Stack cakes, shuck beans, chicken 'n' dumplings, soup beans, and fried apple pies-- important regional foods of Appalachia. Add biscuits and gravy, fried apples, chow chow, and gritted corn bread, and this food reveals roots in the cultures of Europe, Asia, America, and Africa. Long before peanut butter and mayonnaise found a place in Appalachian kitchens, Native Americans hunted black bear, buffalo, elk, and whitetail deer. They gathered hickory nuts, black walnuts, American chestnuts, persimmons, and fox grapes, and they domesticated corn, pumpkin, squash, and beans.

When Americans became fascinated with regional foods in the 1970s, the ingenuity and integrity of Appalachian foodways were well established and deserving of recognition. The Foxfire Book, published in 1972, was among the first to give wide national attention to Appalachian food including dried green beans or "leather britches," dried pumpkin, sauerkraut, pickled beets, souse or hog's head cheese, stew, watermelon pickles, and methods of preserving such as burying, bleaching, drying, distilling, and churning. In the mountains, communities began organizing street festivals to celebrate regional foods and established days or whole weeks to honor sorghum, apples, honey, ramps (a kind of wild garlic), maple syrup, dandelions, bean soup, fried chicken, bourbon, buckwheat, and even squirrels.