Every town has one: a humble restaurant serving up soul-satisfying food, a place that pulls the whole community together. Maybe it's in a cinderblock shack or a clapboard house, but it's the kind of place you take for granted-until you leave town and an uncontrollable craving takes over. These are America's Classics-local eateries recognized by the James Beard Foundation as timeless institutions within their communities. This cookbook brings together eighty of their recipes so the home cook can re-create such regional favorites as St. Elmo's Crab Mac and Cheese, The Shed's Red Chile Enchiladas, Aunt Carrie's Indian Pudding, Bowens Island Frogmore Stew, Totonno's White Clam Pizza, Camp Washington's Cincinnati Chili, and Gott's Roadside Cheeseburger (with the secret sauce!). Just as good as the food are the inspiring tales behind these mom-and-pops, told in oral histories: how an immigrant grandfather turned an heirloom dish into a booming business, or how a vengeful lover's recipe for spicy fried chicken earned a cult following. Classic All-American Eats is a tribute to the local treasures and unsung heroes of true American cooking, as well as a collection of recipes for craveable classic dishes.

Everybody has one in their collection. You know-one of those old, spiral- or plastic-tooth-bound cookbooks sold to support a high school marching band, a church, or the local chapter of the Junior League. These recipe collections reflect, with unimpeachable authenticity, the dishes that define communities: chicken and dumplings, macaroni and cheese, chess pie. When the Southern Foodways Alliance began curating a cookbook, it was to these spiral-bound, sauce-splattered pages that they turned for their model. Including more than 170 tested recipes, this cookbook is a true reflection of southern foodways and the people, regardless of residence or birthplace, who claim this food as their own. Traditional and adapted, fancy and unapologetically plain, these recipes are powerful expressions of collective identity. There is something from-and something for-everyone. The recipes and the stories that accompany them came from academics, writers, catfish farmers, ham curers, attorneys, toqued chefs, and people who just like to cook-spiritual Southerners of myriad ethnicities, origins, and culinary skill levels. Edited by Sara Roahen and John T. Edge, written, collaboratively, by Sheri Castle, Timothy C. Davis, April McGreger, Angie Mosier, and Fred Sauceman, the book is divided into chapters that represent the region's iconic foods: Gravy, Garden Goods, Roots, Greens, Rice, Grist, Yardbird, Pig, The Hook, The Hunt, Put Up, and Cane. Therein you'll find recipes for pimento cheese, country ham with redeye gravy, tomato pie, oyster stew, gumbo z'herbes, and apple stack cake. You'll learn traditional ways of preserving green beans, and you'll come to love refried black-eyed peas. Are you hungry yet?

Food studies, once trendy, has settled into the public arena. In the academy, scholarship on food and literary culture constitutes a growing river within literary and cultural studies, but writing on African American food and dining remains a tributary. Recipes for Respect bridges this gap, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture as well as the contributions of Black cooks and chefs to what has been considered the mainstream. Beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing nearly to the present day, African Americans have often been stereotyped as illiterate kitchen geniuses. Rafia Zafar addresses this error, highlighting the long history of accomplished African Americans within our culinary traditions, as well as the literary and entrepreneurial strategies for civil rights and respectability woven into the written records of dining, cooking, and serving. Whether revealed in cookbooks or fiction, memoirs or hotel-keeping manuals, agricultural extension bulletins or library collections, foodways knowledge sustained Black strategies for self-reliance and dignity, the preservation of historical memory, and civil rights and social mobility. If, to follow Mary Douglas's dictum, food is a field of action?that is, a venue for social intimacy, exchange, or aggression?African American writing about foodways constitutes an underappreciated critique of the racialized social and intellectual spaces of the United States.

