The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook

Everybody has one in their collection. You know—one of those old, spiral- or plastic-tooth-bound cookbooks sold to support a high school marching band, a church, or the local chapter of the Junior League. These recipe collections reflect, with unimpeachable authenticity, the dishes that define communities: chicken and dumplings, macaroni and cheese, chess pie. When the Southern Foodways Alliance began curating a cookbook, it was to these spiral-bound, sauce-splattered pages that they turned for their model. Including more than 170 tested recipes, this cookbook is a true reflection of southern foodways and the people, regardless of residence or birthplace, who claim this food as their own. Traditional and adapted, fancy and unapologetically plain, these recipes are powerful expressions of collective identity. There is something from—and something for—everyone. The recipes and the stories that accompany them came from academics, writers, catfish farmers, ham curers, attorneys, toqued chefs, and people who just like to cook—spiritual Southerners of myriad ethnicities, origins, and culinary skill levels. Edited by Sara Roahen and John T. Edge, written, collaboratively, by Sheri Castle, Timothy C. Davis, April McGreger, Angie Mosier, and Fred Sauceman, the book is divided into chapters that represent the region’s iconic foods: Gravy, Garden Goods, Roots, Greens, Rice, Grist, Yardbird, Pig, The Hook, The Hunt, Put Up, and Cane. Therein you’ll find recipes for pimento cheese, country ham with redeye gravy, tomato pie, oyster stew, gumbo z’herbes, and apple stack cake. You’ll learn traditional ways of preserving green beans, and you’ll come to love refried black-eyed peas. Are you hungry yet?

"This edited collection presents articles in southern food studies by a range of writers, from established scholars like Psyche Williams-Forson to emerging scholars like Rien Fertel. All are chosen for a combination of accessible writing and solid scholarship and offer stories and historical details that add to our understanding of the complexities of southern food and foodways. The editors have chosen to organize the collection by methodology in part in order to escape what reader Belasco calls "the tradition-inventing, nostalgic approach of so many books about regional foodways." They also aim to advance the field by presenting articles that represent a range of tools and methodologies from disciplines such as history, geography, social sciences, American studies, gender studies, literary theory, visual and aural studies, cultural studies and technology studies that make up the amazingly multifaceted world of academic food studies, in hopes that this structure can help further a conversation about best practices"--

Fire up your multicooker or Instant Pot® and discover why Southern cuisine “takes to the appliance like butter on a biscuit” (The Washington Post). NAMED ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Atlanta Journal-Constitution • The Washington Post • Country Living • The Post and Courier From jambalaya to deviled eggs and praline cheesecake, in Instantly Southern you’ll find 85 ways to get fresh, delicious, and soulful breakfasts, lunches, and dinners on the table with less fuss than ever. Featuring supermarket staples such as winter squash, beef chuck roast, pork shoulder, and sweet potatoes, as well as signature Southern ingredients like okra, greens, beans, and Bourbon, these dishes are easy to make and easier to love. • Breakfasts: Shrimp and Stoneground Grits; Ham and Cheese Bread Pudding; Hummingbird Coffee Cake with Pineapple Cream Cheese Glaze • Hearty mains: Holiday Ham with Ginger-Peach Glaze; Chicken and Fluffy Dumplings; Bourbon and Cola Beef Short Ribs • Soups, salads, and healthy sides: Winter Squash Soup with Apple Butter Cream; Barley, Peach, and Cherry Salad with Sweet Tea Vinaigrette; Quick Greens • Dessert: Red Velvet Cheesecake; Salted Caramel Banana Pudding; Pineapple-Upside Down Whether you're cooking for company or your family on a hectic night, there are plenty of tempting options for every meal of the day. Praise for Instantly Southern “This IP title shines a bit brighter than the rest of its ilk because the author is fun to read, and this cuisine takes to the appliance like butter on a biscuit.”—The Washington Post “If Sheri Castle gives me a kitchen tip, I take it seriously. She has completely convinced me that I can’t cook another day without my own Instant Pot.”—Vivian Howard, award winning chef, author, and host of A Chef’s Life

A gorgeous full-color celebration of North America's local food heroes and traditions. Offers profiles of farmers, artisans, chefs, and organizations that are making a difference, and shares eighty seasonal recipes that highlight the very best local foods across the country.

