Smoke, Roots, Mountain, Harvest: Recipes and Stories In… (2024)

I love cookbooks, especially those that celebrate the traditional recipes and ingredients of Appalachia. My roots are in the South and my cooking is inspired by my home.

Award-winning food blogger Lauren McDuffie of Harvest & Honey has written a beautiful love letter to her Appalachian home (she was born in Kentucky and raised in West Virginia) with a stunning collection of stories, recipes, and photographs.

"Food, to me, is a source of endless wonder, nourishment, and love, and in today's world of infinite distractions, I appreciate it all the more. When we gather together at the table, phone and other electronic devices fade into the background, emails and work stop, and conversation flows." *

This cookbook begins with a list of helpful pantry and kitchen items, tips and tricks for the included recipes, and a helpful wine pairing guide.

The recipes are divided into sections by season, beginning with fall. Each section begins with a personal story followed by a menu of 4 - 5 recipes. Each recipe includes a brief note, serving size, ingredients with cooking instructions, and a lovely photograph.

I tested two recipes before writing my review to gauge how user-friendly the instructions are.
With the crisp fall weather turning to winter, I made Potato & Pimiento Purèe, a "fondue-mashed potato hybrid" McDuffie adapted from a traditional French recipe to include a Southern favorite: pimiento cheese.
This dish works as an excellent side to a grilled steak or chicken dinner and can also be easily adapted into a super-cheesy potato soup!

It's the season for Christmas cookies so I had to try the recipe for Chocolate-Tipped Salted Butter Meltaways, a recipe adapted from a Southern Living Christmas cookbook her mom keeps in her kitchen. These are simple, no-fuss cookies with allspice as the star ingredient.

Other recipes I'm looking forward to making include: Chipotle-Peach Pulled Pork Sandwiches, Curried Bean & Cornbread Soup, and Morning Sun Tea Lattes.

Smoke, Roots, Mountain, Harvest is a solid collection of stories and recipes that celebrate the South and McDuffie's food styling and photography is superb!

Thanks to Chronicle Books and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review. Smoke, Roots, Mountain, Harvest: Recipes and Stories Inspired by My Appalachian Home is scheduled for release on May 14, 2019.

* The quote included is from an advance readers copy and is subject to change upon publication.

For more reviews, visit www.rootsandreads.wordpress.com

I'm always on the lookout for new and unique cookbooks and when I saw this one available for reviewing, I knew it was something I needed to get my hands on.

So first off, the cover on this book is just gorgeous. It is bright and eye-catching, and I have never seen apples like that before! The book itself is divided into the following chapters...

-- Introduction
-- How to Use This Book
-- Larder & Kitchen Tools
-- Good to Know
-- A Quick Wine Pairing Guide
-- Fall (Ghost Stories, Far from the Tree, Forest Walk, The Homeplace, Noble Rot)
-- Winter (The Wilderness Road, Nora’s Kitchen, Apothecary, Evergreen, Moonshine)
-- Spring (Country Roads, Sun Shower, The Friday Night Jamboree, Kentucky Rain)
-- Summer (Riverbend, Bourbon Country, Strawberries & Summertime, Harvest & Honey, The Sweetest Winds)

This cookbook was well laid out. The recipes easy to follow. It was full of gorgeous photos, quotes, and stories. Which I would have loved to have shown you, but they covered my review copy in an insane amount of "copyright" graphics which frankly made it hard to read.

Here are just a few of the yummy sounding recipes you will find within...

-- Fire-Roasted Stuffed Pumpkins
-- S’mores, from Scratch
-- Earthquake Bread
-- “Persinnamon“ Crisps
-- Curried Bean & Corn bread Soup
-- Buttermilk & Herb-Fried Chicken with Hot Honey
-- Blackberry Cobbler
-- Simple Pizza Dough
-- Chicken in Milk
-- Roasted Red Cabbage Wedges
-- Winter Glow Elixir
-- Winter-Spiced Morning Rolls
-- Wildflower & Spring Greens
-- Morning Sun Tea Lattes
-- Cantaloupe & Honey Jam
-- Hummingbird Pancakes (I made these, and they were SO good!)
-- Heirloom Tomato Galette
-- Whiskey-Spiked Creamed Corn
-- Sweet Cream Pound Cake

If you are a collector of cookbooks, then this is one you won't want to miss. It would make a perfect addition to your collection, or a gorgeous coffee-table book to leave out for guests to look through.

