Cooking In The New South

From toasted Curried Pecans, to Angel Biscuits, to a blueberry tea bread from south Georgia, to spoonbread, Brunswick Stew, lots of oyster recipes, Daisy Young’s Red Beans and Rice, pound cakes, chess pie, to rum balls to make during Christmas, you get the full meal and more in these 200 recipes. It is a fast and furious taste of my native South and a good picture of where Atlanta and the South were in the early 1980s when I wrote this book.

Most popular recipes: There are so many favorites we have used over and over through the years. Angel Biscuits from the chef at the Georgia Governor’s Mansion, McTyre’s Cornbread from a great photographer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sweet Rolls from the old Herren’s Restaurant in downtown Atlanta. Proof of the Pudding’s cold Pimiento Soup, my mother’s recipe for baking a country ham, how to make Cuban Picadillo as well as Scalloped Oysters and Country Captain Chicken like they do in Savannah. And the sweets are fabulous! Chess pie, chess cake, Shaker lemon pie, sweet potato pie, and more.

Why I wrote this book: This was my first cookbook. I was the food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and I wanted to write a book that captured a little of the old South and a little of the new. So chapters are introduced with a recipe from the “past,” such as how to make biscuits, pit barbecue a whole hog, boil peanuts, fry chicken, etc. And inside the chapter are old favorites as well as fun new renditions.

Favorite cooking tip in the book: To bake the best biscuits, use a soft low-gluten flour and chill your shortening or butter before cutting it into the flour. Add only enough liquid to make the dough workable.