Southern Food
At Home, On the Road, In History
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
This lively, handsomely illustrated, first-of-its-kind book celebrates the food of the American South in all its glorious variety—yesterday, today, at home, on the road, in history. It brings us the story of Southern cooking; a guide for more than 200 restaurants in eleven Southern states; a compilation of more than 150 time-honored Southern foods; a wonderfully useful annotated bibliography of more than 250 Southern cookbooks; and a collection of more than 200 opinionated, funny, nostalgic, or mouth-watering short selections (from George Washington Carver on sweet potatoes to Flannery O’Connor on collard greens).
Here, in sum, is the flavor and feel of what it has meant for Southerners, over the generations, to gather at the table—in a book that’s for reading, for cooking, for eating (in or out), for referring to, for browsing in, and, above all, for enjoying.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Egerton (Generations, Nashville, etc.) writes here not as a food critic or professional historian but as an affectionate observer. The book commences with an informal history that suffuses the entire volume, from notes on 19th century meat packing in Nashville to the invention of the hot Brown sandwich at the Brown Hotel in Louisville in the 1930s. However, aside from a few wistful observations, such as a comment that the golden age of oysters peaked in 1850, the book celebrates the here and now of Southern food. Extensive travel and tasting produce a narrative account of more than 200 restaurants, from unique pockets of homestyle cooking to the Po Folks franchise, which has 167 restaurants in 24 states. Home cooking also is well represented with descriptions of dishes and the people who prepare them. Included are recipes for a number of traditional items such as burgoo, a hearty stew, which can be made entirely with grocery-store ingredients though "a squirrel or two would have added much in the way of both flavor and history,'' pecan bourbon cake, deviled crabs, red-eye gravy and buttermilk pie. Photos.