My dad's family is from Virginia, and I have fond memories of spending holidays there with my grandparents: my granddaddy tending to his garden for the ripest, sweetest tomatoes I've ever eaten, my grandmother baking biscuits and making gravy, and coconut cake for special occasions. Country cooking was good, as in, it made you feel loved.

ANYWHO, this is part of why I love, love, love this book. There's stuff in here that you'll just get when you're from the South, when you've seen the Blue Ridge Mountains, and when you know there's more to Appalachia than guns and Walmart. Lauren McDuffie is also a great writer and shares stories that evoke nostalgia even if you haven't been to this part of the country. The photos are stunning and moody and the recipes are familiar with a modern, unexpected twist: adding grapes to jalapeno corn bread, gouda to grits, and bourbon to the carrot glaze. Plus the desserts! I love them. Though it's missing a coconut cake :)

Disclaimer: I work for the publisher of this book and got early access to the book. Opinions however are my own.

I expected to like this cookbook a little more than I did, actually. I am an old fashioned country cook and spent a lot of my life in the south, so it seemed like it would be a perfect fit.

While there are things that I do really like about it, the recipes just aren't ones that are likely to work in my kitchen. Many of them call for ingredients that I consider expensive and trendy, not old fashioned and country. For instance, the fire roasted stuffed pumpkins call for shredded Gruyere cheese. Was that big in old time Appalachia? Likewise, the "S'mores, From Scratch" call for Nutella and many of the ingredients in other recipes are just plain old expensive -- not something I consider representational of classic southern country food.

I also really felt like it missed the mark in the things that made Appalachian cooking so special once upon a time. One thing I love about real traditional country food is that foraged ingredients play such a high role, for instance. I cook with wild foods on a near daily basis and we put up several hundred pounds of wild foods every year through canning, freezing, drying and fermenting. Last night's menu included roasted wild asparagus from the freezer and the night before we had chicken of the woods mushrooms in the stir, fry, for instance, and I season everything liberally with ramp salt. I made elderberry muffins for breakfast yesterday and my son made wild black raspberry syrup for the cake he made the day before. In the old days, it was just normal to cook with wild greens, berries, nuts and so on. While McDuffie does use black walnuts often and features some wild mushrooms in her "Forager's Feast" menu, even that menu includes almost no foraged ingredients of any kind (even the mushrooms) and it provides no information on foraging. She even mentions in the intro to that section that when friends took her foraging for wild mushrooms as an adult: "Up until that point in my life, the closest I'd ever come to foraging for my food was selecting a lobster from the tank at a beachside seafood place during a family vacation." Somehow this description doesn't jibe with what I think of for the author of what's supposed to be traditional Appalachian cookbook.

This is a cookbook that is likely to appeal to a lot of readers, especially foodies and those who like stories with their recipes. The photos are very artistic and McDuffie tells great stories. The recipes sound delicious, just not like the type of dishes that I love to cook in my old fashioned kitchen.

Two caveats: I'm not putting a date finished date on this book because I was unable to finish it before the digital preview expired and deleted itself from my computer. There may have been sections farther in the book that I would have loved and missed because of the maddening practice of archiving review books so reviewers cannot re-download them if we don't finish them before they expire. Secondly, the review copy I read was covered with watermarks which made it difficult to fully read and prevented trying any of the recipes.

I read a temporary digital copy of this book for the purpose of review.

Yes, I decided that after Nadiya’s recipe book, I would like to get a taste of a different part of the world. Smoke, Roots, Mountain, Harvest by Lauren McDuffie was available on Netgalley and I didn’t need more incentive than the gorgeous cover and the luscious title. Who could say no to discovering delicious home-cooked meals from West Virginia?

Since I’m thorough in my research, I went online to see who Lauren McDuffie is.

She’s a blogger, freelance writer, author and photographer. And let me tell you, her blog, Harvest and Honey, just as her Instagram account are breath-taking. Full of mouth-watering photos of dishes I could NOT chose only one to try from. Of course, I needed to see her cookbook, fromChronicle Books, which introduces readers to more than 70 recipes, all from Appalachian ingredients.

