Food and drinks are some of the easiest ways — and the most fun— to vicariously experience another culture. When you add a great book to the mix, you've got the makings of a perfect evening. In Food+Fiction, we recommend a delicious read and a related recipe so you can try the taste of different destinations in your own kitchen.

This post is part of our Food+Fiction series.

The Ballad Novels by Sharyn McCrumb are all set in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. Taking their titles from country ballads, they stitch together local legend, facets of rural life, and richly imagined characters into irresistibly atmospheric Southern Gothic tales.

Although the character Nora Bonesteel plays only a supporting role in a handful of the stories, she looms large in the imagination. Inspired by a real-life friend of the author, Nora is a keeper of legends, a repository for mountain history and long-told stories that must not be forgotten.

Her body is small, but she wields an intuition as lethal as a finely-honed axe. Her gift of the sight sets her apart, and she lives alone with nature as her primary — and most beloved — companion. She weaves; she knits. She reads the poetic novels of Thomas Wolfe and watches soap operas, pleasing only herself and happy to do so.

But should someone in need come calling, she takes care of them with the same diligence she tends to herself.

In She Walks These Hills, Nora watches over the troubled ghost of Katie, a young girl who will never age, doomed to walk the hills in sorrow. Later, when weary stragglers appear at her mountaintop home, Nora beckons them in, warming them by her fire and nourishing them with homemade food.

If an occasion calls for a celebration — or a sad story needs to be told — Nora might very well pass around a bowl of cool, creamy banana pudding to sweeten the conversation or lift a heavy heart.

After all, banana pudding is a must-have at potlucks, weddings, funerals, and cookouts from Alabama to West Virginia, in flatlands and mountains alike. Delightfully cold from the fridge on a hot day, it’s been a staple in kitchens of the South since the late 1800s when steamships brought bananas across the sea to southern ports.

Then in 1921, Ms. Laura Kerley of Bloomington, Illinois, created a recipe that added crispy Nabisco Nilla Wafer to that tender vanilla-infused custard. By the 1940s, Nabisco had institutionalized the original recipe on its yellow-and-red box — and it still appears there today.

No one would fault you for taking the traditional route; after all, that recipe has been feeding people through life’s milestones for more than a century. But if you want what cookbook author Ronni Lundy calls a ‘hypnotizingly good’ version of banana pudding, we encourage you to try this recipe from The Shack in Staunton, Virginia.

The Shack’s Sweet and Savory Banana Pudding (adapted from Victuals by Ronni Lundy)

Serves 8

The woman had been running through the woods a long time. Blood crusted in the briar-cut on her cheek. Her matted hair, a thicket of dry leaves and tangles, hung about a gaunt face, lined with weariness and hunger. A shapeless, dirt-streaked dress that had once been blue gaped over bony wrists and sagged empty at the collarbone. She might have been twenty, but her eyes were old. She was following the deer track that hugged the ridge above the river… Nora Bonesteel stood under an apple tree at the edge of her meadow, watching the woman pass by… For more than seventy years — when the air was crisp and the light was slanted and the birds were still — Nora Bonesteel had caught glimpses of the young woman following the deer track across Ashe Mountain. — Sharyn McCrumb

This haunting mystery (452 pages) was published in August of 2015 by Scribners. The book takes you to the Tennessee mountains. Melissa read She Walks These Hills and loved it; it wouldn't be on our site if she didn't recommend it.

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Top image courtesy of Maria Evseyeva/Shutterstock.