Food studies, once trendy, has settled into the public arena. In the academy, scholarship on food and literary culture constitutes a growing river within literary and cultural studies, but writing on African American food and dining remains a tributary. Recipes for Respect bridges this gap, illuminating the role of foodways in African American culture as well as the contributions of Black cooks and chefs to what has been considered the mainstream. Beginning in the early nineteenth century and continuing nearly to the present day, African Americans have often been stereotyped as illiterate kitchen geniuses. Rafia Zafar addresses this error, highlighting the long history of accomplished African Americans within our culinary traditions, as well as the literary and entrepreneurial strategies for civil rights and respectability woven into the written records of dining, cooking, and serving. Whether revealed in cookbooks or fiction, memoirs or hotel-keeping manuals, agricultural extension bulletins or library collections, foodways knowledge sustained Black strategies for self-reliance and dignity, the preservation of historical memory, and civil rights and social mobility. If, to follow Mary Douglas's dictum, food is a field of action?that is, a venue for social intimacy, exchange, or aggression?African American writing about foodways constitutes an underappreciated critique of the racialized social and intellectual spaces of the United States.

In Creole Italian, Justin A. Nystrom explores the influence Sicilian immigrants have had on New Orleans foodways. His culinary journey follows these immigrants from their first impressions on Louisiana food culture in the mid-1830s and along their path until the 1970s. Each chapter touches on events that involved Sicilian immigrants and the relevancy of their lives and impact on New Orleans. Sicilian immigrants cut sugarcane, sold groceries, ran truck farms, operated bars and restaurants, and manufactured pasta. Citing these cultural confluences, Nystrom posits that the significance of Sicilian influence on New Orleans foodways traditionally has been undervalued and instead should be included, along with African, French, and Spanish cuisine, in the broad definition of "creole." Creole Italian chronicles how the business of food, broadly conceived, dictated the reasoning, means, and outcomes for a large portion of the nearly forty thousand Sicilian immigrants who entered America through the port of New Orleans in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and how their actions and those of their descendants helped shape the food town we know today.

In Creole Italian, Justin A. Nystrom explores the influence Sicilian immigrants have had on New Orleans foodways. His culinary journey follows these immigrants from their first impressions on Louisiana food culture in the mid-1830s and along their path until the 1970s. Each chapter touches on events that involved Sicilian immigrants and the relevancy of their lives and impact on New Orleans. Sicilian immigrants cut sugarcane, sold groceries, ran truck farms, operated bars and restaurants, and manufactured pasta. Citing these cultural confluences, Nystrom posits that the significance of Sicilian influence on New Orleans foodways traditionally has been undervalued and instead should be included, along with African, French, and Spanish cuisine, in the broad definition of "creole." Creole Italian chronicles how the business of food, broadly conceived, dictated the reasoning, means, and outcomes for a large portion of the nearly forty thousand Sicilian immigrants who entered America through the port of New Orleans in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and how their actions and those of their descendants helped shape the food town we know today.

Yes, there is barbecue, but that's just one course of the meal. With Vinegar and Char the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrates twenty years of symposia by offering a collection of poems that are by turns as sophisticated and complex, as vivid and funny, and as buoyant and poignant as any SFA gathering. The roster of contributors includes Natasha Trethewey, Robert Morgan, Atsuro Riley, Adrienne Su, Richard Blanco, Ed Madden, Nikky Finney, Frank X Walker, Sheryl St. Germain, Molly McCully Brown, and forty-five more. These poets represent past, current, and future conversations about what it means to be southern. Throughout the anthology, region is layered with race, class, sexuality, and other shaping identities. With an introduction by Sandra Beasley, a thought-provoking foreword by W. Ralph Eubanks, and luminous original artwork by Julie Sola, this collection is an ideal gift. Meant to be savored slowly or devoured at once, these pages are a perfect way to spend the hour before supper, with a glass of iced tea?or the hour after, with a pour of bourbon?and a fitting celebration of the SFA's focus and community.

Catfish Dream centers around the experiences, family, and struggles of Ed Scott Jr. (born in 1922), a prolific farmer in the Mississippi Delta and the first ever nonwhite owner and operator of a catfish plant in the nation. Both directly and indirectly, the economic and political realities of food and subsistence affect the everyday lives of Delta farmers and the people there. Ed's own father, Edward Sr., was a former sharecropper turned landowner who was one of the first black men to grow rice in the state. Ed carries this mantle forth with his soybean and rice farming and later with his catfish operation, which fed the black community both physically and symbolically. He provides an example for economic mobility and activism in a region of the country that is one of the nation's poorest and has one of the most drastic disparities in education and opportunity, a situation especially true for the Delta's vast African American population. With Catfish Dream Julian Rankin provides a fascinating portrait of a place through his intimate biography of Scott, a hero at once so typical and so exceptional in his community.

