FoodReference.com (since 1999)
BOOK REVIEW SECTION

 

Cookbooks, Biographies & Memoirs; Food References, History & Science; Humor, etc.

 You are here > Home

COOKBOOKSA: '5 A Day' to 'At Our Table' >  A Love Affair with Southern Cooking

 

CULINARY SCHOOLS
& COOKING CLASSES

From Amateur & Basic Cooking Classes to Professional Chef Training & Degrees -  Associates, Bachelors & Masters - More than 1,000 schools & classes listed for all 50 States, Online and Worldwide

 

FREE Magazines
and other Publications

An extensive selection of free magazines and other publications

A Love Affair with Southern Cooking: Recipes and Recollections

by Jean Anderson

Book Description
More than a cookbook, this is the story of how a little girl, born in the South of Yankee parents, fell in love with southern cooking at the age of five. And a bite of brown sugar pie was all it took.

"I shamelessly wangled supper invitations from my playmates," Anderson admits. "But I was on a voyage of discovery, and back then iron-skillet corn bread seemed more exotic than my mom's Boston brown bread and yellow squash pudding more appealing than mashed parsnips."

After college up north, Anderson worked in rural North Carolina as an assistant home demonstration agent, scarfing good country cooking seven days a week: crispy "battered" chicken, salt-rising bread, wild persimmon pudding, Jerusalem artichoke pickles, Japanese fruitcake. Later, as a New York City magazine editor, then a freelancer, Anderson covered the South, interviewing cooks and chefs, sampling local specialties, and scribbling notebooks full of recipes.

Now, at long last, Anderson shares her lifelong exploration of the South's culinary heritage and not only introduces the characters she met en route but also those men and women who helped shape America's most distinctive regional cuisine—people like Thomas Jefferson, Mary Randolph, George Washington Carver, Eugenia Duke, and Colonel Harlan Sanders.

Anderson gives us the backstories on such beloved Southern brands as Pepsi-Cola, Jack Daniel's, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, MoonPies, Maxwell House coffee, White Lily flour, and Tabasco sauce. She builds a time line of important southern food firsts—from Ponce de León's reconnaissance in the "Island of Florida" (1513) to the reactivation of George Washington's still at Mount Vernon (2007). For those who don't know a Chincoteague from a chinquapin, she adds a glossary of southern food terms and in a handy address book lists the best sources for stone-ground grits, country ham, sweet sorghum, boiled peanuts, and other hard-to-find southern foods.

Recipes? There are two hundred classic and contemporary, plain and fancy, familiar and unfamiliar, many appearing here for the first time. Each recipe carries a headnote—to introduce the cook whence it came, occasionally to share snippets of lore or back-stairs gossip, and often to explain such colorful recipe names as Pine Bark Stew, Chicken Bog, and Surry County Sonker.

Add them all up and what have you got? One lip-smackin' southern feast!

About the Author
The winner of five best cookbook awards (Tastemaker, James Beard, IACP) and a member of the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame, Jean Anderson writes for Bon AppÉtit, Food & Wine, Cottage Living, Gourmet, More, and other national publications. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

 

 

  Home   |   About & Contact   |   Food History Articles   |   Interviews   |   Cooking Contests   |   Other Links  

Please feel free to link to any pages of FoodReference.com from your website.
For permission to use any of this content please E-mail: james@foodreference.com
All contents are copyright © 1990 - 2018 James T. Ehler and www.FoodReference.com unless otherwise noted.
All rights reserved.
You may copy and use portions of this website for non-commercial, personal use only.
Any other use of these materials without prior written authorization is not very nice and violates the copyright.
Please take the time to request permission.


 

FoodReference.com Logo

 

 

Popular Pages