If Foy Allen Edelman hadn't decided to make a 180-degree turn in her life, she would have never heard the collard poem. Nor met a Rowan County centenarian who got a recipe from listening in on a party line, nor headed out on North Carolina coastal fishing boats to record how fishermen cooked their catch.

Most certainly she would have missed the Vance family of Avery County, explaining how to prepare and roast bear meat.

And the tales might not have been preserved for others to hear.

Edelman has spent 4 1/2 years collecting recipes, foodways, folklore and oral histories from all 100 of the state's counties for her project, "Coming Together at the North Carolina Table."

The office, which she calls "the dungeon," of her Wake County home is crammed with notebooks organized by region, CDs of her cooks' voices and scribbled notes with leads on more cooks to visit. Photographs Edelman has taken of the cooks and their families beam from the walls. A table full of gift goodies from her subjects includes a soda bottle of potent moonshine.

She's still trying to organize it all, and is looking for a publisher. She wrote an article recently for the North Carolina Folklore Journal, whose Web site included some of the recordings for what she wants to be a "talking cookbook," so that readers can hear the voices of men and women across the state. Many talk about foodways that are passing or gone.

She just decided to do this; no grants or funding.

Why this project?

"Growing up, my family disagreed on a lot of things, but one thing we all agreed on was food," says Edelman, who was born in Kinston. "And I love North Carolina."

Edelman started out with studies in art and design, but ended up in a safe job with a steady income: computer systems analyst. One day, she realized, "I was sitting at a machine in a dark room all day.

"When I turned 50, I took out the good silver and started using it every day, and my family china. What was I waiting for? I'm 50. This is it."

She was laid off from her job. She started thinking about the great cooking of her grandmother and the equally wonderful, but very different, meals prepared by the family's African-American housekeeper.

"A window just opened," she says.

Edelman purchased recording equipment. Along the way, she studied history at N.C. State University and audited a class in North Carolina dialects.

She started asking around for good cooks or people with stories to tell about North Carolina foodways. Edelman contacted county extension agents and senior citizen centers for leads. One name would lead to another, and another.

There were few foods she felt she had to include -- collards and biscuits were two -- and most of the recipes and stories just came up.

"When you start talking about food, the barriers just fall away," she says.

Edelman had a memorable visit at a reunion of the descendants of Lucinda Wilson, a former slave who established the family's Yancey County homeplace in the early 1900s and eventually gave land to the county for a school. Two of Lucinda Wilson's grandchildren talked about carrying recipes in their heads and measuring with their hands instead of cups or spoons.

Edelman is especially pleased to have gotten recipes from Cherokees in the mountains, which she said was not easy to do. A student at NCSU introduced her to his great-grandmother, Lula Owl, who described making dried-apple stack pie.

Recipes for squirrel pie, School Girl Pickles and roast mullet, even how to make corn whiskey, are recorded.

And the bear roast. Jenny and Jim Vance, in their 70s, enthusiastically described how to track bear. Jim should know: He said he has killed 97 of them. Then Jenny offered cooking advice, such as to trim off all the fat from the roast portion (bear fat doesn't taste good) and don't try to make gravy from the drippings (she doesn't like the flavor). She said to put bacon on the roast to keep the meat from drying out, and a little garlic salt is good. Now you know, should you ever come across a good cut of bear.

The cooks talked about more than food. Inez Blackwell, born in 1930 in Caswell County, read a poem she wrote about her son. She also recalled hog-killing time and making souse meat.

Most of the interview subjects are over 65, and tell stories of wrenching a living from rocky hills or rolling waves. But cooking always brings memories of joyous times and feelings of abundance, even when families didn't have a lot.

Food led some of Edelman's cooks to high art. Robin Buchanan of Cary read a poem she wrote about biscuits made by her mother-in-law, Betty Buchanan. And Betty Buchanan provided instruction in making those ode-inspiring biscuits, in the confident, matter-of-fact voice of a seasoned baker.

A Pasquotank County cook offered a poem bemoaning the frequency with which collards appeared on his childhood dinner table. It ended with:

And when I get to heaven,

I hope that good St. Pete

Hasn't gone and planted collards

Up and down that golden street.

'Cause if there's collards in heaven,

There's one thing I know,

I'll catch the very first train out,

And join my friends below.

Edelman has recorded more than 100 cooks so far, but is still short on responses from a few counties (Forsyth, Guilford, Randolph, Polk, Lincoln and Gates) and about some types of food she wants to include. She'd also like to include more younger people.

"I'm not sure how I'm going to put this together, and there's no money left," Edelman says, "But I've had a wonderful time with this."

Get $150+ in coupons in every Sunday N&O. Click here for convenient home delivery.