Southern cooking, the most interesting and complex regional cuisine in America, remains a mystery to many professional cooks and southerners. With a stellar collection of recipes, Neal reveals the background and subtleties of southern foods. He uses imaginative new ways with old standards to make the recipes more accessible, but he never resorts to shortcuts or processed ingredients. He also shows how the meeting of Native American, Western European, and African cultures has created this cuisine.

Through the Garden Gate is a collection of 144 of the popular weekly articles that Elizabeth Lawrence wrote for The Charlotte Observer from 1957 to 1971. With those columns, a delightful blend of gardening lore, horticultural expertise, and personal adventures, Lawrence inspired thousands of southern gardeners.

" A] fine contribution to the green-thumb genre.--Publishers Weekly

This delightful cookbook celebrates the glories of southern baking, with 300 recipes for the breads, biscuits, cakes, pies, cookies, and sweets that have been the pride of southern cooks for generations.

From his first chapter on cornmeal--with recipes for dumplings, hushpuppies, and four styles of spoonbread--to his delicious array of desserts--including persimmon pudding, lemon chess pie, and pecan cake with caramel icing--Bill Neal interweaves fascinating bits of culinary history with a native's knowledge of the cooking secrets of the rural South. He demystifies beaten biscuits,...