It's Sanders's personal history that also helps explain what country cooking really is. We depended upon the land for survival. When you are doing that sort of thing, you have to look at the streams, fields, and forest around you, and just reason - this is how we are going to survive the winter. It isn't easy to define country cooking, since it varies from region to region. Sanders emphasizes the importance of vegetables - not only those grown in the garden, but those in the wild.
Country women tend to pull in anything and everything, almost, and end up cooking it.
We scour the fields in the spring for those special greens. We call them 'creasie greens' - they are really watercress or field cress and pokeweed. Country cooking is also associated with family traditions handed down from one generation to the next. Country seldom calls for expensive or rare ingredients, and there's a lot of baking and frying. You can't broil, Sanders points out, on a wood-burning stove.