Catfish Dream centers around the experiences, family, and struggles of Ed Scott Jr. (born in 1922), a prolific farmer in the Mississippi Delta and the first ever nonwhite owner and operator of a catfish plant in the nation. Both directly and indirectly, the economic and political realities of food and subsistence affect the everyday lives of Delta farmers and the people there. Ed's own father, Edward Sr., was a former sharecropper turned landowner who was one of the first black men to grow rice in the state. Ed carries this mantle forth with his soybean and rice farming and later with his catfish operation, which fed the black community both physically and symbolically. He provides an example for economic mobility and activism in a region of the country that is one of the nation's poorest and has one of the most drastic disparities in education and opportunity, a situation especially true for the Delta's vast African American population. With Catfish Dream Julian Rankin provides a fascinating portrait of a place through his intimate biography of Scott, a hero at once so typical and so exceptional in his community.

How does Southern food look from the outside? The form is caught in constantly dueling stereotypes: It's so often imagined as either the touchingly down-home feast or the heartstopping health scourge of a nation. But as any Southern transplant will tell you once they've spent time in the region, Southerners share their lives in food, with a complex mix of stories of belonging and not belonging and of traditions that form identities of many kinds.

"Cornbread Nation 7," edited by Francis Lam, brings together the best Southern food writing from recent years, including well-known food writers such as Sara Roahen and Brett Anderson, a couple of classic writers such as Langston Hughes, and some newcomers. The collection, divided into five sections ("Come In and Stay Awhile," "Provisions and Providers," "Five Ways of Looking at Southern Food," "The South, Stepping Out," and "Southerners Going Home"), tells the stories both of Southerners as they move through the world and of those who ended up in the South. It explores from where and from whom food comes, and it looks at what food means to culture and how it relates to home.

The sixteen essays in "The Larder" argue that the study of food does not simply help us understand more about what we eat and the foodways we embrace. The methods and strategies herein help scholars use food and foodways as lenses to examine human experience. The resulting conversations provoke a deeper understanding of our overlapping, historically situated, and evolving cultures and societies.
"The Larder" presents some of the most influential scholars in the discipline today, from established authorities such as Psyche Williams-Forson to emerging thinkers such as Rien T. Fertel, writing on subjects as varied as hunting, farming, and marketing, as well as examining restaurants, iconic dishes, and cookbooks.
Editors John T. Edge, Elizabeth Engelhardt, and Ted Ownby bring together essays that demonstrate that food studies scholarship, as practiced in the American South, sets methodological standards for the discipline. The essayists ask questions about gender, race, and ethnicity as they explore issues of identity and authenticity. And they offer new ways to think about material culture, technology, and the business of food.
"The Larder" is not driven by nostalgia. Reading such a collection of essays may not encourage food metaphors. "It's not a feast, not a gumbo, certainly not a home-cooked meal," Ted Ownby argues in his closing essay. Instead, it's a healthy step in the right direction, taken by the leading scholars in the field.

Sook's Cookbook brims with delicious, uniquely southern recipes such as green olive jambalaya, watermelon rind preserves, and poinsettia cake, as well as classic buttermilk biscuits and lemon meringue pie. Marie Rudisill first began working on Sook's Cookbook with her nephew, Truman Capote, in the late 1940s to pay tribute to her charming, eccentric aunt, Sook Faulk. After putting the project aside for many years, Rudisill developed the book's methodology on her own: using nineteenth-century plantation daybooks for inspiration, she paired recipes with profiles of family and community cooks.

