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A Love Affair with Southern Cooking
Jean Anderson
Recipes and Recollections
William Morrow Cookbooks
October 2007
On Sale: October 16, 2007
464 pages
ISBN: 0060761784
EAN: 9780060761783
Hardcover
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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!
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