Cookin Southern

Ann Jackson combines all the hominess of Southern cuisine with a dose of healthful eating in recipes that are vegetarian versions of standard favorites. Included are the sumptuous vegetable and fruit dishes and baked goods that have traditionally graced Southern tables. and tucked in between are remembrances of life in the South that will take you back to a time and place where the pace is slow and friendly, close to the earth, and full of good food.

Hi, y’all! This book is my proudest achievement so far, and I just have to tell y’all why I am so excited about it. It’s a book of classic dishes, dedicated to a whole new generation of cooks—for every bride, graduate, and anyone who has a love of a great Southern meal. My family is growing and expanding all the time. We’re blessed with marriages and grandbabies, and so sharing these recipes for honest, down-home dishes feels like passing a generation’s worth of stovetop secrets on to my family, and yours. I’ve been cooking and eating Southern food my whole life, and I can tell you that every meal you make from this book will be a mouthful of our one-of-a-kind spirit and traditions. These recipes showcase the diversity and ingenuity of Southern cuisine, from Cajun to Low-Country and beyond, highlighting the deep cultural richness of our gumbos and collards, our barbecues and pies. You may remember a few beloved classics from The Lady & Sons, but nearly all of these recipes are brand-new—and I think you’ll find that they are all mouthwateringly delicious. It is, without a doubt, a true Southern cooking bible. I sincerely hope that this book will take its place in your kitchen for many years to come, as I know it will in mine. Here’s to happy cooking—and the best part, happy eating, y’all! Best dishes, Paula Deen

More than thirteen hundred individual recipes, as well as suggested menus for various occasions and holidays, are collected in a new edition of this classic cookbook, first published in 1928, that is the starting place for anyone in search of authentic dishes done in the traditional style.

“The 80 recipes are important, but really, this is a food-studies book written for those who feel some nostalgia for, or connection to, Appalachia.” —Lexington Herald-Leader Mark F. Sohn’s classic book, Mountain Country Cooking, was a James Beard Award nominee in 1997. In Appalachian Home Cooking, Sohn expands and improves upon his earlier work by using his extensive knowledge of cooking to uncover the romantic secrets of Appalachian food, both within and beyond the kitchen. Shedding new light on Appalachia’s food, history, and culture, Sohn offers over eighty classic recipes, as well as photographs, poetry, mail-order sources, information on Appalachian food festivals, a glossary of Appalachian and cooking terms, menus for holidays and seasons, and lists of the top Appalachian foods. Appalachian Home Cooking celebrates mountain food at its best. “When you read these recipes for chicken and dumplings, country ham, fried trout, crackling bread, shuck beans, cheese grits casseroles, bean patties, and sweet potato pie your mouth will begin to water whether or not you have a connection to Appalachia.” —Loyal Jones, author of Appalachian Values “Offers everything you ever wanted to know about culinary mysteries like shucky beans, pawpaws, cushaw squash, and how to season cast-iron cookware.” —Our State “Tells how mountain people have taken what they had to work with, from livestock to produce, and provides more than recipes, but the stories behind the preparing of the food . . . The reading is almost as much fun as the eating, with fewer calories.” —Modern Mountain Magazine

As African American women left the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture. Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives. As employment opportunities expanded in the twentieth century, most African American women chose to leave cooking for more lucrative and less oppressive manufacturing, clerical, or professional positions. Through letters, autobiography, and oral history, Sharpless evokes African American women's voices from slavery to the open economy, examining their lives at work and at home.

Here on display in this must-have collection is the cooking artistry, gift for teaching, and relaxed, confidence-inspiring tone known so well by Nathalie Dupree's enthusiastic nationwide audience. Many of the dishes prepared on New Southern Cooking with Nathalie Dupree (the fifty-five-part television series that has aired on PBS, the Learning Channel, and Star TV) are included, and a great many more: dishes simple or elaborate, dishes for a weekday meal or a multicourse feast, dishes such as a timeless, crumbly, melt-in-the-mouth biscuit or a tantalizing Grilled Duck with Muscadine Sauce. You'll find all the old-time flavors and textures embodied in such classic delights as black-eyed peas, fried chicken with the crustiest of coatings, country ham, and peach cobbler. Here, too, is all the new lightness and flavor combinations that mark today's innovative Southern cooking-expressed in such recipes as Acadian Peppered Shrimp (made tangy with just the right touches of basil, garlic, oregano, and cayenne), chicken breasts with stir-fried peanuts and collards, and grouper grilled over a pecan-seasoned fire. Nathalie Dupree shows us how to get that Southern aura of comfort and welcome into our meals. She draws on the many cuisines, rustic and elegant, that have profoundly influenced Southern cooking from its beginnings—including English, French, African, Spanish, and West Indian. Nathalie has provided a wonderfully wide-ranging selection of Southern recipes remarkable for their ease of preparation and perfectly tuned to the pace of our lives today. Whether you're cooking for guests or the folks at home, planning a backyard barbecue (there are twenty-two barbecue recipes alone!) or a big gala party, you'll find here an abundant supply of irresistible recipes, accompanied by charming illustrations by Karen Barbour.

The creation of the Aunt Jemima trademark from an 1889 vaudeville performance of a play called "The Emigrant" helped codify a pervasive connection between African American women and food. In Black Hunger, Doris Witt demonstrates how this connection has operated as a central structuring dynamic of twentieth-century U.S. psychic, cultural, sociopolitical, and economic life. Taking as her focus the tumultuous era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when soul food emerged as a pivotal emblem of white radical chic and black bourgeois authenticity, Witt explores how this interracial celebration of previously stigmatized foods such as chitterlings and watermelon was linked to the contemporaneous vilification of black women as slave mothers. By positioning African American women at the nexus of debates over domestic servants, black culinary history, and white female body politics, Black Hunger demonstrates why the ongoing narrative of white fascination with blackness demands increased attention to the internal dynamics of sexuality, gender, class, and religion in African American culture. Witt draws on recent work in social history and cultural studies to argue for food as an interpretive paradigm which can challenge the privileging of music in scholarship on African American culture, destabilize constrictive disciplinary boundaries in the academy, and enhance our understanding of how individual and collective identities are established.