I am Ruby Calloway. I grew up in a holler in Eastern Kentucky, where nobody wrote a receipt down because nobody needed to. My grandmother fed a family through sixty winters out of a root cellar, a canning kettle and a smokehouse, and she taught me all of it standing at her elbow.

Here I show you those mountain kitchen methods the way they were really done. Root cellaring. Water bath and pressure canning. Curing, smoking, drying, and the make-do cooking that carried Appalachian families through the lean years. I always give you the why of it, so you can judge a method with your own good sense.

On food safety I stay with the tested rules from the USDA and your state Extension service. That is the one place tradition does not get the benefit of the doubt.

My book, Grandma Never Wrote Hers Down, puts sixty years of these receipts in writing at last: rubycallowaybooks.com

Now listen here, honey. Pull up a chair.

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