Representing a Region and Its Cuisine: Erica Abrams Locklear Discusses Appalachia on the Table

On April 25, 2024, Erica Abrams delivered a lecture about her discoveries when her mother passed along a cookbook made and assembled by her grandmother. She thought she knew what to expect. But rather than finding a homemade cookbook full of apple stack cake, leather britches, pickled watermelon, or other “traditional” mountain recipes, Locklear was surprised to discover recipes for devil’s food cake with coconut icing, grape catsup, and fig pickles. Some recipes even relied on food products like Bisquick, Swans Down flour, and Calumet baking powder. But why was that surprising? In this talk, Erica Abrams Locklear drew from her new book, Appalachia on the Table, to explore where her—and the nation’s—Appalachian food script came from. In her talk she focused on the representations of foods consumed, implied moral judgments about those foods, and how those judgments shape reader perceptions of those depicted. The question at the core of Locklear’s analysis asks, "How did the dominant culinary narrative of the region come into existence and what consequences has that narrative had for people in the mountains?" One aspect of her talk featured archival materials from Appalachian Virginia that demonstrate long-standing culinary knowhow, despite century-old narratives that once suggested otherwise. 

Erica Abrams Locklear is a professor of English and the Thomas Howerton Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of North Carolina Asheville. She is the author of Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food and People and Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment: Appalachian Women’s Literacies. She is a seventh-generation Western North Carolinian who loves good food, books, and conversation. 

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.