Savor the South Cookbook

'Show me a recipe with pecans, and I have to try it.' Attributing her own love of this American nut to the state of her birth--Georgia is the nation's leader in growing pecans--and to the happy fact that her mother 'hardly made a cookie, candy, or pan of Sunday dressing without them,' Kathleen Purvis teaches readers how to find, store, cook, and completely enjoy this southern delicacy. Pecans includes fifty-two recipes, ranging from traditional to inventive, from uniquely southern to distinctly international, including Bourbon-Orange Pecans, Buttermilk-Pecan Chicken, Pecan Pralines, and Leche Quemada. In addition to the recipes, Purvis delights readers with the pecan's culinary history and its intimate connections with southern culture and foodways. Headnotes for the recipes offer humorous personal stories as well as preparation tips such as how to choose accompanying cheeses.

Recalling childhood visits to her grandmother's house in New Orleans, where she would feast on shrimp and okra gumbo, Dale Curry offers fifty recipes--for gumbos, jambalayas, and those little something extras known as lagniappe--that will put Louisiana taste and hospitality on your table. "Gumbo" calls to mind the diverse culinary traditions of Louisiana that, like gumbo itself, are simmered from elements of the many cultures circulating in the state. Drawing historically from French, African, Caribbean, Native American, Spanish, Italian, and other culinary sources, the Creole and Cajun cooking featured in Gumbo embraces the best of local shellfish, sausages, poultry, and game. The heart of Louisiana home cooking--and now showcased by of chefs across the South and beyond--gumbo, jambalaya, and lagniappe traditionally drew from the state's waterways and estuaries rich with crustaceans, swamps exploding with waterfowl and alligators, and forests full of game. From the land came rice and peppers, two leading ingredients in gumbo and jambalaya. Recipes include classic and traditional dishes, as well as specialties offered by star chefs Bart Bell, Leah Chase, Emeril Lagasse, Donald Link, and Tory McPhail. With Curry's easy-to-follow instructions at hand, home cooks will be ready to let the good times roll at every meal.

In this paean to the brightly colored root, April McGreger tells the multifaceted history of a fundamental southern food, praising its rich and diverse savory-to-sweet flavor profile, botanical varieties, and shockingly high nutritional value. Along with instructions for selection and storage, McGreger shares the fifty best sweet potato recipes in the world. Embracing but going well beyond the classics--from Sweet Potato Pone and Candied Sweet Potatoes to Sweet Potato Chiles Rellenos and Sweet Potato-Ginger Cremes Caramels--McGreger's creations will delight and satisfy with their deliciousness and versatility.McGreger relates a tale from a traveler in 1940s Mississippi who said he ate "sweet potatoes with wild turkeys and various other meats, had a potato pie for dessert and roasted potatoes offered to him as a side dish, drank sweet potato coffee and sweet potato home brew, had his horse fed on sweet potatoes and sweet potato vines, and when he retired he slept on a mattress stuffed with sweet potato vines and dreamed he was a sweet potato someone was digging up." The sweet potato is no less important to McGreger, the daughter and sister of Mississippi sweet potato farmers.

In Tomatoes, Miriam Rubin gives this staple of southern gardens the passionate portrait it deserves, exploring the tomato's rich history in southern culture and inspiring home cooks to fully enjoy these summer fruits in all their glorious variety. Rubin, a prominent food writer and tomato connoisseur, provides fifty vibrant recipes as well as wisdom about how to choose tomatoes and which tomato is right for which dish.Tomatoes includes recipes that celebrate the down-home, inventive, and contemporary, such as Stand-over-the-Sink Tomato Sandwiches, Spiced Green Tomato Crumb Cake, Green Tomato and Pork Tenderloin Biscuit Pie, and Tomato and Golden Raisin Chutney. Rubin also offers useful cooking tips, lively lessons on history, cultivation, and preserving, and variations for year-round enjoyment of the tomato.

John Shelton Reed's Barbecue celebrates a southern culinary tradition forged in coals and smoke. Since colonial times southerners have held barbecues to mark homecomings, reunions, and political campaigns; today barbecue signifies celebration as much as ever. In a lively and amusing style, Reed traces the history of southern barbecue from its roots in the sixteenth-century Caribbean, showing how this technique of cooking meat established itself in the coastal South and spread inland from there. He discusses how choices of meat, sauce, and cooking methods came to vary from one place to another, reflecting local environments, farming practices, and history.Reed hopes to preserve the South's barbecue traditions by providing the home cook with fifty-one recipes for many classic varieties of barbecue and for the side dishes, breads, and desserts that usually go with it. Featured meats range from Pan-Southern Pork Shoulder to Barbecued Chicken Two Ways to West Texas Beef Ribs, while rubs and sauces include Memphis Pork Rub, Piedmont Dip, and Lone Star Sauce and Mop. Cornbread, hushpuppies, and slaw are featured side dishes, and Dori's Peach Cobbler and Pig-Pickin' Cake provide a sweet finish. This book will put southerners in touch with their heritage and let those who aren't southerners pretend that they are.

