-[Woman VO] Nestled in the remote corner of southwest Virginia, this region captivates with its rugged landscapes, natural wonders, cultural attractions, and outdoor adventures-- experiences you'll only find in the heart of Appalachia.

Adventure guides available at heartofappalachia.com.

[♪ ♪ ♪] -[Narrator VO] Fluffy, buttery biscuits; crispy, golden cornbread.

These aren't just side dishes around here-- they're a way of life.

Passed down through families, baked in cast iron skillets, and paired with everything from apple butter to soup beans, these humble breads tell the story of survival, adaptation, and good old-fashioned Southern hospitality.

We'll be uncovering the importance of these dishes and how they're still popular today.

We wanted to dig deeper into the traditions behind these beloved staples.

There's something about fresh biscuits in the oven or a cast iron skillet full of golden cornbread that feels like home.

These simple, humble foods hold deep roots in Virginia's Appalachia, passed down through generations like treasured family heirlooms.

So we turned to the Appalachian Americans Facebook group, where folks proudly share stories of their grandmothers' kneading dough before sunrise or cornbread cooking on a stove after a long day's work.

We scrolled through recipe after recipe, each one carrying a piece of someone's history-- a memory tied to a Sunday supper or a holiday feast.

We picked a couple of those recipes to try for ourselves: one for biscuits-- light and buttery, and just the right amount of flakiness-- and another for cornbread, the kind that crumbles just enough but still holds together for a good slather of butter.

And just as we expected, they were delicious.

[Host] Can you tell me a little bit about... the origins of cornbread?

-Oh, boy, we ought to head way back to the beginning of the beginning.

[♪ ♪ ♪] [Dr. Sorensen] The corn that was domesticated by the Aztecs in Mesoamerica is the beginning-beginning-- and they were making all kinds of things from corn.

And both plain corn, just ground and used, but primarily, of course, in those cultures, corn that has been nixtamalized, which means it's been processed with lime or alkaline, which makes it then very healthy and, you know, can eat.

So they had a number of thousands of years doing it.

Now, it wasn't just a little simple experiment-- they really knew what they were doing with that.

The plant itself begins to move north out of Mexico.

It hits this kind of latitudinal weather line of light, and so people-- again, these people were really good at growing corn, at botany-- and they worked on it until they got a corn that could tolerate longer days and shorter winters.

Or they had to make that kind of adjustment.

And so corn, as it moves into what then became British North America, took a while to move-- first across the Gulf States-- those are the warmer places-- all the way across, and then slowly moved northward with these various cultures.

And every culture-- there were hundreds of native and indigenous cultures-- and it would seem that many of them took on to corn in very idiosyncratic ways.

They used it for different purposes.

They loved different colors of corn.

They had religious and spiritual connections to corn--some groups.

Others, it was just a much more pragmatic and practical kind of corn production.

It took a while for it to move north up the East Coast-- say, all the way to the Iroquois nations in the Northeast-- and yet it was always productive.

So everybody's been making corn for a long, long time-- thousands of years.

So there's lots of different cornbreads.

So now you've churched it up to that level, and that's pretty much what most farmers or very poor people can kind of put together.

They're going to have-- maybe most of the time-- they're going to have these pone, and then every once in a while, they're going to have pretty nice cornbread.

It's great with butter, honey, sorghum molasses-- whatever, you know.

It just has such a wonderful flavor.

And it becomes this common American food.

It's eaten in some forms in the Northeast-- maybe not quite as much as in the South, in the same way that in the South, you eat a lot of cornbread, but you don't eat quite as much wheat and bread unless you're very, very elite or somebody.

So you've got that happening.

And then, in Southern elite households, you have these fantastic enslaved Black cooks-- mostly women-- who really know their stuff.

They really know how to cook, and they've learned from European influences.

Because if you were a cook in an elite household, you're learning about these things because the mistress of the house-- she's telling you what she wants, and then you add it to the things you already know.

[♪ ♪ ♪] -[Narrator VO] When you bite into a piece of warm cornbread or a flaky biscuit here in Appalachia, you're tasting more than just tradition.