But now more about the book. I have to start with the slight inconvenience it caused me when it came to being able to read it. It is 240 pages of recipes flavoured with colourful pictures, which makes it impossible to use my good old impossible. Next best thing was to use Aldiko reader on my tablet, but boy, it took ages to turn pages. That’s why reading it went slowly and I couldn’t really enjoy the book to its full potential.

Not even this, though, could hold me back and I dived into this little piece of heaven. First off, I appreciated it that the recipes were divided by seasons. I like order in pretty much every part of my life and being able to turn to a specific recipe without having to look for it for ages is a life saver. Other than that, I really like that it there’s a whole chapter on what ingredients and tools you need for home cooking. As a first cookbook for a beginner cook, it’s essential to learn the basics and this book definitely helps with that. It walks you through how to build a campfire, how to clean a cast-iron skillet and how to choose the right wine to go with your dish. It covers everything you might need to cook delicious meals with maximum preparation and thus success.

I wanted to give the book a try, so I chose two recipes that I had all the ingredients for. This proved a bit tricky as the author uses some herbs, spices and sauces that are not available where I live, which I’m quite sad about. So, in the end I went with Buttermilk & Herb-Fried Chicken; instead of the original recipe’s Hot Honey, though, with some Hungarian cucumber and sour cream salad.

And the dessert I opted for was some Blackberry Crisp.

I have to say, the chicken was some of the best I’ve ever head and the crisp is just my kind of dessert. I love fruits and oats together so it was a winner!

I know that I’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to this cookbook, but I’m sure I’ll use it when I feel like having some hearty winter food. Or breezy summer salads and honey-infused sweets.

A lovely book, full of interesting stories and great recipes.
There're wonderful illustrations.
i loved both the stories and the recipes and I want to try some of them.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC

So, I requested to review an ARC of a cookbook! Specifically, one that features parts of my home state and recipes and wisdoms that I had heard by entire life. This cookbook—Smoke, Roots, Mountain, Harvest—is based on the author’s life in rural Appalachia and the cookery she experienced throughout her life. Its such a beautiful notion to create a cookbook of your own recipes that are based on the poetic nature of home, especially in a land as magical as the Appalachian Mountains. When you live in Kentucky, hiking in the Daniel Boone National Forest is an important trip that you need to take at least once. As you cross the gaps through the mountains and entire into the Virginias and Tennessee there is something so old and profound about the region. Time seems to stop and the most important things in life become easier to see and appreciate. The way of life there is slower, the roads are quieter, and the people have a much more melodic and sing-song way of speaking. These are all things that this cookbook captures so well. There is a pace in this book, it too has that way of flowing that is more like poetry or music versus a manual for cooking. The writing is perfect, the photography is exceptional, and content itself is so stunning and inspiring. It is beautiful.

As I was reading, the first thing that I noticed was how this cookbook was divided. It is done in two ways. First, it is divided by season. I love this notion because when we eat from the land, we should follow the seasons and cook by what is in season. Each of these seasonal sections features and really highlights what is in season during that time. Second, each season is divided by celebration, gathering type, holiday, or general theme. These also depend on each season; it is as if the best occasions and themes for each season are highlighted. For fall there is an apple section, winter features Christmas, spring showcases the fresh flowers and green, and summer boasts picnics, berries, and sun tea. There are so many other smaller themes and sections as well.

I was head of heels excited when I found a tea and tinctures section tucked within the winter division of the book. Most cookbooks that I have seen forget drinks that aren’t alcoholic drinks or milkshakes/smoothies. This book, as in the Appalachian folk tradition, incorporates tidbits of wisdom and folklore. These are things that, although I did not live in the mountains, heard when I was growing up to. Including a section that focuses on making your own tea, tisane, and tinctures as a way to heal and nourish the body was brilliant.

As a proper Kentucky girl, I was so excited to see an entire themed section based on bourbon. I grew up with an appreciation of liquor from my home state, and my pride has only grown as I grow older. I don’t normally pickup bourbon to drink, but I do occasionally enjoy a nice Old Fashioned, a Maker’s and co*ke, or a Kentucky Mule. All of course, must be made with Kentucky Bourbon. The section that cooks with bourbon stole me away and made me so nostalgic for the smells of home. It’s a good cookbook when it can invoke those feelings just by reading it.