Greens--collard, turnip, mustard, and more--are a defining staple of southern food culture. Seemingly always a part of the southern plate, these cruciferous vegetables have been crucial in the nourishing of generations of southerners. Having already been celebrated in operatic terms--composer Price Walden's "Leaves of Green" includes this lyrical note: "From age to age the South has hollered / The praises of the toothsome collard--greens now get their leafy culinary due in Thomas Head's Savor the South® cookbook. Head provides a fascinating culinary and natural history of greens in the South, as well as an overview of the many varieties of edible greens that are popular in the region. Including practical information about cultivation, selection, and preparation, Head also shows how greens are embraced around the world for their taste and healthfulness. The fifty-three recipes run from classic southern "potlikker" styles to new southern and global favorites. From Basic Southern Greens to Turnip Green Tarts to Greens Punjabi-Style, cooks will find plenty of inspiration to go green.

While the hindquarters of swine have been preserved in salt the world over for thousands of years, there are only a few places on earth where ham is as celebrated or integral to the cuisine as it is in the American South. To begin to understand the place that this iconic food holds in the hearts of southerners, Damon Lee Fowler writes, one has only to step into the historic smokehouse of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and take a deep breath. More than a century after the last hams were hung to smoke in that chamber, the aroma of salt, smoke, and air-dried pork still permeates the rough masonry walls and clay floor, filling the air with its earthy perfume. Even after centuries of culinary transformations throughout the South, that fragrance lingers in kitchens throughout the region. Ham's 55 recipes bring home the love in just about every way-brine- or dry-cured, smoked or not, boiled, baked, glazed, honey-baked and spiral cut, thin-sliced and piled into biscuits and sandwiches, fried up with eggs, with grits, with redeye gravy, added for savor to soups, casseroles, poultry, seafood, and, yes, the vegetable pot. Fowler also includes recipes inspired by Chinese, French, Italian, and Spanish dishes, and provides a guide to basic terminology and cooking methods.

Robust and delicious, beans and field peas have graced the tables of southerners for generations, making daily appearances on vegetable plates, sideboards, and lunch counters throughout the region. Indeed, all over the world, people rich, poor, or in between rely on legumes, the comforting "culinary equalizer," as Sandra A. Gutierrez succinctly puts it. Her collection of fifty-one recipes shines a fresh light on this sustaining and infinitely varied staple of ordinary life, featuring classic southern, contemporary, and international dishes. Gutierrez, who delights with culinary history, cultural nuance, and entertaining stories, observes that what has long been a way of life for so many is now trendy. As the farm-to-fork movement has taken off, food lovers are revisiting the heirloom varieties of beans and peas, which are becoming the nutrition-packed darlings of regional farmers, chefs, and home cooks. Celebrating all manner of southern beans and field peas--and explaining the difference between the two--Gutierrez showcases their goodness in dishes as simple as Red Beans and Rice, as contemporary as Mean Bean Burgers with Chipotle Mayo, and as globally influenced as Butter Bean Risotto.

Bridgette A. Lacy offers an ode to a meal that, notably in the Sabbath-minding South, is more than a meal. Sunday dinner, Lacy observes, is "a state of mind. It is about taking the time to be with the people who matter to you." Describing her own childhood Sunday dinners, in which her beloved, culinary-minded grandfather played an indelible role, Lacy explores and celebrates the rhythms of Sunday food traditions. But Lacy knows that, today, many who grew up eating Sunday dinner surrounded by kin now dine alone in front of the television. Her Sunday Dinner provides remedy and delicious inspiration any day of the week. Sure to reward those gathered around the table, Lacy's fifty-one recipes range from classic southern favorites, including Sunday Yeast Rolls, Grandma's Fried Chicken, and Papa's Nilla Wafer Brown Pound Cake, to contemporary, lighter twists such as Roasted Vegetable Medley and Summer Fruit Salad. Lacy's tips for styling meals with an eye to color, texture, and a simple beauty embody her own Sunday dinner recollection that "anything you needed was already on the table."

Did you know that bourbon must be made in America and aged for at least two years in new American oak barrels that are charred on the inside? In this spirited little cookbook, Kathleen Purvis explores the history, mythology, and culinary star power of this quintessential southern liquor. On the scene in Kentucky, home to most bourbon makers, she reports on the science and love behind the liquor's long, careful production. Featuring both classic and cutting-edge cocktails, the cookbook ranges well beyond beverages to present bourbon as a distinct ingredient in appetizers, entrees, side dishes, and desserts.From Classic Mint Julep to Bourbon-Ginger Grilled Pork Tenderloin to Pecan Bourbon Balls to Bourbon-Chicken Liver Pate, the 54 recipes in Bourbon are punctuated by Purvis's wicked sense of humor. Did you know that even the taxman takes a cut from the "angel's share" that evaporates from bourbon barrels?