In Tomatoes, Miriam Rubin gives this staple of southern gardens the passionate portrait it deserves, exploring the tomato's rich history in southern culture and inspiring home cooks to fully enjoy these summer fruits in all their glorious variety. Rubin, a prominent food writer and tomato connoisseur, provides fifty vibrant recipes as well as wisdom about how to choose tomatoes and which tomato is right for which dish. Tomatoes includes recipes that celebrate the down-home, inventive, and contemporary, such as Stand-over-the-Sink Tomato Sandwiches, Spiced Green Tomato Crumb Cake, Green...

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, with some decidedly cosmopolitan additions--from Fiery Fried Chicken to Lavender Ice Cream to Mango-Spice Lassi. For each recipe, Moose...

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 advice for selecting, storing, and cooking, and reflects on the place of peaches in southern identity. Peaches includes forty-five recipes...

Debbie Moose's Southern Holidays is a cook's celebration of the richly diverse holiday traditions of today's South. Covering big traditional holidays such as Christmas and Mardi Gras, this must-have addition to the Savor the South® cookbook collection also branches out into regional and cultural holidays that honor newer southern traditions, including recipes from real cooks hailing from a range of ethnic traditions and histories. The cooks' stories accompanying the recipes show how holiday foods not only hold cherished personal family memories but also often have roots in a common past that...

Sara Foster takes the expression "easy as pie" seriously. New and experienced bakers alike will thrill to Foster's encouraging approach to tossing together the most delicious made-from-scratch pies. A southern kitchen is unimaginable without pie, says Foster, who grew up on a farm in Tennessee, where many a meal ended with a bubbling pie or cobbler straight from the oven. "There were many pie makers in my family, and no one ever needed a recipe—they just mixed, rolled out pastry, and baked to perfection," she writes. Surrounded from an early age by her pie-baking mother, grandmothers,...

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 who grew up eating Sunday dinner surrounded by kin now dine alone in front of the television. Her Sunday Dinner provides remedy and delicious...

From the earliest days of European settlement in the South, as in many rural economies around the globe, cured pork became a main source of sustenance, and the cheaper, lower-on-the-hog cuts--notably, bacon--became some of the most important traditional southern foodstuffs. In this cookbook, Fred Thompson captures a humble ingredient's regional culinary history and outsized contributions to the table. Delicious, of course, straight out of the skillet, bacon is also special in its ability to lend a unique savory smokiness to an enormous range of other foods. Today, for regular eaters and...

Robust and delicious, beans and field peas have graced the tables of southerners for generations, making daily appearances on vegetable plates, sideboards, and lunch counters throughout the region. Indeed, all over the world, people rich, poor, or in between rely on legumes, the comforting "culinary equalizer," as Sandra A. Gutierrez succinctly puts it. Her collection of fifty-one recipes shines a fresh light on this sustaining and infinitely varied staple of ordinary life, featuring classic southern, contemporary, and international dishes. Gutierrez, who delights with culinary history,...

Fruit collects a dozen of the South's bountiful locally sourced fruits in a cook's basket of fifty-four luscious dishes, savory and sweet. Demand for these edible jewels is growing among those keen to feast on the South's natural pleasures, whether gathered in the wild or cultivated with care. Indigenous fruits here include blackberries, mayhaws, muscadine and scuppernong grapes, pawpaws, persimmons, and strawberries. From old-school Grape Hull Pie to Mayhaw Jelly–Glazed Shrimp, McDermott's recipes for these less common fruits are of remarkable interest--and incredibly tasty. The non-native...

While the hindquarters of swine have been preserved in salt the world over for thousands of years, there are only a few places on earth where ham is as celebrated or integral to the cuisine as it is in the American South. To begin to understand the place that this iconic food holds in the hearts of southerners, Damon Lee Fowler writes, one has only to step into the historic smokehouse of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and take a deep breath. More than a century after the last hams were hung to smoke in that chamber, the aroma of salt, smoke, and air-dried pork still permeates the rough masonry...