Southern Food

“Hey, good lookin’—what ya got cookin’?” This is what Dolly Parton sings to her sister Rachel Parton George whenever she walks into her kitchen. It’s what you do when a love for good music and good food runs in the family. In Good Lookin’ Cookin’ Dolly and Rachel share tips for hosting events all year long, including twelve multi-course menus of cherished recipes for New Year’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and more.

The Potlikker Papers tells the story of food and politics in the South over the last half century. Beginning with the pivotal role of cooks in the civil rights movement, noted authority John T. Edge narrates the South's journey from racist backwater to a hotbed of American immigration. In so doing, he traces how the food of the poorest Southerners has become the signature trend of modern American haute cuisine. This is a people's history of the modern South told through the lens of food.

Ask any self-respecting Louisianan who makes the best gumbo and the answer is universal: "Momma." The product of a melting pot of culinary influences, gumbo, in fact, reflects the diversity of the people who cooked it up: French aristocrats, West Africans in bondage, Cajun refugees, German settlers, Native Americans-all had a hand in the pot. What is it about gumbo that continues to delight and nourish so many? And what explains its spread around the world? A seasoned journalist, Ken Wells sleuths out the answers.

The kitchen is often the heart of South Asian homes. Muslim South Asian kitchens, in particular, are the engines of an entire culture. The alchemy that takes place within them affects nations and economies, politics and history, and of course human relationships. There is proof of it in Desi Delicacies, Claire Chambers’ anthology of essays, stories and recipes supplied by some of the region’s most well-loved writers, historians and chefs.