“Every family has its own way of doing ambrosia,” says Shelley Cooper, chef at Dancing Bear Appalachian Bistro in rural Townsend, Tennessee, just outside Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The traditional dish is a throwback to a time when tropical ingredients were exotic luxuries. “I can remember my maternal grandmother in the Mississippi Delta, she would do ambrosia with fresh fruit and whipped cream for special occasions,” Cooper says. “My North Carolina mountain family would go to church on Sunday, then have ambrosia with potluck lunch. It was the fruit cocktail and marshmallow stuff.” Cooper, who grew up in Memphis, spent her formative career years cooking Southern food at restaurants in places from Alaska to New Zealand, until coming home to Tennessee in 2013. (“It was a spiritual calling,” she says.) As she built Dancing Bear’s menu, she wanted to revisit that family favorite in a fresh way. The greens, goat cheese, and brown butter dressing always stay the same, but the fruit changes with the season. In early summer, Cooper uses berries she gathers on the property—unless one of the lodge’s namesakes is already foraging for them. “You do have to be careful,” she says. “But if the bears are out, there’s always somebody showing up in a pickup who wants to sell me something.”
