The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook

Shop Notes:

When I need a solid recipe for a Southern dish, my personal copy of this cookbook is my first stop.  It's a veritable what's-what of Southern cuisine. The Southern Foodways Alliance has curated an excellent collection of recipes from notable church and community cookbooks, noted chefs, and popular Southern cookbook authors and artisanal food producers.  It's a bit of a mish-mash, but a really useful and delicious one.

From the Publisher:

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.

About the Editors:

Sara Roahen writes, edits, coaches, teaches, and otherwise dabbles in storytelling.  Her memoir, Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table, was the chosen reading for the One Book One New Orleans reading initiative in 2009, and it received the Louisiana Library Association's Louisiana Literary Award in 2010. Sara co-edited and contributed writing to The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook. Her work has additionally appeared in Saveur, Bon Appetit, Tin House, Oxford American, and Garden ; Gun magazines, and in/on a host of other magazines, newspapers, books, and web sites.

Sara Camp Milam is the SFA's managing editor. She has a B.A. in Spanish from Princeton University and an M.A. in folklore from UNC-Chapel Hill. She began volunteering for the SFA in 2009 and joined the staff full time in 2012. Before finding her way to SFA World Headquarters, Sara Camp was a middle school Spanish teacher and an associate editor at The Oxford American magazine.

John T. Edge is a writer, commentator, and, since its founding in 1999, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He has written a multitude of books on Southern food.

Release Date: April 2015

Condition: New