Long before somebody could open a chest freezer and pull out supper, Appalachian families had another dependable appliance. It rose every morning in the east.

There was no temperature control.

No digital display.

No automatic defrost.

And there certainly wasn't a little light that came on when you opened the door.

There was just the sun, moving air, a good dry place and generations of knowledge about what could be saved and what couldn't.

Before refrigeration and home freezers changed the Appalachian kitchen, drying food was one of the simplest ways to make August last until January.

It sounds almost too simple.

Take water out of food and it lasts longer.

But knowing how to do that without letting the food spoil first was something people learned through experience, then passed from one generation to the next.

The Original Food Dryer

Today, you can buy a food dehydrator, spread sliced apples across plastic trays, turn a knob and come back several hours later.

Our grandparents had considerably less plastic involved.

Fruit might be sliced and laid where warm air could circulate around it. Beans could be threaded and hung. Herbs could be gathered into bunches. Other foods might be spread on clean cloths, screens or trays in a protected place.

The principle was always the same.

Get the moisture out before spoilage gets in.

Modern food science explains why the old method worked. Microorganisms that spoil food need moisture. Remove enough water, and their ability to grow is greatly reduced.

The people doing the drying didn't need a laboratory to tell them that.

They had December.

If the food hanging in the kitchen or stored in the pantry was still good when snow was on the ground, the method worked.

Apples Were Too Valuable to Waste

Few foods were better suited to Appalachian preservation than apples.

The National Park Service calls apples perhaps the most important fruit historically grown in the Southern mountains. Mountain families used them fresh and turned them into cider, vinegar, applesauce, apple butter and pies. Some varieties stored well on their own, while others could be preserved for later use.

And then there were dried apples.

Anybody who grew up around an old Appalachian kitchen probably remembers them.

They weren't pretty.

A dried apple didn't look much like the shiny red thing sitting in the produce department today. The slices shriveled. They darkened. They became leathery.

But put those dried apples into a pot with water and let them slowly come back to life, and you had the beginning of fried apple pies, stewed apples and desserts in the middle of winter.

That mattered.

Because the old mountain household wasn't trying to win a beauty contest with its food.

The object was to still have something to eat after the tree outside had been bare for three months.

The Library of Congress notes that dried and preserved fruits became staple ingredients in American households, part of a larger tradition of "putting food by" for the winter.

Beans Hanging From the Wall

Of course, we've already met the most famous Appalachian example.

Leather britches.

Green beans were strung with needle and thread and hung to dry until the plump summer bean shriveled into something that looked considerably more like an old piece of leather than supper.

The tradition survived well into modern Appalachia. The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress even documented West Virginia residents stringing beans for drying in the 1990s, identifying the finished product as leather britches.

But beans tell us something larger about Appalachian preservation.

Drying wasn't merely a recipe.

It was a system.

Grow the food when the ground would grow it.

Eat some fresh.

Preserve the rest.

Then trust your shelves, jars, strings, cellar and smokehouse to carry you through until the ground woke up again.

Corn Didn't Have to Stay on the Cob

Corn was another food practically designed for keeping.

Some could be left to mature and dry before being shelled. Dried corn could then be ground into meal and turned into cornbread, mush, hoecakes and countless other dishes.

That was one reason corn became so important in mountain foodways.

It was more than something to eat in July.

It could cross seasons.

The Smithsonian's examination of Appalachian foodways points to the deep Indigenous foundation of corn, beans and squash in the region, followed by adaptations from European and African food traditions. Corn became especially central as settlers adapted older grain-based food traditions to crops that grew well in their new surroundings.

A field of corn was therefore more than a summer crop.

Properly handled, part of that field could still be feeding a family when the next year's corn hadn't even been planted.

Even the Smokehouse Was a Dryer

Drying didn't always mean laying something in the sunshine.

Sometimes the preservation happened in smoke.

Meat preservation combined several defenses against spoilage. Salt pulled moisture from meat. Time allowed further drying. Smoke added flavor and helped create conditions less friendly to spoilage.

A smokehouse was not a freezer.

It didn't stop time.

It slowed it down.

And for families who slaughtered hogs in the colder months, that could mean the difference between having meat for weeks or months and watching a valuable animal spoil.

That is an important distinction when we look back at these old foodways.

Appalachian preservation wasn't one clever trick. It was a collection of little tricks, each buying more time.

Salt bought time.

Smoke bought time.

Dry air bought time.

Sugar bought time.

Vinegar bought time.

A cool cellar bought time.

Taken together, they allowed a household to stretch a short growing season across an entire year.

Nothing About It Was Automatic

It's easy to romanticize all this.

A porch covered with drying beans makes a wonderful photograph.

Apple slices drying on a late-summer afternoon sound downright peaceful.

But food preservation was work.

Someone planted it.

Someone weeded it.

Someone picked it.

Someone washed it.

Someone peeled it, sliced it, strung it, salted it, stirred it or carried it.

Then someone had to watch it.

Rain at the wrong time could ruin drying food. Dampness could invite mold. Insects and animals were always interested in an unattended meal.

And when winter came, the work began again.

Dried foods often had to be soaked, simmered or otherwise brought back to something resembling the food that had gone into storage months earlier.

Convenience wasn't the point.

Survival was.

Then Electricity Changed Everything

Eventually the refrigerator entered Appalachian homes.

Then came the home freezer.

For the first time, families could preserve fresh meat, vegetables and fruit without changing them nearly as much.

A green bean could go into the freezer looking like a green bean and come out months later still looking more or less like one.

That was revolutionary.

No threading beans through a needle.

No waiting for apples to dry.

No wondering whether a damp spell had ruined a week's work.

Push down the lid.

Close the door.

Plug it in.

Done.

And yet something interesting happened.

The old foods didn't completely disappear.

People kept making apple butter even when they could freeze apples.

They kept canning tomatoes when canned tomatoes were sitting ten minutes away at the grocery store.

They kept pickling beans.

Some even kept making leather britches.

Why?

Because eventually preservation stopped being only about survival.

It became taste.

Then memory.

Then tradition.

The Food Remembers

That's why an old jar of beans or a skillet of dried apples can mean more than what's on the plate.

It carries a little piece of a world in which September mattered because January was coming.

A world where a good garden was worth more than decoration.

A world where throwing away perfectly good food could border on foolishness because somebody knew exactly how much labor had gone into producing it.

The sun did part of the work.

So did salt.

So did smoke.

But most of the work was done by people who understood something modern abundance has allowed us to forget.

Harvest time wasn't the end of the growing season.

It was the beginning of winter preparation.

And hanging from porch rafters, drying beside a stove, resting in a cellar or curing in a smokehouse was next January's supper.

They didn't call it sustainable living.

They called it getting ready.