6 Tennessee Family Recipes at Risk of Disappearing With Gen Z

Downtown Erwin fills with vendor tents this Friday and Saturday, when the Unicoi County Apple Festival packs in more than 400 stalls.

Almost none of them sell a written recipe.

Grandmothers taught much of Tennessee’s home cooking standing at a stove, by feel, and the knowledge never left the room where it started.

These are the Tennessee family recipes at risk of disappearing with Gen Z.

1. Soup Beans and Cracklin’ Cornbread

Soup beans and cracklin’ cornbread fed East Tennessee’s mountain families through hard winters for generations.

The dish never needed a recipe card, just a soaked pot of pintos, a hunk of fatback, and a skillet of cornbread studded with fried pork skins.

Nobody measured anything.

A 2023 survey of 2,000 Americans found 71% have at least one family recipe handed down to them.

Only 53% of Gen Z can say the same, compared with 77% of Gen X.

No survey has measured soup beans and cracklin’ cornbread by name.

But the same drop-off shows up in exactly this kind of dish, one taught standing at a stove instead of off a card.

Many kitchens still make a pot, but fewer pair it with the cracklins their grandparents never would have skipped.

2. Country Ham and Redeye Gravy

Country ham and redeye gravy still come out of the smokehouses in Monroe County, but the number of curers you can call by name keeps shrinking.

Allan Benton got his start in 1973, leasing a building on Old Highway 68 between Madisonville and Sweetwater where area farmers had already been curing hogs since 1947.

He ran hams out of that leased building for five years, then built the cinderblock facility on U.S. 411 in Madisonville in 1978, the same building the company still cures in today.

Allan Benton’s three children work in medicine instead of the family business, and only two of his five grandchildren have said they want to keep it going.

That’s three generations, counting the founder, his children, and his grandchildren.

Redeye gravy comes from the same pan, just black coffee poured over the ham drippings until it turns the color that gives the dish its name.

3. Apple Stack Cake

Apple stack cake, a family recipe, still shows up every fall when East Tennessee’s dried-apple crop comes in.

The Unicoi County Apple Festival packs more than 400 vendors into downtown Erwin the first weekend of October.

Fewer home bakers still build the full seven-layer version themselves.

A stack cake takes seven thin layers of cake alternating with cooked dried apples, pricked in patterns with a fork before it bakes.

Families used to spread that labor across a whole afternoon or longer, and the cake tasted better after sitting a few days in a cool place.

That takes time.

4. Chow-Chow Relish

Chow-chow relish rounds out a plate of soup beans or pinto beans in family kitchens across Tennessee’s mountain counties.

It’s a spoonful of chopped green tomato, cabbage, and pepper, put up every fall in jars that last through winter.

Nobody used to buy chow-chow.

Everybody canned it.

No survey has tracked chow-chow’s decline for Tennessee alone.

But food-culture writers have documented the same fragile hand-off in Appalachian foothill communities further south.

The practice there usually stops the year the one relative who always did it stops too.

Chow-chow depends on that same one-relative chain in Tennessee’s mountain counties, with nobody writing the ratios down because nobody ever needed to.

5. Sorghum Molasses

Sorghum molasses used to come out of a family cane patch every fall, boiled down over a wood fire behind the house.

Muddy Pond, a small farming community on Tennessee’s Upper Cumberland Plateau, still presses and boils sorghum the old way every October.

Tennessee sorghum cane acreage has dropped from about 3,000 acres in the 1950s to roughly 400 acres today, grown by about 80 producers statewide, according to the Tennessee Encyclopedia.

That’s an 87% drop.

Muddy Pond’s home mill still uses horses to turn the cane press, the same method that made sorghum a farm staple before store-bought syrup took over.

6. Grainger County Canned Tomatoes

Grainger County families have grown tomatoes famous enough that former Gov. Don Sundquist once proclaimed the skill an art passed down through generations.

Families used to put up dozens of jars every August, tomatoes packed away for winter soup and tomato gravy.

Freezers changed that math.

A chest freezer holds a summer’s worth of tomatoes without the boiling water, the lids, or the hours standing over a hot stove.

Fewer kitchens bother with the jars anymore.

Still Caring About These Dishes

Many younger people aren’t walking away from family recipes like these because they don’t care about them.

A 2025 food-industry survey found Gen Z shoppers are more than twice as likely as older generations to blame a lack of know-how for cooking less from scratch.

Interest was never missing.

What’s often missing is a single afternoon standing next to somebody who already knows a recipe by heart.