This interview originally aired in the April 13, 2025 episode of Inside Appalachia.
When you think of “Appalachian cooking,” what comes to mind? For a lot of folks, it’s savory comfort foods like biscuits with sausage gravy, crispy fried chicken and mashed potatoes loaded with butter. But, what about folks who want that comfort food, without involving animals? Jan Brandenburg is a pharmacist and poet in Eastern Kentucky. Over the last 30 years, she’s collected and perfected recipes that take a plant-based approach to the Appalachian table. Producer Bill Lynch spoke with Brandenburg about her new book The Modern Mountain Cookbook.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Courtesy
Lynch: Just looking at your book, I didn’t get the sense that you were raised a vegan.
Brandenberg: No, not at all. I grew up just a “regular meal” type person. I actually worked at both the stockyards and a tobacco warehouse. My family ran the restaurant. Those kinds of places are just open for sale days. And so my family ran the restaurants in those two businesses in Pulaski County.
Lynch: What was the dinner table like when you were growing up?
Brandenberg: What was the dinner table like? Catfish, hamburger, steak, hamburgers, hot dogs and, you know, lots of biscuits and gravy, cornbread and green beans. We ate a lot of green beans.
Both of my grandparents had big gardens, but there generally was, like, fried chicken or something to go along with it.
Lynch: When did you become a vegan? And where did that happen?
Brandenburg: I became vegetarian in 1995 for love of animals, and wanting to let my dinner table reflect my values a little bit more, and then I just gradually made that transition to veganism. The more I read about it, the more familiar I got with products and in the ways to cook to do that.
I think I’ve been fully vegan since 2006, but I spent a lot of years of those early years eating vegan. Also everything else was minimal. But, you know, you get out somewhere, you get in a bind… I wasn’t as strict as I am now, fully embracing that, because now I’m prepared. I’m prepared for whatever any town can throw at me. I am ready to eat vegan.
Lynch: When did you start cooking?
Brandenberg: I’ve always cooked. I mean, I always say that the “Easy Bake Oven,” that was it for me, with that little light bulb.
So, I’ve always cooked. Even as a teenager, it was just something I always liked to do. Now, when I worked in the restaurant as a kid, it was mostly as the dishwasher. I didn’t get to do a lot of cooking. But I was always in the kitchen when my grandmother made all those pies, and she would just let you have free rein in her kitchen.
She had every confidence that I could bake anything that I wanted to, even if I didn’t have any experience. It was no holds barred in my grandmothers’ kitchens. They really just didn’t mind, especially my paternal grandmother.
Lynch: Well, for somebody who writes a cookbook, you would imagine you got good at cooking. So when did you know that you were good?
Brandenburg: Probably, even as a teenager. My mother didn’t particularly like to cook, and so I did a lot of cooking growing up. I baked cupcakes for my little sister to take to school. Even in college, I did a lot of cooking with my roommate, and somehow, I became the hostess for most any family gathering that we had. And that has continued, even though I am vegan and not much of the rest of my family is.
Lynch: How does that go with those when you’re hosting, these get togethers, barbecues or whatever?
Brandenburg: You would be surprised. Really, nobody complains. I do Thanksgiving. I do Christmas. I do most birthdays. We have luaus. We have fiestas.
I’m really creative, and what I can pull together from plant based materials… it really is a lot in the seasoning, but nobody ever complains. They’re completely happy.
I always joke that maybe they just really hate to cook, but they really do like to come here. It’s good food, and they’re all used to it now, and nobody says anything about the fact that it’s vegan.
Lynch: When did you start adapting older recipes to plant based?
Brandenburg: Well, the minute I made that transition, even when I became a vegetarian. If you’re a creative thinker, you think, “What do I want to do here? What do I want to do to make sure that we meet our traditional values?”
You want people to feel comfortable with what you’re serving. You know, “I want mashed potatoes, I want broccoli casserole.” These are all things that people expect. So, it was just kind of a dish at a time when it got to the holidays. Sometimes, I did a test run to make sure that it all worked out.
I guess holidays really were the impetus for developing new recipes.
Other than that, when I’m cooking just for me, I can go pretty simple with some tofu and roasted vegetables. But if you’re going to have a crowd, and I do. I mean, I probably have people over for dinner at least once a week, sometimes more. Even for something like St Patrick’s Day, you just want people to be comfortable and get something that they anticipate for that particular meal.
