N.C.'s other side of cooking

In the early 1990s, Elizabeth Wiegand found herself in France at Anne Willan's legendary LaVarenne Cooking School.

Wiegand, a Raleigh native, spent a week learning how to cook French foods and reveling in the Burgundy region's ingredients.

While watching someone make crème anglaise, Wiegand realized that it was nothing more than boiled custard, a staple of her North Carolina upbringing.

Wiegand says she had an epiphany that the foods and cooking traditions of her home state should be venerated as much as French food.

"I made a vow to try to celebrate North Carolina foods," Wiegand says.

Wiegand, who had been working as a freelance food and travel writer, started pitching a food lover's guide to North Carolina. Her publisher suggested breaking the topic down. Her first book, "The Outer Banks Cookbook," came out a couple of years ago. Her latest book explores the cooking traditions of the mountains: "The New Blue Ridge Cookbook: Authentic Recipes from Virginia's Highlands to North Carolina's Mountains."

She will be signing books Friday at Raleigh's Quail Ridge Books.

The cookbook has recipes from down-home to fancy from chefs in restaurants now populating the area. The book is filled with stories about ingredients, such as ramps, black walnuts and Southern maple syrup, or about producers, such as the Sunburst Trout Company or Alan Muskat, aka The Mushroom Man, who leads fungi-foraging excursions.

While researching this cookbook, Wiegand says, she was surprised to learn there is a stronger, earlier farm-to-table tradition in the mountains than in the Triangle. As one farmer told her about the isolated communities with few fast food restaurants, the mountain areas never got away from the slow food movement.