Cooking Up A Storm: A Story of Cooking, Gathering, and Natural Healing in Appalachia

Categories
Appalachian Collections > Appalachian Folklife Archive
Subject
Appalachia
Oral histories--Appalachia
Folklore--Appalachia
Cooking.
Canning and preserving.
Herbal medicine
Healing.
Creator
Spence, Angie
Sheets, Mary Anne
Sheets, Opal
Harris, Patricia
Type
text and audio
Coverage - Temporal
2000
Date
2000-11-28
2020-09-22
Identifier
200.446.03.pdf
Language
english
Publisher
Appalachian Regional and Rural Studies Center. Radford University
Archives & Special Collections. McConnell Library. Radford University
Description
Angie Spence enjoys cooking and knows from her experiences growing up in the Eastern Shore of Virginia, that people cook with what foods are native to their regions. This idea interested her and gave inspiration for this project. Ms. Spence found three local fans of cooking and interviewed, and cooked with them. During the interviews, she heard about gathering roots and berries, canning, making preserves, and natural healing using traditional Appalachian herbal elixirs. In addition, Ms. Spence saw that with a love of cooking comes also a love of family and friends. This interview is among projects created by students enrolled in English 446 (initially English 452), “Appalachian Folklore,” 1981-2019, and in graduate level counterparts English 548 and 648 “Appalachian Folk Culture(s)” offered 17 fall semesters between 1987 and 2009. Minimally contain collector’s introduction and analysis, transcribed informant interviews, and excerpted and labeled examples of oral, customary, and/or material folklore/folklife collected primarily within the Appalachian region. Most include also tables of contents, informant information, indexes (outlines) of interviews, photographs, miscellaneous paper items, and indexes of informants, genres, and geographic locations. Accompanying audio recordings (several minutes to 2+ hours). Transferred to McConnell Library Archives & Special Collections from Appalachian Regional and Rural Studies Center, Fall 2013.
Rights
All rights are reserved by the original creators and their informants, excepting those expressly provided in a permission form on file in the Archives offices. Content is available for free personal, non-commercial, and educational use, provided that proper citation is used (e.g. McConnell Library Archives and Special Collections, Radford University, Radford, VA). Any commercial use of the materials, without the written permission of Radford University, is strictly prohibited. Please refer to the McConnell Library Archives and Special Collections website for more information.