Lynch: What does a vegan St. Patrick’s Day feast look like?
Brandenburg: We had Irish stew. I had shepherd’s pie. I made some brown bread. And that was the first time that I’d done that. I wasn’t especially happy with that, so I made a backup of cornbread.
We had an Irish pea salad and some green cupcakes, and some wine – some wine and Guinness, which is vegan. Yeah, you do kind of have to shop for vegan wine, not all wine is vegan, not all beer is vegan.
Lynch: So, in adapting cooking and finding ways to make these recipes, what was difficult? Were there particular things that you wanted to create that were harder?
Brandenburg: Pies were hard. So, in the cookbook, there is chocolate pie. My grandmother made the best pies. You know, she turned out 10 pies every Saturday morning to take to our restaurant, and they were beautiful, you know, big fluffy meringues.
Now, we have aquafaba. That, probably, was like the biggest game changer, as far as what you can make, because that really replicates egg white. So, her Italian cream cake I can now make, and also her chocolate cream pie. But those were two of the more difficult recipes in the book to substitute.
Lynch: When you started writing this cookbook, did you have like, a ton of recipes built up? Did you have a core recipe that kind of everything kind of built around? Where does somebody start with a vegan cookbook?
Brandenburg: It was kind of an accident that I did this, because I have a lot of recipes, and I’ve kept up with them –like most cooks do. I always jot something down if I make a change and the measurements for that.
And I do make a lot of changes. That’s just the way it goes. When you cook, you’re like, you can always improve it.
Writing the cookbook, I was just driving to work one day and heard them talking about University of Kentucky Press on the radio. I thought, you know, I should do that. I should send that in, because I’ve always loved to write. I’ve written other things. I wrote pharmacy articles. I’ve written poetry. I wrote an article for a mothering magazine once. So, writing has been part of my everyday life, but this was fun, because when I sat down and started to do it, I thought, “you know, there are a lot of stories that actually go with the recipes.” So, every recipe kind of does have a little background story to it in the entire book.
Lynch: It’s a meaty book – excuse the phrase, “a meaty book.” As far as recipes, there’s a lot of stuff in here. Do you have a favorite recipe?
Brandenberg: I think probably the rosemary bread. It just has the best scent. It makes your home smell so good – just a really warm, comforting recipe. If I had to pick one, I would say that’s the one.
Lynch: Kind of on the opposite spectrum of questions here, is there a recipe that got away, a recipe that couldn’t go in the book for some reason, or maybe wasn’t ready for prime time?
Brandenburg: I have more recipes, but I can’t think of any. I never gave up on one. You know, broccoli casserole was really, really difficult. Hash brown casserole was pretty difficult because you have to recreate those condensed soups that people cook with. You have to use that as a starting point.
So, those were hard, but I didn’t ever give up. There’s nothing that I really wanted to add in there that I didn’t finally say, “Okay, it’s ready to go.”
That’s kind of a personality trait. I really have trouble giving up on anything.
Lynch: So, you’ve been a vegan for almost 20 years, right? Is it easier to be vegan now than it was 20 years ago?
Brandenburg: So much easier. I mean, it’s really not hard unless you want to eat out a lot, especially when you live in a small town, but that’s just what I love.
If you go to a bigger city, it’s very easy. But in a small town like Berea or Irvine where I lived right before I moved here, it’s still hard to find something if you would like to eat out a lot. But other than that, if you’re willing to cook at home, it’s very easy.
Lynch: So, what comes next?
Brandenberg: I have another cookbook in mind. This one I would like to focus on, because just because my friends and I last year, we decided we would just do these themed happy hours.
So, we had, like, game day, and we had the fiesta and the luau, and we had disco day. You know how the 70’s were really big for casserole, right? So, we made menus around all of those. And it really made me write a lot of new recipes, like a s’mores pie or camp vegan ice cream pie when we did Fiesta night.
I really have a lot of other recipes that I’ve developed, and so it will probably be like, “Plant Based Celebrations, Large and Small.” That’s what I’m thinking.
Lynch: The book is the Modern Mountain Cookbook, a plant-based celebration of Appalachia by Jan A. Brandenburg. Jan, Thanks a lot.
Brandenburg: Thank you. You have a good evening. Bye.
——
The Modern Mountain Cookbook is available from the University Press of Kentucky.
