Research at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, was supported by the Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons Fund for Ethnography. Many thanks to the archivists at the AFC and at UNC’s Wilson Library who helped me access crucial documents, to staff at Southern Cultures who located images and refined my prose, and to all the readers who offered valuable feedback on the structure and content of this essay. Any oversights or omissions are mine.
- Drake Hokanson and Carol Kratz, Purebred & Homegrown: America’s County Fairs (Madison, WI: Terrace Books, 2008), 76.
- Liana Krissoff, Canning for a New Generation: Bold Fresh Flavors for the Modern Pantry (New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 2010), 10–11, 166; Katie Doolan, “Local Cookbook Author Relies on Seasonal Produce,” Lincoln Journal Star, May 27, 2014.
- Sara Dickerman, “Can It,” Slate, March 10, 2010.
- Anne Van Willigen and John Van Willigen, Food and Everyday Life on Kentucky Family Farms, 1920–1950 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 241; Lloyd Alter, “13 Great Posters on Preserving Food, When It Was Life or Death,” TreeHugger, September 26, 2012, accessed December 27, 2013, http://www.treehugger.com/slideshows/green-food/can-all-you-can-13-great-posters-when-preserving-was-matter-life-and-death/; Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 97; Chuck Reece, “Creamed Corn and the Truth,” The Bitter Southerner, September 30, 2014, http://bittersoutherner.com/preserving-place/#.VEVdAFY_EpE.
- “Bottling” is often used interchangeably with “canning,” but “canning” doesn’t always mean “bottling.” It can also refer to things sealed in “tin” cans, especially in the first half of the twentieth century; John L. Robinson, Living Hard: Southern Americans in the Great Depression (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981), 132; Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott, and Joslyn Brenton, “The Joy of Cooking?” Contexts 13 (2014): 20–25. On “fractionated” economies in rural West Virginia, see Katherine R. Roberts, “The Art of Staying Put: Managing Land and Minerals in Rural America,” Journal of American Folklore 126 (2013): 407–33. In The Livelihood of Kin: Making Ends Meet “The Kentucky Way,” Rhoda H. Halperin documented similarly complex and interconnected strategies—combining wage labor, entrepreneurial ventures in periodic marketplaces, local food production and foraging, creative reuse, and trading of goods and services—in the 1980s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).
- Photos of the Dotsons and their home can be found in image folders PF-20367/938-956, in the William R. Ferris Collection (#20367), Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Libraries; Judy Peiser and William Ferris, Bottle Up and Go, ½” color video (Memphis: Center for the Study of Southern Culture, 1980).
- Ferris Collection, folder PF-20367/938; folder 2996, reel 5, tape 17, pages 4–5.
- Ferris Collection, folder 2970, reel 1, tape 1, p. 11; folder 2996, reel 5, tape 17, p. 5.
- Ethel Dixon, Big Mama’s Old Black Pot Recipes (Alexandria, LA: Stoke Gabriel Enterprises, 1987).
- Ibid., 36, 3.
- Dixon, Old Black Pot, 36. On “craft satisfaction,” see Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982). On the social value of work and self-sufficiency—which has been especially well documented in the mountain South—see Patricia D. Beaver, Rural Community in the Appalachian South (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1986); Halperin, Livelihood of Kin; Lu Ann Jones, Mama Learned Us to Work: Farm Women in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Katherine R. Roberts, “Storehouses of Abundance and Loss: Architecture, Narrative and Memory in West Virginia” (PhD diss., Indiana University, Bloomington, 2006); Patricia Sawin, Listening for a Life: A Dialogic Ethnography of Bessie Eldreth through Her Songs and Stories (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004).
- Sadie Miller, Interview, Tape AFC 1999/008 SR123, Coal River Folklife Project, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Katherine Rosser Martin, “Food Preservation and the Folk Aesthetic,” Kentucky Folklore Record 25 (1979): 1–5.
- Roberts, “Storehouses”; Carrie Severt, Interview, AFS 21483-21484, Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project (AFC 1982/009), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
- Van Willigen, Food in Everyday Life, 219; Lesa Postell, Appalachian Traditions: Mountain Ways of Canning, Pickling & Drying (Whittier, NC: Ammons Communications, 1999), 8–9, 11.
