Walk into any bookshop in the mountains of Western North Carolina, and you will almost certainly find an impressive array of books celebrating these life and times—from hiking guides to Cherokee folk tales. And the new titles keep coming. Here are three volumes that arrived on store shelves in recent months.
For the Mountain Cook
Tupelo Honey Café’s latest cookbook is as sumptuous as the meals served up by this Asheville institution. Tupelo Honey’s Elizabeth Sims, director of marketing, and Brian Sonoskus, executive chef, wrote and produced this ode to the restaurant. Take 125 delicious recipes easily replicated by the home cook, toss in a ménage of regional photographs and foods, spice the dish with the comments of Sims and Sonoskus, and you have a book worthy of both kitchen and coffee table.
Look first at the recipes for traditional Southern favorites: chicken and crispy dumplings, hush puppies, country ham and pimento cheese biscuits. But Sims and Sonoskus have added to the home repertoire, too, from goat cheese basil grits to pierogis with rabbit confit and peppered cabbage and a Carolina shrimp melt.
Long associated with Southern cooking, Sims’s voice makes the writing shine, from chapter introductions to snappy recipe commentary. In the chapter titled “Porcine Love,” for example, she opines: “And then there’s bacon. One of the surest signs of genuine affection in our neck of the woods is to sign your missive ‘Love you more than bacon.’ A higher aspiration doesn’t exist.”
Finally, the extensive photographs and illustrations reveal both the end results of these mouth-watering recipes and the love of the authors for the mountains.
In the book’s foreword, the chef Sean Brock—originally from a small town in southwestern Virginia but now one of the stars of culinary Charleston—lauds this cookbook for the way “the traditions of mountain cuisine are looked at through a modern lens.” That’s it exactly: old recipes and foods with a 21st-century twist. (Andrews McMell Publishing, $30)
For the History Buff
Perhaps the most whimsical new title is The Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, by Janet Morrison. Part of the Postcard by History Series, the book looks at bygone days through reproductions of postcards local to Western North Carolina, each accompanied by succinctly written notes packed with information. Here are cards depicting the Cherokee people, small communities such as Lake Junaluska, and wildlife, particularly black bears. Two standout photos show the Ghost Town train on its steep incline and another of the Hotel Gordon on Waynesville’s Main Street. The latter reminds us that the town’s Main Street once served as home to half a dozen hotels and rooming houses, back in that time when summer visitors from the Deep South came by rail to the mountains to escape the heat. (Arcadia Publishing, $22)
For the Photographer
North Carolina Unforgettable: Photography by Robb Helfrick begs for a spot on coffee tables across the state. We’ve seen some of these photo subjects in other such collections: Tryon Palace, the 740-gallon coffee pot in Old Salem, the Lynn Cove Viaduct, various coastal lighthouses. But many less well-known pictures testify to both Helfrick’s talent and of the beauty of all corners of the Old North State. His autumn shot of Upper Whitewater Falls in Transylvania County captures the majesty of that gorge, and the picture he took at dusk from Thunderstruck Ridge above Maggie Valley reminds us once again of our region’s appeal. (Far Country Press, $33)