A negative aspect that actually really bothered me more once I finished reading it was the ending. It feels so abrupt to me. It is as if the last recipe is given and then, it is literally over. I wish there was just some sort of short, maybe just a partial page and a good photo, that closed the cookbook up and just made a general conclusion. If feels like maybe I lost the last few pages, or they just got messed up and I missed them while reading. I think that to complete the book it needs this. Like family and traditional culture in Appalachia, while things can end abruptly and often do, a loving goodbye and thanks for coming is always a thing.

I gave this book five stars. I am probably very bias because so many parts of this cookbook were home for me, but I did love it. Many thanks to Netgalley and Chronicle Books for this one. I am sure that when this one comes out I will buy it for my collection. There are so many recipes that I want to try and cannot wait to do so. I would highly recommend this book if you like to cook, like photography, or like the region in general. It is a cookbook there is so much more tucked into those pages besides recipes.

Familiar with McDuffie's blog - Harvest & Honey? I am not. But I am a new fan. Her book - Smoke, Roots, Mountain, Harvest - is delightful. Obviously, her current fans will be drawn to it; as will those with ties to West Virginia and Appalachia. But if you are a Southern girl like me, you will find a kindred spirit here. If you're from west of the Mississippi and love to explore unfamiliar American culture and cuisine, this book is for you. McDuffie's stories educate you and paint a picture of the traditions in this region. Before each recipe is a short description of why she included it - a favorite ingredient, a cultural staple, a regional technique. And then the recipes themselves are so delicious sounding that you will have a difficult time deciding where to start. Black Grape & Jalapeno Skillet Cornbread. Boozy Pickled Hot Sauce. Cantaloupe & Honey Jam. Bourbon-Broiled Salmon.

I received a copy of this book from #NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts are my own. I have yet to figure out the way to tie this into my blog, but I loved the book so much that I didn't want to delay in posting a review. https://patch405.com/blog/

It feels almost brash, as the author, to add a review here, but this isn’t so much a review as it is an expression of gratitude. If you’re seeing this, chances are you’re at the very least, interested in my cookbook, and I thank you for that. Writing this book was a great joy of my life; the stories, imagery, and foods all providing me a chance to honor the place I call home.

This book is not a full-blown Appalachian cookbook, and it was never meant to be. I grew up eating and cooking and loving all sorts of cuisine, and I do so today as well, as a person who works in food professionally. So, I have fused many of my favorite flavors and tastes that I enjoy in my modern kitchen with recipes, techniques, and ingredients that are Appalachian through and through.

So, this book was meant to give its readers and its cooks something a little different, something you won’t find in any other book. That was important to me. Telling my story, while honoring the place I call home was a great privilege, and I thank you so much for your interest.

"Smoke, Roots, Mountain, Harvest" is a beautiful book filled with the recipes and stories of Lauren McDuffie's Appalachia home. In the book, each season is represented with several season inspired menus and stories of some of the key ingredients and and recipes that are used. Ingredients local to the area are at the core of so many of the recipes. This book looks like it will be a beautiful hardcover book - which may be more of a "pretty on the shelf" book for many who may find some of the ingredients hard to come by. This e-ARC was difficult to read closely (and seriously consider making any of the recipes) because of the intense publishers watermark that was prominently displayed across each page.

ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Smoke, Roots, Mountain, Harvest
by Lauren Angelucci McDuffie

Recipes and stories inspired by my Appalachian Home

This is a book I can see on a coffee table or by a favorite chair so that it is easily available to read or just to look at the beautiful photographs. I love a book that tells a bit of a story and provides insight about the author and the recipes within the book – this book does just that. I was wondering how Appalachian food would be presented thinking that it would be rather bland and Southern but instead it was a bit more in that it took the ingredients of the area and turned them into so much more. As I looked through I thought about making s’mores long ago and then thought about making all of the ingredients from scratch. Putting moonshine in recipes...something I had never thought of. Some of the flavors reminded me of gourmet restaurants while others were more like spiffed up comfort food. When I hit Persinamon crisps I thought, “Could I make those with our persimmons?”

