Frank Carlson Library

Most southern cooks will agree with Debbie Moose when she writes, "Like a full moon on a warm southern night, buttermilk makes something special happen." Buttermilk explores the rich possibilities of this beloved ingredient and offers remarkably wide-ranging recipes for its use in cooking and baking--and drinking, including The Vanderbilt Fugitive, a buttermilk-based cocktail. Buttermilk includes fifty recipes--most of which are uniquely southern,...

For fifteen years, food writer Belinda Ellis traveled around the country for the White Lily® flour company, teaching people to make biscuits and listening to their stories. "I learned that deep in the soul of a biscuit, there's more than the flour, fat, and milk. A hot biscuit embodies a memory of place and family," she writes. Ellis's heartfelt tribute to the biscuit celebrates the many possible flavors and uses for this classic southern bread....

Whether you swear by peaches from Georgia or from South Carolina, there's no doubt that the fruit is sacred to southerners. From the moment the first mouthwatering Elberta variety was grafted in the 1870s, the peach has been an icon of summertime and a powerful symbol of the South's bounty. Peaches showcases the sweet richness of this signature fruit. Native Atlantan and award-winning food writer Kelly Alexander explores the fruit's history, offers...

Passionate okra lovers crave this bright green, heat-loving vegetable, whether fried, grilled, steamed, roasted, boiled, broiled, pickled, raw, whole, sliced, or julienned. With Okra, Virginia Willis provides "the key that unlocks the door of okra desire" to okra addicts and newcomers to the pod alike.Topping eight feet, with gorgeous butter-yellow flowers that ripen into the plant's signature seed-filled pods, okra has a long association with foodways...

Each little cookbook in our SAVOR THE SOUTH® collection is a big celebration of a beloved food or tradition of the American South. From buttermilk to bourbon, pecans to peaches, one by one SAVOR THE SOUTH® cookbooks will stock a kitchen shelf with the flavors and culinary wisdom of this popular American regional cuisine. Written by well-known cooks and food lovers, the books brim with personality, the informative and often surprising culinary and...

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...

While many fish, from bream and crappie to bass, trout, and shad, are popular in the South, none of them has settled as thoroughly in southern culture as the humble, bewhiskered, bottom-dwelling catfish. For Memphis natives Paul and Angela Knipple, enjoying "that steamy sweet white meat encased in golden crisp cornmeal was just a part of our childhoods." In this Savor the South® cookbook, the Knipples share their family memories of catching and eating...

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....

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...

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...