust, salt-rising bread, cobbler with a biscuit top.
24 recipes
How a little fed a lot. Soup beans cooked all day, and soup beans with no meat at all. Water gravy. Onion gravy over bread. Poke sallet boiled three waters. Wilted lettuce with hot grease. Mush and milk in a bowl. Vinegar pie. Poor man's cake with no eggs and no butter.
22 recipes
Canning, drying, pickling and the cellar — every one of them checked against how it's done safely now, not just how we did it. Apple butter, blackberry jam, chow-chow, bread and butter pickles, sauerkraut in a crock. Shuck beans dried on a string. Holing up taters and cabbage for winter.
24 recipes
Company food, church food, and what you carry to a house when somebody's died. Fried chicken for a crowd. Chicken and dumplings for twenty. Cornbread dressing and giblet gravy. Dried apple stack cake. Jam cake with caramel icing. Banana pudding. The ham biscuits you carry to a house.
Before recipe one
How to read this book. About Dessie — my mother, who never wrote a word of it down. What stood in this kitchen and what didn't. And the oven table: what a slow, moderate, quick and hot oven meant when you judged it by holding your hand inside and counting.
Every recipe, laid out the same
Cups, spoons, pounds and ounces, and weights where the weight matters. Real measures you can follow at a stove you've never cooked on before.
The steps, numbered and short. Plain language — no colour, no stories. When you're at a hot stove you need to know what to do the first time you read it.
How you'd know without a cup, a clock or a thermometer. How the dough feels when it's right. What the grease sounds like when it's hot enough. What colour the gravy turns just before it's too late. The way the bubble comes up through a hoecake and what it means when the edge goes dull. That's what the women up these hollers had in their hands, and it isn't written down in any book I ever saw. It's in all 120 of these.
A line or two on the mistake near everybody makes on that particular recipe, and what to do about it. I've made every one of them myself.
The thing about that recipe that isn't obvious — the part you'd only ever know if somebody stood there and showed you.
A page from it
The grease in the pan has to be hot enough that the batter sizzles when it hits. If it goes in quiet, there'll be no crust.
Here is the one thing about cornbread that matters more than anything in the bowl. The skillet goes in the oven empty with the grease in it, and it gets hot — really hot — and the batter is poured into hot grease and it fries the bottom before it ever bakes. That's the crust. That's the whole difference between mountain cornbread and the yellow cake people make in a square pan and call cornbread.
Listen when the batter goes in. A good loud fry sound — like an egg hitting a pan — means the grease was right. A soft hiss or nothing at all means the skillet went in too cool, and you'll have no crust, and there's no fixing it once the batter's in.
Every one of the 120 is laid out this way, front to back.
Who wrote it
My name is Verna Sizemore. I'm eighty-three years old and I've cooked at the same stove in the same house in Perry County, Kentucky, for sixty-some years. My mother Dessie cooked before me, and her mother Nannie before that, and Nannie's skillet is on my back burner this morning.
Not one of them ever measured anything. Mama's soda was what would lay in her palm without rolling off. Her salt was three fingers, twice if it was a big pot. She had a measuring cup somewhere in the back of a drawer and it stayed there forty years.
We lost her in 1994, and near all of it went into the ground with her. My daughter Ruby got after me about it for years — Mama, when you're gone there ain't a soul left that knows this. So I sat down at that table and I wrote it out, all hundred and twenty of them, both ways at once.
They never set it down on paper. So I did.
Before you spend the money
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Before you buy
No. Every recipe has real measures you can follow exactly, the same as any cookbook. The by-hand part sits underneath for when you've made a thing five or six times and don't need the cup anymore. Start with The First Skillet — three recipes, and it's in the bundle.
All of it. This is skillet, oven and stovetop cooking with ingredients from any grocery store — cornmeal, buttermilk, lard or shortening, beans, potatoes, chicken. The only thing that's regional is where it came from.
Yes, and that part was written carefully. Every recipe in Putting Up follows current tested guidance for canning and pickling — pressure canner where a pressure canner is required, no exceptions and no old shortcuts. Where the old family way is no longer considered safe, the book says so plainly and tells you why. There is one thing it deliberately does not teach: curing and smoking meat at home. That one needs somebody standing beside you.
A 176-page PDF, delivered by download link straight after payment, along with the large-print edition and the extras listed above. It reads on any phone, tablet or computer and prints cleanly on plain letter paper, a page at a time or all at once. No app, no account, no subscription.
If you can open an email, you can open this. You get a link, you tap it, and the book is on your phone or tablet to read whenever you like. Nothing to install. If you get stuck, one email and we'll walk you through it.
Some of them, scattered, and mostly written by people who learned them out of another website. What you're paying for is 120 of them in one place, in one voice, with the by-hand knowing written beside each one — and that part isn't online anywhere, because it was never written down at all.
Seven days, full refund, one email — and you keep the file.
The Mamaw Book
120 recipes · instant download · 7-day money back, and you keep the file
Wait — one thing
120 recipes, and beside every one of them, how she knew without a cup or a clock. Seven-day refund if it isn't for you, and you keep the file.
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