You're tasting the land itself, and at places like Wade's Mill, you see how deep those roots go.

Tucked in the Shenandoah Valley, Wade's Mill has been grinding grain since the 1700s, but it wasn't just a place to make flour.

It was a heartbeat of the early community.

Mills, like this one, were once vital gathering spots, serving as post offices, trading centers, even banks.

Farmers would bring their corn to be ground, swap news, barter, and build the social fabric of the region one sack of meal at a time.

These mills help shape Appalachian foodways, keeping ingredients local, seasonal, and community-driven.

Cornmeal for cornbread, soft wheat flour for biscuits-- it all started here, and it still does.

What seems like a simple side dish is actually a story of geography, resilience, and resourcefulness passed down through generations.

[♪ ♪ ♪] -[John Siegfried] We are here at Wade's Mill, the oldest continually operating grist mill, certainly in Virginia, probably in America.

It's in the central Shenandoah Valley.

It's between Staunton and Lexington, just off of Interstate I-81, about three miles.

-It was built by Captain Joseph Kennedy.

He and his wife, Elizabeth, were Scots-Irish immigrants from Northern Ireland and came to America in 1733, and then came down the Great Wagon Trail into the Shenandoah Valley to settle this property as part of the historic board and grants.

-[John] It provided grain support or grinding for probably 10 or 20 farms that were located nearby, and all the other mills around the area provided the same thing.

It was a community center for all the people that lived here.

They would buy--not only would they get their grains here, but they would get quite a lot of other things.

And millers actually were quite a critical part of the local economy.

A lot of them were bankers.

A lot of the old order tickets that we have here at the mill are actually IOUs, and so that was a form of banking-- when you got a little slip of paper that said, "Could you give me a bag of flour, "and I'll pay you when I thrash out of my part of the farm up the road?"

This is a water-powered mill.

Most of the mills in this part of Virginia were overshot wheels, where you put the water in at the top of the wheel.

Very efficient-- 85% energy efficient.

So east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, there were water-powered mills.

Those mills were undershot wheels, where the wheel was in the river and you're effectively dependent on the flow of the river for your energy.

-One thing that's unique about Wade's Mill is that there is the Oliver Evans system in the mill, which is operational today.

Oliver Evans was an inventor, and in 1790 he received U.S. patent number three, signed by George Washington, for his invention of the first automated manufacturing process in America.

It was a system that moved grain throughout the mill using a series of belts and buckets, taking grain up to the fourth floor of the mill and then using gravity and chutes to get it down through various sifters and the stones.

And that invention took the place of seven men in the mill.

So it was quite a disruptive technology at the time.

[♪ ♪ ♪] [Karen Siegfried] We grind wheat, buckwheat, spelt, and rye, and five kinds of corn-- and all of those grains we make into flour, grits, cornmeal, and then use all the grains in a range of about 15 specialty mixes.

It's all stone-ground on granite stones, and most of the grains that we grind here are sourced locally or regionally from small Virginia farmers.

It's all 100% natural-- no additives, no preservatives-- just like the farmers would have gotten up in 1750 when they were bringing their grains to the original Captain Kennedy's Mill.

-We're open to visitors here at Wade's Mill from the first week in April until the last weeks in December.

Both Karen and I, we enjoy having people visit between Thursday and Sunday from 10 till 5.

-We've lived overseas and worked internationally all of our adult careers, and we never really knew this little gem existed.

And I think--at least I-- every day when I get up and look at the landscape and see the mountains, I just can't imagine a better place to be.

It's beautiful.

[♪ ♪ ♪] -[Doctor Sorensen] It's just part of that ubiquitous Southern culture, and the Appalachians are definitely part of that culture.

Whether they're people farming marginal land or just very, you know, just marginally middle class-- but they've got corn, and corn will succeed and grow, and other things won't.

And so that combination of corn, something--cornbread and good, rich beans with pork in it-- well, you can't hardly ask for a better, you know, stick-to-the-ribs meal for a large family, small family, whoever.

And so those kinds of meals really appealed.

And you just see versions and versions of that all over.

So Appalachia is probably a hotbed of-- but it's something that you see all across the Appalachian chain.

