The Best Of Southern Food

This lively, handsomely illustrated, first-of-its-kind book celebrates the food of the American South in all its glorious variety—yesterday, today, at home, on the road, in history. It brings us the story of Southern cooking; a guide for more than 200 restaurants in eleven Southern states; a compilation of more than 150 time-honored Southern foods; a wonderfully useful annotated bibliography of more than 250 Southern cookbooks; and a collection of more than 200 opinionated, funny, nostalgic, or mouth-watering short selections (from George Washington Carver on sweet potatoes to Flannery O’Connor on collard greens). Here, in sum, is the flavor and feel of what it has meant for Southerners, over the generations, to gather at the table—in a book that’s for reading, for cooking, for eating (in or out), for referring to, for browsing in, and, above all, for enjoying.

Fried chicken, rice and gravy, sweet potatoes, collard greens and spoon bread - all good old fashioned, down-home southern foods, right? Wrong. The fried chicken and collard greens are African, the rice is from Madagascar, the sweet potatoes came to Virginia from the Peruvian Andes via Spain, and the spoon bread is a marriage of Native American corn with the French soufflé technique thought up by skilled African American cooks. Food historian Rick McDaniel takes 150 of the South's best-loved and most delicious recipes and tells how to make them and the history behind them. From fried chicken to gumbo to Robert E. Lee Cake, it's a history lesson that will make your mouth water. What southerners today consider traditional southern cooking was really one of the world's first international cuisines, a mélange of European, Native American and African foods and influences brought together to form one of the world's most unique and recognizable cuisines.

Every culture has its own unique flavor profile woven into the fabric of its history and traditions. Deep in the South, food is the focal point of our memories, the centerpiece of every occasion. What began as a humble means of nourishment has evolved into a cultural art form embraced throughout the country. Born-and-bred Southern belle Devon O'Day reminisces her way through this rich collection of the region's signature dishes. From Sunday dinner to Christmas morning brunch, My Southern Food chronicles the moments of life that happen anyplace you can balance a plate on your knees. This collection isn't just a catalog of recipes; it's an album of memories you're sure to recognize. In My Southern Food, you’ll find dishes including: Cathead Cheese Biscuits Gumbo Chicken and Dumpings Sweet Potato Casserole Country Ham The recipes in My Southern Food reflect a lifetime of the places, people, and occasions that define Southern living. Devon journeys through this compilation of recipes with stories and anecdotes that enrich the experience of recreating her most treasured meals. You don't have to be a Southerner to enjoy this cuisine. The appeal of these satisfying flavors is rooted in their simplicity.

“The one food book you must read this year." —Southern Living One of Christopher Kimball’s Six Favorite Books About Food A people’s history that reveals how Southerners shaped American culinary identity and how race relations impacted Southern food culture over six revolutionary decades Like great provincial dishes around the world, potlikker is a salvage food. During the antebellum era, slave owners ate the greens from the pot and set aside the leftover potlikker broth for the enslaved, unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient rich. After slavery, potlikker sustained the working poor, both black and white. In the South of today, potlikker has taken on new meanings as chefs have reclaimed it. Potlikker is a quintessential Southern dish, and The Potlikker Papers is a people’s history of the modern South, told through its food. Beginning with the pivotal role cooks and waiters played in the civil rights movement, noted authority John T. Edge narrates the South’s fitful journey from a hive of racism to a hotbed of American immigration. He shows why working-class Southern food has become a vital driver of contemporary American cuisine. Food access was a battleground issue during the 1950s and 1960s. Ownership of culinary traditions has remained a central contention on the long march toward equality. The Potlikker Papers tracks pivotal moments in Southern history, from the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s to the rise of fast and convenience foods modeled on rural staples. Edge narrates the gentrification that gained traction in the restaurants of the 1980s and the artisanal renaissance that began to reconnect farmers and cooks in the 1990s. He reports as a newer South came into focus in the 2000s and 2010s, enriched by the arrival of immigrants from Mexico to Vietnam and many points in between. Along the way, Edge profiles extraordinary figures in Southern food, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Colonel Sanders, Mahalia Jackson, Edna Lewis, Paul Prudhomme, Craig Claiborne, and Sean Brock. Over the last three generations, wrenching changes have transformed the South. The Potlikker Papers tells the story of that dynamism—and reveals how Southern food has become a shared culinary language for the nation.

How does Southern food look from the outside? The form is caught in constantly dueling stereotypes: It's so often imagined as either the touchingly down-home feast or the heartstopping health scourge of a nation. But as any Southern transplant will tell you once they've spent time in the region, Southerners share their lives in food, with a complex mix of stories of belonging and not belonging and of traditions that form identities of many kinds. Cornbread Nation 7, edited by Francis Lam, brings together the best Southern food writing from recent years, including well-known food writers such as Sara Roahen and Brett Anderson, a couple of classic writers such as Langston Hughes, and some newcomers. The collection, divided into five sections (“Come In and Stay Awhile,” “Provisions and Providers,” “Five Ways of Looking at Southern Food,” “The South, Stepping Out,” and “Southerners Going Home”), tells the stories both of Southerners as they move through the world and of those who ended up in the South. It explores from where and from whom food comes, and it looks at what food means to culture and how it relates to home.

The fifth volume in this popular series is a feast for the eyes, spanning the food cultures of the South and celebrating food and the ways in which it forges unexpected relationships between people and places. This collection of more than 70 essays and poems provides nourishment as well as a sense of community and shared history.

Nourishment, nostalgia, Native ingredients and global influences. Southern Cultures's debut "best of" collection gets straight to the heart of the matter: food. For those of us who've debated mayonnaise brand, hushpuppy condiment, or barbecue style—including, in some quarters, whether the latter is a noun or a verb (bless your heart)—we present here a collection equal to our passions. Culled from our best food writing, 2008–2014, this special volume serves up tomatoes, turtles, molasses, Mother Corn and the Dixie Pig, bourbon, gravy, cakes, jams, jellies, pickles, and chocolate pie. Dig in! And stay tuned for more "best of" collections to come.

Edna Lewis—acclaimed author of the American classic, The Taste of Country Cooking—and Alabama-born chef Scott Peacock pool their unusual cooking talents to give us this unique cookbook filled with recipes and stories of two distinct styles of Southern cooking. Miss Lewis’s specialty is Virginia country cooking and Scott Peacock focuses on inventive and sensitive blending of new tastes with the Alabama foods he grew up on, liberally seasoned with Native American, Caribbean, and African influences. Together they have taken neglected traditional recipes unearthed in their years of research together on Southern food and worked out new versions that they have made their own. Together they share their secrets for such Southern basics as pan-fried chicken, creamy grits, and genuine Southern biscuits. Scott Peacock describes how Miss Lewis makes soup by coaxing the essence of flavor from vegetables, and he applies the same principle to his intensely flavored, scrumptious dish of Garlic Braised Shoulder Lamb Chops with Butter Beans and Tomatoes. You’ll find all these treasures and more before you even get to the superb cakes (potential “Cakewalk Winners” all), the hand-cranked ice creams, the flaky pies, and homey custards and puddings. Lewis and Peacock include twenty-two seasonal menus, from A Spring Country Breakfast for a Late Sunday Morning and A Summer Dinner of Big Flavors to An Alabama Thanksgiving and A Hearty Dinner for a Cold Winter Night, to show you how to mix and match dishes for a true Southern table. Interwoven throughout the book are warm memories of the people and the traditions that shaped these pure-tasting, genuinely American recipes. The result is a joyful coming together of two extraordinary cooks, sharing their gifts. And they invite you to join them.