In these pages, you'll meet Sook -- made famous in Capote's story, "A Christmas Memory" -- with her kitchen windowsill herb garden (complete with two pet chameleons to ward off bugs) and her penchant for cooking on her big, black woodstove year-round -- even on the hottest summer days. Recipes for tea sugar cookies and lemon-and-parsley butter tea sandwiches follow the profile of Marie's aunt Jenny, who ran the Faulk household, as well as her own renowned hat and accessory shop. Rudisill also spotlights often-overlooked cooks -- Little Bit, the official house cook, and Corrie Wolff, a housekeeper and occasional cook, whose recipes feature the Cajun and Creole flavors of Louisiana, as well as Sem, who prepared special food for parties, weddings, and funerals.

In his foreword, Gourmet contributing editor John T. Edge calls Sook's Cookbook -- first published in 1989 -- "one of the most compelling regional cookbooks of the latter half of the twentieth century." He also celebrates Marie Rudisill's character and spirit -- from her sassy appearances on the Tonight Show, where she became known as the Fruitcake Lady, to her deep appreciation of the people and the old southern ways she knew and loved in Monroeville, Alabama. Much more than a cookbook, these pages pay homage to a small town in the Deep South and the intriguing people who made it come alive.

This new collection in the Southern Foodways Alliance's popular series serves up a fifty-three-course celebration of southern foods, southern cooking, and the people and traditions behind them. Editors Dale Volberg Reed and John Shelton Reed have combed magazines, newspapers, books, and journals to bring us a ""best of"" gathering that is certain to satisfy everyone from omnivorous chowhounds to the most discerning student of regional foodways.After an opening celbration of the joys of spring in her natal Virginia by the redoubtable Edna Lewis, the Reeds organize their collection under eight sections exploring Louisiana and the Gulf Coast before and after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the food and farming of the Carolina Lowcountry, ""Sweet Things,"" southern snacks and fast foods, ""Downhome Food,"" ""Downhome Places,"" and a comparison of southern foods with those of other cultures.In his ""This Isn't the Last Dance,"" Rick Bragg recounts his experience, many years ago, of a New Orleans jazz funeral and finds hope therein that the unique spirit of New Orleanians will allow them to survive: ""I have seen these people dance, laughing, to the edge of a grave. I believe that, now, they will dance back from it."" ""My passport may be stamped Yankee,"" writes Jessica B. Harris in her ""Living North/Eating South,"" ""but there's no denying that my stomach and culinary soul and those of many others like me are pure Dixie.""In her ""Tough Enough: The Muscadine Grape,"" Simone Wilson explains that the lowly southern fruit has double the heart-healthy resveratrol of French grapes, thus offering the hope of a ""southern paradox."" The title of Candice Dyer's brief history says it all: ""Scattered, Smothered, Covered, and Chunked: Fifty Years of the Waffle House."" In a photo essay, documentarian Amy Evans shows us the world of oystering along northwest Florida's Apalachicola Bay, and for the first time in the series, recipes are given - for a roux, braised collard greens, doberge cake, and other dishes.

The sixteen essays in "The Larder" argue that the study of food does not simply help us understand more about what we eat and the foodways we embrace. The methods and strategies herein help scholars use food and foodways as lenses to examine human experience. The resulting conversations provoke a deeper understanding of our overlapping, historically situated, and evolving cultures and societies.
"The Larder" presents some of the most influential scholars in the discipline today, from established authorities such as Psyche Williams-Forson to emerging thinkers such as Rien T. Fertel, writing on subjects as varied as hunting, farming, and marketing, as well as examining restaurants, iconic dishes, and cookbooks.
Editors John T. Edge, Elizabeth Engelhardt, and Ted Ownby bring together essays that demonstrate that food studies scholarship, as practiced in the American South, sets methodological standards for the discipline. The essayists ask questions about gender, race, and ethnicity as they explore issues of identity and authenticity. And they offer new ways to think about material culture, technology, and the business of food.
"The Larder" is not driven by nostalgia. Reading such a collection of essays may not encourage food metaphors. "It's not a feast, not a gumbo, certainly not a home-cooked meal," Ted Ownby argues in his closing essay. Instead, it's a healthy step in the right direction, taken by the leading scholars in the field.