The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook
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The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook

Title Details

Pages: 296

Illustrations: 12 figures

Trim size: 7.500in x 9.500in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 04/01/2015

ISBN: 9-780-8203-4858-2

List Price: $28.95

Subsidies and Partnerships

Published in association with Southern Foodways Alliance

Published with the generous support of Friends Fund

The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook

Local recipes from the worldly South

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  • Description
  • Reviews
  • Awards
  • Contributors

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?

Published in association with the Southern Foodways Alliance at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. A Friends Fund Publication.

It's as much Americana as cookbook, an effort to preserve a vanishing part of our culture. Either way, it's an instant classic.

Time

The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook is a tribute to standards of the Southern table as well as a showcase for the delicious handiwork of some notable contemporary chefs.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Each page herein delivers a strong sense of community; the contributions are from real people with real names; the collection is democratic, but with nary a sign of culinary chaos; and the food is just plain good. And here’s the best part, as far as I’m concerned: Regardless of whether it looks back into the past or ahead into the future, this book looks ever Southward.

—Alton Brown, from the foreword

So why are we excited about yet another Southern cookbook? By sourcing recipes from spiral-bound community cookbooks and then testing and adapting them for modern kitchens, this collection of recipes has the potential to become the standard reference on the topic. Add to that the research power of the Southern Foodways Alliance and its director John T. Edge, and this book could be unstoppable.

—Eater.com

Includes of plenty of genuinely new and genuinely Southern food to prove that it's still a living, breathing cuisine.

Nashville Scene

The folks at the S.F.A., which works to preserve the region's foodways, called on their friends—chefs, historians, civil rights activists and ham curers, to name a few—to help assemble a modern community cookbook. And what friends they have. . . . The only thing that could make this book more Southern would be a complimentary bottle of bourbon.

—Christina Muhlke, New York Times

An excellent community cookbook feels like a cherished hand-me-down. It's food history, generally reflecting a specific ethnic group or region. That's what you'll discover in The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook. Like something a proud parent places in your hands—a treasure, saying, 'This is for you, my best recipes. The ones I love the most. You'll take good care of them.' A collaborative project, the book took three years to produce, with recipes culled from Southern Foodways Alliance members. That's the secret to quality. Choose a great community of food people and food lovers, and you get great recipes.

—Miriam Rubin, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Runner-up

IACP Cookbook Awards, International Association of Culinary Professionals

Winner

Gourmand Cookbooks Awards, Gourmand magazine

Hugh Acheson

Sheri Castle

David Cecelski

Georgeanna Milam Chapman

Craig Claiborne

Nathalie Dupree

Lolis Eric Elie

Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt

Damon Fowler

Nikki Giovanni

Jessica B. Harris

Linton Hopkins

Mary Lasseter

Edward Lee

Ted Lee

Donald Link

April McGreger

Angie Mosier

Susan Puckett

Sara Roahen

Lee Smith

Robb Walsh

Virginia Willis

Joe York

Dale Abadie

Jean Anderson

Ben Averitt

Ben Barker

Karen Barker

Scott Barton

Billy Bayley

Allan Benton

Bill Best

Vishwesh Bhatt

Marcelle Bienvenu

Fritz Blank

Pauline P. Bridgforth

Sean Brock

Gayle Brooks

Eliza Brown

Walter Bundy

Richard Bunn

Ora Lee Butler

Erin Caricofe

Johnnie Carr

Kathy Cary

Ann Cashion

Margaret P. Cashion

Madge Castle

Bryan Caswell

Natalie Chanin

Leah Chase

Carol Copeland

Shirley Corriher

Diana Cottier

Mildred Council

John Coykendall

Amy Crockett

John Currence

Carol Darden

Norma Jean Darden

Sally Davenport

Nan Davis

Eula Mae Doré

Stephen Palmer Dowdney

Crescent Dragonwagon

Jason Edwards

Belinda Ellis

Rick Ellis

Corbin Evans

Eli Evans

Mary Beverly Evans

Pam Eversmeyer

John Fleer

John Folse

Martha Foose

Kenneth Ford

Sara Foster

Fred Fussell

Sara Gibbs

Jim Gossen

Flavius B. Hall

Melissa Booth Hall

Ashley Hansen

J.C. Hardaway

Chris Hastings

Thomas Head

Eddie Hernandez

Blair Hobbs

Beckett Howorth

Dan Huntley

Bret Jennings

Sonya Jones

Elizabeth Karmel

Lionel Key

Joyce King

Jimmy Koikos

Nicky Koikos

David Lasseter

Mike Lata

Phoebe Lawless

Austin Leslie

Dana Logsdon

Ronni Lundy

John Malik

Dean McCord

Rick McDaniel

Nancie McDermott

Robby Melvin

Alexander Mitchell

Debbie Moose

Gene Morris

Jennie Sue Murphree

Walter Murphree

Bill Neal

Cynthia LeJeune Nobles

Sarah O'Kelley

Louis Osteen

Mary Margaret Pack

Peter Patout

Tim Patridge

Scott Peacock

Bob Perry

Audrey Petty

Floyd Poche

Margaret Propst

Paul Prudhomme

Billy Reid

Kay Rentschler

Todd Richards

Jared Richardson

Lee Richardson

Cappy Ricks

Ann Garner Riddle

Grace Riley

Glenn Roberts

Clinton Robinson

Ray Robinson

Tom Sasser

Steven Satterfield

Jill Sauceman

Lynne Sawicki

Patty Schnatter

James Schroeder

Francine Wolfe Schwartz

Ed Scott

Jamie Shannon

Jim Shirley

Beth Shortt

LaRou Shouse

Bill Smith

Bill Smith

Ken Smith

Greg Sonnier

Susan Spicer

Martha Stamps

Kathy Starr

Robert Stehling

Frank Stitt

Chuck Subra

John Martin Taylor

Sarah Thomas

Poppy Tooker

Miguel Torres

Celeste Uzee

Vance Vaucresson

Julie Vaucresson

Ari Weinzwieg

Hal White

Liz Williams

Horace Randall Williams

Alex Young

Matthew Lee

Amy Evans

About the Author/Editor

John T. Edge (Editor)
JOHN T. EDGE is the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including the foodways volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

Sara Camp Milam (Editor)
SARA CAMP MILAM is the Southern Foodways Alliance’s managing editor. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Sara Roahen (Editor)
SARA ROAHEN is an oral historian and the author of Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table. She has written for Tin House and Food & Wine.