Some of the words I wrote down as I read and looked through this book were:
* a book to take your time with
* pretty on a table
* entertaining from this book would be interesting
* Rich
* Intriguing
* blend of old and new
* stories
* anecdotes
* blend of old and new
* variety
* Play on traditional recipes

Would I like to have this book in my library? Yes
Would I try any of the recipes? Definitely

Thank you to NetGalley and Chronicle Books for the ARC – This is my honest review.

5 Stars

Now I'm starving! When this cookbook is published in May, buy two copies--one to give and one to keep. Smoke, Roots, Mountain, Harvest highlights cooking the way it should be, inspiring not tiring. McDuffie's dedication says it all, "For you Mom, you were right all along." I'm in! This is a book that leads you home. The compilation reads like the jackpot of regional Appalachian family recipes, passed down through generations. Organized by season, each menu boasts a story and a unique title like 'Kentucky Rain' and 'Forest Walk' and 'Harvest & Honey.' Her photography is arrestingly artistic and alluring, a strong light and shadow game play on linens, flowers and dishes, you'll want to roll up your sleeves and get to it. I could listen to her storytelling for hours, she draws you in, skips along memories, and offers comfort (hello to the entire chapter based on Grandma Nora's classics.) A few recipes that immediately caught my attention: Raspberry Ripple Ice Cream, Drunken Short Ribs, Winter Spiced Morning Rolls, Coconut Vanilla Bean Jam, Succotash Crostini, and Hummingbird Pancakes with Roasted Banana Cream
Rounded out with a wine pairing guide and two entire chapters on Moonshine and Bourbon, this compendium will also quench your thirst. I loved eating, I mean reading, this gorgeous cookbook! Thanks to @netgalley and @chroniclebooks for my free digital copy!

I'm giving this lovely cookbook two separate ratings. The official rating is an aggregate of the two.

As a coffee table book, Smoke, Roots, Mountain, Harvest gets 5 stars. It is spectacularly beautiful, full of gorgeous photographs, charming stories, and interesting recipes. It's terrific for paging through at random and admiring it.

As a cookbook, it gets 2 stars. It is full of interesting recipes. Aka roasted grapes with sausage and leeks on white pizza. Grapefruit and vanilla french toast souffle. cornbread with grapes and jalapenos. Harvest spinach salad with chocolate. Blue cheese and walnut short bread. The recipes are fascinating, but hold zero appeal for me. They are complicated and have some expensive and/or obscure ingredients, which, since these recipes are only inspired by Appalachian culture, not faithful to it, can range from the difficult to obtain Appalachian locals ingredients, like ramps, to items much further afield, like saffron. Maybe they're all terrific, delicious dishes, but I don't feel like jumping through hoops to obtain the ingredients just to test that theory. (Also, if you have a need for keeping gluten and/or animal products out of your diet, these recipes won't be much more helpful for you than they were for me.)

So now that I've read and enjoyed the book, I'll return it and keep an eye out for recipes I can use elsewhere. Thank you, #Netgalley, for letting me read an advanced copy for free in exchange for my honest opinion. Thank you, next.

This book was received as an ARC from Chronicle Books in exchange for an honest review. Opinions and thoughts expressed in this review are completely my own.

The Fall season is wonderful when it comes to trying new recipes and it's always the same warm comforting dishes that come from generations of cooking. Lauren McDuffie does an excellent job combining new modern fall recipes with comforting classics we all know and love. I am curious to try a lot of the recipes featured in this book especially the drinks and cobblers and from where our library is, apples and a lot of veggies grow a lot. A wide selection of delicious, delectable, comforting dishes that are sure to wow and please your guests.

We will definitely consider adding this book to our Non-Fiction TX Cookbook collection at the library. That is why we give this book 5 stars.

Lauren writes exquisitely. I'm from around the Appalachians and reading her stories brought smiles, laughter, and a bit of heartache. Wonderful recipes that I can't wait to try (many that are reminiscent of my own past) and beautiful photography. A book worth adding to your collection.