Southern food and food stories are bound together. This book will reflect people, regardless of where they come form, who claim Southern food as their own, whether for a lifetime or a mealtime. People feel deep affection for their local community cookbooks, especially those well-worn volumes that serve as a timestamp of a particular place and time. No other type of recipe collection is more generous, gracious, and welcoming. Before we give you a bite, we Southern cooks have to tell you about what we've made. Southern food is evocative, so our food and food stories are bound together in our communities. A memorable Southern cookbook holds good food and a good read, the equivalent of a brimming recipe box plus the scribbled notes and whispered secrets that cover the tips, advice, and stories that a generous cook shares with family members, friends, and neighbors. These recipes bring all sorts of cooks, recipes, and stories to a common table to bring readers a cookbook filled with good things to eat that have something to say.

A colorful celebration of Southern foods, Southern cooking, and the people and traditions behind them gathers the best of food writing from magazines, newspapers, books, and journals, with contributions by Rick Bragg, Molly O'Neill, Edna Lewis, Jim Ferguson, Amy Evans, Pat Conroy, Candice Dyer, and many others. Original.

In Inventing Authenticity, Carrie Helms Tippen examines the rhetorical power of storytelling in cookbooks to fortify notions of southernness. Tippen brings to the table her ongoing hunt for recipe cards and evaluates a wealth of cookbooks with titles like Y’all Come Over and Bless Your Heart and famous cookbooks such as Sean Brock’s Heritage and Edward Lee’s Smoke and Pickles. She examines her own southern history, grounding it all in a thorough understanding of the relevant literature. The result is a deft and entertaining dive into the territory of southern cuisine—“black-eyed peas and cornbread,fried chicken and fried okra, pound cake and peach cobbler,”—and a look at and beyond southern food tropes that reveals much about tradition, identity, and the yearning for authenticity. Tippen discusses the act of cooking as a way to perform—and therefore reinforce—the identity associated with a recipe, and the complexities inherent in attempts to portray the foodways of a region marked by a sometimes distasteful history. Inventing Authenticity meets this challenge head-on, delving into problems of cultural appropriation and representations of race, thorny questions about authorship, and more. The commonplace but deceptively complex southern cookbook can sustain our sense of where we come from and who we are—or who we think we are.

The work of considering, imagining, and theorizing the U.S. South in regional, national, and global contexts is an intellectual project that has been going on for some time. Scholars in history, literature, and other disciplines have developed an ad­vanced understanding of the historical, social, and cultural forces that have helped to shape the U.S. South. However, most of the debates on these subjects have taken place within specific academic disciplines, with few attempts to cross-engage. Navigating Souths broadens these exchanges by facilitating transdisciplinary conversations about southern studies scholarship. The fourteen original essays in Navigating Souths articulate questions about the significances of the South as a theoretical and literal “home” base for social science and humanities researchers. They also examine challenges faced by researchers who identify as southern studies scholars, as well as by those who live and work in the regional South, and show how researchers have responded to these challenges. In doing so, this book project seeks to reframe the field of southern studies as it is currently being practiced by social science and humanities scholars and thus reshape historical and cultural conceptualizations of the region. Contributors: Alix Chapman, Rico D. Chapman, Michele Grigsby Coffey, Kirsten A. Dellinger, Leigh Anne Duck, Gwendolyn Ferreti, Kathryn Green, Robert Greene II, John Hayes, Jeffrey T. Jackson, Anne Lewis, Katie B. McKee, Kathryn Radishofski, Emily Satterwhite, Jodi Skipper, Jon Smith, Melanie Benson Taylor, Annette Trefzer, Daniel Cross Turner, Charles Reagan Wilson