You see it across, and you see it all the way through to the Tidewater.

And you see it every place that Virginians and Georgians and South Carolinians and Marylanders and everybody moved-- especially with their enslaved populations-- moved westward into cotton country.

You see cornbreads in various forms follow them all the way across.

When you went to your mom's house, when you went to your grandma's house-- now remember, we're in 2020-- so I'm talking about moms and grandmas who were born, and grandmas who worked during World War II, and moms who began to work outside of the home in the '50s and the '60s.

And still they have these cornbread traditions that are part of their family, so that it's when they go and have their family reunion, or they have a homecoming, you know, or a wedding, or a few, you know-- well, traditional old-fashioned weddings, dinners-- "Where's the cornbread?"

You know, somebody's got a recipe that somebody says, "Oh, you've got to have so-and-so's cornbread," and that's just lovely to know that those traditions are not dying.

Here in Virginia, we're very fortunate.

Deep Roots Mill makes the most beautiful corn flour.

It's just fantastic-- and made with a water mill.

So there's people really interested in traditional corn mill making.

Anson Mills in South Carolina are producing a real broad variety of corn meals and hominies and others-- different varieties of corn-- more people are experimenting with them, and they're never going to become the universal corn.

We have too many people-- 370 million people-- none of these farms can produce enough to feed everybody.

But if you're looking for a particular kind of thing, for a particular recipe, or just because you'd really like to continue-- you can find that.

But there's people growing blue corn and multicolored corn, and now we also have a whole range of Indigenous groups all across the country, both from Woodland and the American Southwest and the Southeast, who are bringing their foodways to the attention-- 'cause it's never died in their groups.

They didn't have to rediscover it.

They had it, and are bringing it forward, though, for people to enjoy.

And they are using a lot of different kinds of corn.

That's fine.

I mean, the more, the merrier.

To me, my philosophy is-- we got room for everybody.

Let's make the table bigger, somebody bring a few more chairs, somebody make an extra pie or two-- we all got room at the table.

-[Narrator VO] Biscuits have also been a staple in Appalachian kitchens for generations, tracing their roots back to the early settlers who relied on simple ingredients like flour, butter, and buttermilk.

Originally a luxury due to the scarcity of wheat, biscuits became a Southern favorite as leavening agents like baking powder made them easy to prepare.

Today, they remain one of the region's most beloved dishes, served with everything from gravy to homemade jam.

Now we're heading into the kitchen at The Happy Hog, where Chef Matt is going to show us how they make their signature flaky made-from-scratch biscuits.

-So we're going to start on our buttermilk biscuits here.

I've got 12 cups of AP flour, got one pound of butter that we've cubed up, threw that in the freezer for a little bit.

You want your butter to be nice and cold.

We've got a quarter cup of baking powder, two to three tablespoons of white sugar, three tablespoons of kosher salt, and then you want your butter to be nice and cold, because that is going to provide the flakes in the biscuit.

So I'm just going to work this in with my hands.

So I'm not mixing it all the way in-- I'm just kind of breaking it up between my fingers with the flour-- and that is what's going to create all the nice little clumps in the biscuits.

So if you overwork this, you end up with chewy biscuits.

Biscuits are really simple but easy to get off a little bit-- create these nice little flakes.

They're covered in the flour, and that's by keeping the butter super cold before we start.

It'll keep distinct pieces of butter so that--that way, when they hit the heat in the oven, they're going to puff up and create those nice little flakes.

I started cooking mostly from watching my two grandmas, because they're both really good cooks.

So a lot of my recipes started off from them, and I discovered, after moving here, that I have a coastal Southern food flair, I guess--not so much as Appalachian.

So it's been fun kind of figuring out what some of those little differences are.

Around here, it's the pintos and cornbread.

It's like--everybody always wants to have their pintos and cornbread, yeah.

Same general concept of, you know, cheap, cheap meal that includes everything you need nutritionally in it.

But it's just fun-- the different approaches to it.

All right, so we've got all of our butter flaked up in here-- no more big chunks.

So now we're gonna add our buttermilk.

