". . . in a scrapbook style it proves, more than anything, that all colleges are the hearts of their communities, and the way to (and from) all hearts is through food."          ----Rheta Grimsley Johnson, syndicated columnist for King Features Foreword By John Egerton We live in an age when the number of cookbooks in the marketplace seems to grow in direct proportion to the number of households where cooking has lost out to burger drive-thrus, chicken pick-ups, pizza call-ins, taco take-outs, and all the other forms of fast food for busy people. Given that cause-and-effect scenario, who on earth would now dare try to make a compelling case for creating yet another such book? And what could there possibly be left to say about the old-fashioned arts and sciences of home cooking? The answers are (a) East Tennessee State University, and (b) plenty. You’re holding the evidence in your hands. In the vast cauldron of virtual and literal potboilers that so many people now read in nostalgic remembrance of meals past, only a precious few volumes manage to float to the top like a feather-light fritter. This is one of them. Not that it’s actually light, in either calories or pounds and ounces; Home and Away tips the scales at a level usually reserved for the big boys. But don’t let the heft deceive you. Muhammad Ali was big, too, but he could float like a butterfly; Pavarotti could hardly have cultivated such a singular voice of authority without the lungs and shoulders to project it. Anyone who knows the mountains understands that you don’t go bear hunting with a switch-and you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. The people at ETSU who assembled this fascinating and highly useful cookbook accepted that reality: Home and Away had to be big and sprawling, assertive and embracing; it had to have the chops (all the tools necessary to get the job done) in order to do the chops (pork, lamb, beef, etc.). And it does. Home and Away reads and cooks like a world-class book of recipes. It also steps right up and makes a serious, albeit often light-hearted, statement about the panorama of foods and customs to be found in this one university community. Of all the many different ingredients that go into the making of a good cookbook, two paramount and essential things spring quickly to mind. First, you have to have an idea or theme that seems fresh and, if not entirely original, at least not so badly overused that it seems like a book you’ve read many times before. And second, there must be someone in charge of the project who loves food and its social virtues, who knows how to connect the kitchen and the dining room to the larger spaces in people’s lives, and who is skilled at galvanizing and organizing food lovers (a task that has been compared to herding cats). Enter Fred Sauceman, ETSU’s longtime director of university relations. The man is passionate about food-Southern food in particular, that being the cookery of his upbringing, but just about everything else that comes to the table with a tradition and a story and a good cook behind it. Fred and his wife, Jill, both outstanding cooks in their own right, are also avid collectors of recipes and lore from the food world. Ordinarily, institutional cookbooks draw recipes from their immediate family-faculty, staff, alumni, students. Fred’s “fresh idea” was to go beyond that circle and try, in his words, “to balance Southern Appalachian cooking with influences brought in by people from other parts of the country and the world.” Universities, if they are faithful to their search-for-truth mission, tend to become cultural crossroads where people from all corners of the globe come together around shared interests and common pursuits. Fred Sauceman saw this book as much more than a collection of recipes; in his conception, it had to tell the story of the university and its environs through an intricate web of food-related connections. To him, that meant examining everything in the record: the 1911 beginning of ETSU as a normal school, its mountain setting in Southern Appalachia, and all the people who have influenced it, from the earliest administrators and faculty (including pathfinding home economist Ada Hornsby Earnest) to a host of visiting speakers, among them “homeboy” gourmet cook John Dodson, Cherokee poet Marilou Awiakta, former Black Panther Bobby Seale, international hostage rescuer Terry Waite, National Public Radio’s Linda Wertheimer, and mountain-born poet-novelists Robert Morgan and Richard Marius. They’re all here in these pages, talking food and culture, they and hundreds more, and the combined offering of recipes, reminiscences, historical tidbits, stories, and poems totals somewhere between 800 and 1,000 entries. The magnitude alone is mind-boggling, but the quality is also tops. When can you remember a university-or anyone else, for that matter-putting together a compendium like this? Maybe not since Waverly Root, an aptly named culinary genius, turned out his famous dictionary of the foods of the world in 1980. Now comes Sauceman-another foodie with a name that fits-to spread a many-splendored feast before us. If this book won’t get you back into the kitchen with your apron on and your knives sharpened, better have your pulse checked. There’s a cure for fast-food addiction. You can take a giant step in that direction right here at Home and Away. Copyright © 2000, East Tennessee State University John Egerton is universally recognized as the authority on Southern food, and his 1987 book Southern Food: At Home, On the Road, In History is a classic work in the field, having earned him the Tastemaker Award (now the Julia Child Award) from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. His 1994 work, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and has been described as “an astonishing, little-known story of the Southerners who, in the generation before the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation and before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery bus, challenged the validity of a white ruling class and a ‘separate but equal’ division of the races.” The book also brought Egerton the Southern Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction, presented to him in 1995 at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, where Egerton also claimed the Nashville Banner’s Tennessee Writer Award. Among his other books are Generations: An American Family (1983), Shades of Gray (1991), Side Orders (1990), and The Americanization of Dixie (1974). Egerton earned an A.B. degree in journalism and public relations and a master of arts in political science and public administration at the University of Kentucky, where he served on the public relations staff from 1958-60. His wife, Ann Bleidt Egerton, is a dealer in old and out-of-print books in Nashville. John is a native of Cadiz, Kentucky, “the Country Ham Capital of the World.”