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Over the years, I’ve received valuable one-on-one cooking lessons and I’ll forever be grateful to the Southerners who showed me the light: the Virginia farm woman who taught me to bake a proper batter bread, the Cajun who demonstrated the right way to make a roux, the South Carolina plantation cook who revealed her secret fail-safe method of cooking rice. But there were many others who passed along their culinary expertise as well as their place-of-pride recipes. You’ll read about them in the pages that follow.

For this is as much culinary memoir, indeed culinary love letter, as cookbook. It is not—repeat not—“the definitive southern cookbook.” Nor was it ever intended to be.

I simply want to share the experiences—the amusing, the unique—that I’ve had in forty-something years of crisscrossing the South, specifically Alabama, the two Carolinas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia. For these eleven southern states are the ones where I’ve spent the most time.

I want to introduce you to the characters I’ve met along the way as well as to the friends I’ve made. My aim, moreover, is to pass along the South’s rich culinary history, the gossipy stories Southerners love to tell, the snippets of folklore, and not least the precious insight I’ve gained by watching Southerners cook—in the mid South and Deep South, on seashore and mountaintop.

My passion for southern cooking shows no sign of cooling, and it’s this passion that I’m eager to share along with a life’s worth of recipes and recollections.

—Jean Anderson

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

The city of the world where you can eat and drink the most and suffer the least.

—William Makepeace Thackeray, on New Orleans

How to Use This Book

First, please read this section carefully. The information given here includes basics that will assist you as you cook.

Before beginning any recipe in this book, read it—twice, if necessary—so that you know exactly what you are to do. Also check to see that you have all necessary ingredients and equipment.

Before you begin cooking, measure all recipe ingredients and do as much advance prep as possible (peeling, slicing, chunking, and so forth) so that you don’t have to pause mid-recipe.

Do not use one ingredient in place of another unless a recipe suggests substitutions.

Pan sizes and shapes are essential to a recipe’s success, so never substitute one pan for another unless alternates are specified.

Note: For baking, I recommend that you use light-colored pans (preferably aluminum). Dark pans as well as those lined with dark nonstick coatings tend to overbrown breads, cakes, cookies, and pie crusts.

If a recipe tells you to “cool” something, let it come to room temperature.

If a recipe directs you to “chill” something, refrigerate it or set it in an ice bath until uniformly cold.

Always preheat an oven for 20 minutes, a broiler for 15 minutes.

Unless specified to the contrary

Eggs are large.

Butter is old-fashioned, unsalted stick butter.

Use nothing else in the recipes in this book unless substitutes are given.

Lard is rendered hog fat, not vegetable shortening. Many southern butchers, groceries, and supermarkets routinely carry it. Elsewhere, Hispanic groceries would be the place to look. When I lived in New York, my neighborhood Food Emporium (a high-end A & P) carried the Armour brand of lard.

Cornmeal is usually stone-ground (see Sources, backmatter). If granular supermarket cornmeal is intended, recipes will specify that.

Rice may be “converted” (Uncle Ben’s) or long-grain (Carolina). Recipes will specify which one to use for best results.

Flour is all-purpose flour—a good balance of soft and hard wheats—unless a soft southern flour is called for.

Note: Always sift flour before you measure it even if the label says “presifted,” because flour compacts in transit and storage. To measure: Spoon the sifted flour lightly into a dry cup measure (these are the nested cups in 1-cup, ½-cup, 1/3-cup, and ¼-cup