- Margaret Severt Jarvis, Interview, AFS 21479-21482, Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project (AFC 1982/009), American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
- Severt interview; Dixon, Old Black Pot, 36–37, 71. Cf. reflections on the distribution of surplus garden produce in Richard Westmacott, “The Gardens of African-Americans in the Rural South,” in The Vernacular Garden, ed. J. Hunt and J. Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1993), 77–105.
- Ferris Collection, folder 2996, reel 5, tape 17, p. 1; folder 2973, reel 3, tape 10, pages 8–11; folder 2998, reel 6, tape 25, p. 6.
- Miller interview.
- Postell, Appalachian Traditions, 56, 27; van Willigen, Food and Everyday Life, 219; Severt interview.
- Roberts, “Storehouses,” 90; Halperin, Livelihood of Kin, 12; Carl and Mary Thompson, Interview H-0182, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007), Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, UNC Libraries, p. 13, 49. See also Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher B. Daly, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
- Ferris Collection, folder 2998, reel 6, tape 25, p. 5.
- Dickerman, “Can It.”
- S. T. Rorer, Canning and Preserving (Philadelphia: Arnold and CP, 1887); Abby Fisher, What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking: Soups, Pickles, Preserves, Etc., with historical notes by Karen Hess (Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1995); Rafia Zafar, “What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 1, no. 4 (2001): 88–90; “We Can Pickle That!” Portlandia, season 2, episode 1, IFC network, 2012.
- Van Willigen, Food and Everyday Life, 220; Jarvis interview; Severt interview.
- Severt interview; Martin, “Folk Aesthetic,” 2–3, 5.
- Severt interview; Postell, Appalachian Traditions, 63, 26, 36, 20, 52, 42.
- The Ritchie Gazette and Cairo Standard, Wednesday, July 19, 2006:1-B, in Roberts, “Storehouses,” 101; cf. Leslie Prosterman, Ordinary Lives, Festival Days: Aesthetics at the Midwest County Fair (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); Hokanson and Kratz, Purebred & Homegrown.
- Ferris Collection, folder 2996, reel 5, tape 17, p. 8. It’s unclear from the archived records why she wasn’t able to finish the peaches on her optimal timeline; she seems to have begun the process on a Sunday (against her better judgment), and the complications of coordinating the process with a film crew on multiple days may have contributed to the mishap.
- Severt interview; Martin, “Folk Aesthetic,” 4, 2; Jarvis interview; The Home Canner’s Text Book: Practical up-to-Date Recipes for Canning, Preserving, Pickling and Jellymaking, Rev. ed. (Boston: Woven Hose & Rubber Co, 1931), 7.
- Martin, “Folk Aesthetic”; Jarvis interview; Roberts, “Storehouses,” 98.
- Britt Peterson, “Farmer Groupies and Chicken Coddlers: The Foxfire Books and the Paradox of the Modern DIY Movement,” Slate, January 24, 2012.
- Ferris Collection, folder 2979, reel 8, tape 32, p. 3; Severt interview; Miller interview.
- Isabelle de Solier, Food and the Self: Consumption, Production and Material Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Preserving Now workshops and parties are described at http://preservingnow.com/.
- For more on Milton’s ethic and practice, see Travis Milton, “The Welcome Table: Simmering Food Talk,” The Daily Yonder, June 6, 2014, http://www.dailyyonder.com/welcome-table-food-talk-simmers/2014/06/02/7419 and Katie Hoffman, “Everything Tastes Better When You Share It: Travis Milton, the Daily Yonder, and Preserving the Best of Appalachian Food-ways,” Appalworks, June 3, 2014, http://www.appalworks.com/everything-tastes-better-when-you-share-it-travis-milton-the-daily-yonder-and-preserving-the-best-of-appalachian-foodways/. On McGreger, see Whitney Brown, “Eat It To Save It: April McGreger in Conversation with Tradition,” Southern Cultures 15, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 93–102 and Andrea Weigl, “Farmer’s Daughter Launches ‘Community-Supported Preservery,’” Raleigh News & Observer, April 26, 2014, http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/04/26/3811097/farmers-daughter-launches-community.html.