Got five cups of buttermilk, and we're going to mix this in.

This is another spot where you want to just mix this enough that it all comes together.

The more you work this, the chewier the biscuits are going to be.

So we're just mixing it enough so everything's nicely combined.

And from here, we'll turn this out on the table.

At this point on, I'm basically trying to work this as little as possible while getting it together to form our biscuits.

So, got all that together-- gonna fold about a third back in on top of itself.

Do that two more times.

It's kind of a balancing act of getting layers in your biscuit.

The more times you do it, the more layers you'll have, but also it'll start getting chewy if you do it too much.

We're just gonna do that light dusting of flour.

It's gonna help separate those layers.

Then on this pass, we're gonna take it down to about an inch thick.

That'll be for our actual biscuits.

We're gonna cut-- All right, so then we've got a-- we've got an actual ring for this.

In the past, when I didn't have, like, a nice one, you'd use a can of food-- cut both ends off of it.

Works just as well.

Pack these in tight together, and that way, when they push up against each other, they will go up instead of out.

Go brush these up with some butter and fire them off.

-[Narrator VO] No discussion of cornbread is complete without addressing the ongoing debate: sugar or no sugar?

Traditionally, Southern cornbread is more savory, while Northern cornbread tends to be sweeter.

Some cooks insist on a bit of brown sugar to enhance browning, while purists argue that true cornbread should be nothing but cornmeal, salt, water, and maybe a little fat.

Regardless of the variation, one thing remains clear: cornbread is as diverse as the people who make it.

-So a lot of cornbreads-- early cornbreads-- were combinations of cornmeal, wheat flour, and some form of leavening.

And you could use yeast.

Doesn't taste quite the same that we would be used to now if we were eating cornbread, but in the 19th century, we begin to have commercial leavenings available.

And that's when you start having true cornbread, as opposed to cooked in little patties-- cooked in usually a cast-iron skillet.

You're going to add some oil to it, and that's going to lighten it as well.

And you've got corn flour and wheat flour and eggs and milk and-- oh, the big controversy-- do you put sugar in cornmeal?

Well, I got to tell you, I ain't got no dog in that race, because I grew up eating cornbread cooked by a man from Algiers, Louisiana, and he always put two tablespoons of brown sugar in his cornbread.

He said it made it brown nicely.

And it certainly does brown nicely.

So there we go.

Now, a lot of urban people have unfortunately been forced to learn to like the kind that comes in the box.

And the only problem with it coming in the box is that it's not usually well-balanced in terms of half cornmeal, half flour.

And it's almost always far too sweet.

I think that's where that whole sugar controversy must have come in at some point.

And it's cake-like-- more cakey-- whereas traditional cornbread that's baked in a cast-iron skillet and comes hot out of the oven is much denser, more moist, quite crisp on the outside, has a distinct aroma to it, and really makes a difference.

-[Host VO] Biscuits and cornbread are more than just food here.

They represent resilience, resourcefulness, and the deep connection Appalachians have to their land.

Cornbread-- once a necessity in a region where wheat flour was scarce-- became a symbol of sustenance.

Biscuits, originally a luxury for special occasions, are now an everyday comfort food, found in kitchens across the mountains.

And these traditions aren't just surviving-- they're thriving.

Across the region, biscuit shops are opening up, putting modern spins on an old classic.

Food trucks are serving biscuits on the go, proving that these simple recipes can keep up with the pace of today's world while still honoring the past.

Because no matter how much things change, biscuits and cornbread will always have a place at the Appalachian table.

They tell a story of where we've been, who we are, and the flavors that continue to bring us together.

So whether it's a hot buttery biscuit with a drizzle of honey or a slice of skillet cornbread alongside a bowl of beans, one thing is for sure-- these foods aren't just part of a meal.

They're part of the legacy of Virginia's Appalachia.

[♪ ♪ ♪] -[Woman VO] Nestled in the remote corner of Southwest Virginia, this region captivates with its rugged landscapes, natural wonders, cultural attractions, and outdoor adventures-- experiences you'll only find in the heart of Appalachia.

Adventure guides available at heartofappalachia.com.