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 souffl 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 mlange of European, Native American and African foods and influences brought together to form one of the world's most unique and recognizable cuisines.

The South has always been celebrated for its food--a delectable blend of ingredients and cooking techniques connected to the region's rich soil and bountiful waters. And oftentimes what makes a recipe Southern is as much a state of mind as it is a matter of geography--Southerners simply decide a particular food is Southern, and that's that. From the earliest days of settlement, when colonists struggled to survive on a diet of dogs, cats, rats and poisonous snakes, to an era defined by sumptuous dining that blended European, Native American and African cuisines, Southern food truly stems from a unique tradition. Respected Southern food historian and chef Rick McDaniel explores the history of over 150 recipes, from Maryland stuffed ham to South Carolina chicken bog to New Orleans shrimp Creole, without forgetting the meal's crowning glory: dessert.

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.

When the original Encyclopedia of Southern Culture was published in 1989, the topic of foodways was relatively new as a field of scholarly inquiry. Food has always been central to southern culture, but the past twenty years have brought an explosion in interest in foodways, particularly in the South. This volume marks the first encyclopedia of the food culture of the American South, surveying the vast diversity of foodways within the region and the collective qualities that make them distinctively southern. Articles in this volume explore the richness of southern foodways, examining not only what southerners eat but also why they eat it. The volume contains 149 articles, almost all of them new to this edition of the Encyclopedia. Longer essays address the historical development of southern cuisine and ethnic contributions to the region's foodways. Topical essays explore iconic southern foods such as MoonPies and fried catfish, prominent restaurants and personalities, and the food cultures of subregions and individual cities. The volume is destined to earn a spot on kitchen shelves as well as in libraries.

Beloved TV chef (ABC’s Emmy Award-winning The Chew and fan favorite on Bravo’s Top Chef), Carla Hall takes us back to her own Nashville roots to offer a fresh, lip-smackin’ look at America’s favorite comfort cuisine. In Carla Hall’s Soul Food, the beloved chef and television celebrity takes us back to her own Nashville roots to offer a fresh, lip-smackin’ look at America’s favorite comfort cuisine and traces soul food’s history from Africa and the Caribbean to the American South. Carla shows us that soul food is more than barbecue and mac and cheese. Traditionally a plant-based cuisine, everyday soul food is full of veggie goodness that’s just as delicious as cornbread and fried chicken. From Black-Eyed Pea Salad with Hot Sauce Vinaigrette to Tomato Pie with Garlic Bread Crust, the recipes in Carla Hall’s Soul Food deliver her distinctive Southern flavors using farm-fresh ingredients. The results are light, healthy, seasonal dishes with big, satisfying tastes—the mouthwatering soul food everyone will want a taste of. Recipes include: Cracked Shrimp with Comeback Sauce Ghanaian Peanut Beef Stew with Onions and Celery Caribbean Smothered Chicken with Coconut, Lime, and Chiles Roasted Cauliflower with Raisins and Lemon-Pepper Millet Field Peas with Country Ham Chunky Tomato Soup with Roasted Okra Rounds Sweet Potato Pudding with Clementines Poured Caramel Cake With Carla Hall’s Soul Food, you can indulge in rich celebration foods, such as deviled eggs, buttermilk biscuits, Carla’s famous take on Nashville hot fried chicken, and a decadent coconut cream layer cake. Featuring 145 original recipes, 120 color photographs, and a whole lotta love, Carla Hall’s Soul Food is a wonderful blend of the modern and the traditional—honoring soul food’s heritage and personalizing it with Carla’s signature fresh style. The result is an irresistible and open-hearted collection of recipes and stories that share love and joy, identity, and memory.

100 places to eat in the South before you die (and the recipes that made them famous.).

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.