Van Lear Historical Society

Remembering Loretta Lynn’s Cookbook ‘You’re Cookin’ It Country’ | Eater

"A coal-mining workplace where her father labored during the Great Depression, leaving the family in deep poverty that shaped a hard-scrabble, working-class identity reflected in the subject’s cooking and songs. With her mother raising eight children while her father toiled in the mine, she was pushed into early marriage and learned to feed a large family on a tight budget, developing inexpensive, nourishing dishes such as vegetable soup and fried catfish. Those formative hardships and practical recipes later informed a 2004 cookbook of hearty Appalachian comfort food—rich chicken and dumplings, tender buttermilk biscuits, banana pudding with oven-browned meringue, and peach cobbler—that celebrate the economy, taste, and resilience of home cooking." - Amy McCarthy