Despite distance, this Whitesburg area native is still inspired by the mountains of Kentucky.
Photo Above: Missy Jones presents her homemade chocolate cake with buttercream frosting.
Photos Courtesy of Missy Jones.
“The mountains are always drawing you. They never leave you,” says Missy Jones as she stirs a pot of soup beans. But she isn’t stirring that pot in Letcher County, Kentucky, where her family has lived in Tan Yard “Holler” for generations. Instead, she cooks the sacred family meal in her kitchen in Independence, 3 ½ hours away from Whitesburg and about as far north as you can go and still be in Kentucky.
“We thought we’d never leave Letcher County,” Missy tells us. But she and her husband Roger had no choice when coal mining began its downturn. Roger could do just about anything in the mines. He specialized in equipment repair. He loved working underground.
But in 2007, Roger and Missy and their four-year-old daughter McKenzie left the mountains, and Roger took a job in Independence with CSX Transportation.
It’s a familiar theme in Appalachian life and literature: the painful separation of families from their homeplace and their out-migration to cities in the north in search of work.
Roger’s family had done exactly that in the 1960s. In fact, Roger was born in Detroit. But his family returned home to Eastern Kentucky in the early 1970s, when Roger’s father secured a job at the Golden Oak Mining Company in Whitesburg. Missy’s father, Gene Fields, worked there, and that’s how she and Roger met.
Gene Fields worked the mines in Kentucky and across the state line in Haysi, Virginia, leaving out early in the morning and returning way past dark. Missy and her three sisters had the job of filling their father’s dinner bucket every evening for the next day. She remembers his affection for souse meat, liver cheese and potted meat sandwiches.
When she was nine, Missy baked her first biscuits. If any were left over, they would go into her father’s dinner bucket, along with a fried pork chop. That dinner bucket had a spigot. To fill it, Missy had to carry water from her grandparents’ hand-dug well. Even into the 1980s, she still collected rainwater for the washing of clothes.
Most of the Fields family’s waking hours were consumed with work. They grew and raised their own food. But for Missy, it was a life of learning, too. And the lessons she absorbed in Tan Yard Hollow have never left her, despite distance and time.
As she tends to that pot of soup beans, she remembers her mother Annie’s admonition to always “look” the beans carefully, to remove any stones or debris. And she recollects the instructions of her aunt, Patty Evans, to mix in some Great Northern beans with pintos.
Having grown up in a family that raised hogs, Missy adds either a ham hock or a slab of jaw bacon to each pot of soup beans. A whole onion and some salt and pepper complete the simple recipe.
It is in her kitchen not far from the Ohio state line where Missy’s connections to faraway Eastern Kentucky are the strongest.
“In our way of cooking, we didn’t have a lot of spices other than salt and pepper,” Missy says. “I cook with spices now because they’re readily available, but nothing compares to just simple home cooking.”
That simplicity is illustrated in Missy’s Eastern Kentucky approach to chicken and dumplings. In the tradition of her great aunt Lucy Bowling, she makes the thin, rolled-out version. And oftentimes, following her mother Annie’s teaching, she makes the fluffy kind.
Either way, she says a fat, bone-in, skin-on hen creates the best flavor, and she insists that those cooks who throw in some carrots and celery are straying from tradition. A couple of drops of yellow food coloring is an option, but some melted lard is mandatory.
“We use lard for everything, just about,” Missy jokes, sort of.
Again, her mother’s coaching comes to mind when she contends that dumplings should not be stirred. “Or you’ll just have a big pot of gravy. Just give the pot a good shake.”
Inherited kitchen wisdom and this straightforward style of cooking have had a lasting effect on Roger and Missy’s 21-year-old daughter McKenzie, a soup bean lover who often writes papers about Appalachian culture on her way to a teaching degree at Kentucky’s Thomas More University. McKenzie’s most requested meal is her mother’s wilted, or “killed,” lettuce, topped with cornmeal gravy and crumbled cornbread.
“You don’t need a ton of ingredients to make something good,” Missy declares.
She ends our conversation with a reflection on her homeland.
“Southeast Kentucky is a country all its own. The mountains keep it sheltered, and that’s why people like it. And that’s why they’re drawn to it. When you go back to Southeast Kentucky, it’s usually for a death, but we go back as often as we can. Nothing satisfies us until we go on top of Pine Mountain.”
Blackberry Dumplings
Missy Jones is the host of “Mountain Cookin’ with Missy” on Facebook and is the author of a cookbook of the same name. Here’s one of her favorite recipes.
- ½ stick unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 2 pounds frozen or fresh blackberries
- 2 cups sugar
- Enough water to cover the berries about 2 inches—approximately 2 cups
Over medium heat, melt butter in a 7-8-quart Dutch oven. Add berries and sugar and stir until berries thaw and sugar has dissolved. Add water and cook over medium heat, stirring gently, until mixture comes to a rolling boil. While cooking the berries, make the fluffy dumplings.
- 2 cups White Lily self-rising flour (use a little less flour if using another brand)
- ⅓ cup unsalted butter, melted
- Enough whole milk to make a sticky dough
In a bowl, add the flour and make a well in the middle. Add melted butter. Then add enough milk that when stirred, the dough becomes thick and sticky and not too wet. If it’s too wet, add a little more flour. After berries come to a boil, sprinkle a little flour over the dough. Also, flour your hands. Pinch some dough with your hands and gently roll into 2-inch balls. Drop dumplings into the boiling berries. Don’t stir. Make room for all the dumplings by gently moving them around with a spoon. Reduce heat to low. Cover and let simmer for about 10 minutes. Eat immediately to keep dumplings from getting soggy. Serve in a bowl with ice cream or whipped cream.
Fred and Jill Sauceman study and celebrate the foodways of Appalachia and the South from their home base in East Tennessee.
The story above first appeared in our May / June 2024 issue.