Smoke, Roots, Mountains, Harvest was an interesting read detailing the love Lauren McDuffie has for the place she grew up and the recipes and food she so fondly remembers. Sections and recipes focus on using seasonally available ingredients, which I appreciated since that is how I try to meal plan and cook. The pictures were stunning and I think this would be a wonderful coffee table hardcover book.
The only thing that took away from my reading enjoyment was the copyright protected symbol that was on every page. I mostly was able to read the stories and it wasn't as obvious in the pictures, but I could not read many of the recipes. This was a DRC though and I am sure this won't be an issue when the book is released in May. I plan to look for a hard copy and will update my review accordingly after making some of the recipes. 3.5 stars.
I received a DRC from Chronicle Books through NetGalley.

Smoke, Roots, Mountain, Harvest by Lauren McDuffie is a free NetGalley ebook that I read in mid-December.

Appalachian cooking, cool! Against a darker palette with slate, homespun, crimson, cast-iron, and fresh greens, recipes and stories are arranged seasonally and around festivities. McDuffie feels a sense of pride toward where she grew up and it shines throughout every paragraph. There's a reliance on nature to provide and its inherent mystery alongside her food memories of family members, friends, holidays, and restaurants. I had been surprised by the frequently used regional ingredients of ginseng, a seasoning mix of salt/pepper/sugar, apples, spring onions/ramps, and sorghum with my favorite recipes including sumac-crusted pork tenderloin sandwiches, creamy squash & chanterelle bread pudding (aka ‘stuffing’), and chocolate-tipped salted butter meltaways (aka Milanos).

I don't normally read cookbooks cover-to-cover, but this one was too pretty not to. As someone who lived in Virginia for five years before moving to Dublin, Ireland, picking up this book every night steeped me in pleasant nostalgia for the farmers-market-driven foodie culture I'd left behind. This is not a history book--it's not a collection of old-school Appalachia cuisine. Instead, this book reflects how folks like me actually eat in Appalachia, incorporating local ingredients and valued traditions with modern food trends. I've cooked several of McDuffie's recipes already, albeit adapted to Ireland/a tiny city apartment kitchen, and they've all turned out beautifully. A few have even become staples in my cooking. If you're looking for some kitchen inspiration, I think you can't go wrong with "Smoke, Roots, Mountain, Harvest".

I was born in the Appalachian mountains of NC, so I was interested to check out this cookbook. While the photographs are beautiful, there weren't that many recipes I wanted to try. I did like that the book is organized by season and focuses on eating seasonally. After recently finishing Rick Bragg's The Best Cook in the World that also focuses on mountain/country Southern food, I think this book might be a little too fancy of a take on Appalachian food for me. There were a few recipes I wanted to try, but overall it was just a pretty cookbook to look through.

Y’all know I love a good cookbook, and this one tastes like home. It is beautiful enough to be a coffee table book, straightforward enough to follow the recipes, and includes charming stories from Appalachia that provide their own texture to the dishes. I love that it is arranged by season and contains menu plans. Highly recommend, whether you are from this part of the world or just love a good meal.

Smoke, Roots, Mountain, Harvest by Lauren McDuffie is a joy to have. I love to look through cookbooks and see different recipes . With the beautiful pictures and great recipes this was a really nice cook book. Loved it.

What an awesome present from my daughter for Mothers Day this year. Quick things I learned, the difference between The Cajun Holy Trinity, and The Appalachian Holy Trinity or Three Sisters. How to make a quick butter milk without having to buy a quart and only use a cup!! Loved the book totally.

Beautifully photographed and sweet little stories accompany recipes that take southern cooking and kind of twist it a bit. Example: Grilled Corn on the Cob w/Salty Coconut Cream and Peanut Dust. Has the elements, but strangely put together.

Full of earthy recipes that I was not familiar with growing up in the Midwest. It’s refreshing to see different take on dishes that I know. Filed with ingredients that I did not expect. Chapters with moonshine, homemade tinctures, and updated versions of her family recipes.

Pretty out there, but in a fairly appealing way. I am, however, not buying things like miso, mussels, chai, or kimchi as Appalachian.

Beautiful pictures and interesting stories.

Gorgeous pictures and stories. And some good recipes too!

Some fantastic recipes with beautiful personal notes/essays and a love of the Appalachian area and its history. I just bought this one, I liked it so much!

Rtc

This is an incredible cookbook. The pictures are almost as beautiful as the recipes ❤️. My new favorite for sure.