"300 recipes that celebrate the glories of Southern baking, with a generous accompaniment of historical lore"--Jacket.

This "authoritative journey through the baking and related confectionery of the South" ("The New York Times Book Review") 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.

Includes sixty recipes for side dishes, entrees, muffins, bread, and cakes which use grits, and discusses such issues as whether the word "grits" is singular or plural, and why only people in the South eat grits

Roots of a Region reveals the importance of folk traditions in shaping and expressing the American South. This overview covers the entire region and all forms of ex-pression-oral, musical, customary, and material. The author establishes how folklore pervades and reflects the region\'s economics, history (espe-cially the Civil War), race rela-tions, religion, and politics. He follows with a catalog of those folk-cultural traits-from food and crafts to music and story-that are distinctly southern. The book then explores the Native American and Old World sources of southern folk culture. Two case studies serve as examples to stu-dents and as evidence of the author\'s larger points. The first traces the origins and develop-ment of an artifact type, the clay jug; the second examines a place, Georgia, and the relationship of its folklore to the region as a whole. The author concludes by looking to the future of folklife in a region that has lost much of its agrarian base as it modernizes, a future dependent on recent immigration and appreciation of older southern traditions by a largely urban audience. Supporting these explorations are 115 illustrations-sixteen in color-and an extensive bibliography of books on southern folk culture. John A. Burrison is Regents Professor of English and director of the folklore curriculum at Georgia State University. He also serves as curator of the Goizueta Folklife Gallery at the Atlanta History Museum and of the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia at Sautee Nacoochee Center. His previous books are Brothers in Clay: The Story of Georgia Folk Pottery, Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the South, and Shaping Traditions: Folk Arts in a Changing South.

Profiling 48 classic American foods ranging from junk and fast food to main dishes to desserts, this book reveals what made these dishes iconic in American pop culture. Americans have increasingly embraced food culture, a fact proven by the rising popularity of celebrity chefs and the prominence of television shows celebrating food themes. This fascinating overview reveals the surprising story behind the foods America loves. The Story Behind the Dish: Classic American Foods is an engaging pop culture resource which helps tell the story of American food. Each chapter is devoted to one of 48 distinctive American dishes and features the story of where the food developed, what inspired its creation, and how it has evolved. The book not only covers each food as a single entry, but also analyzes the themes and events that connect them, making the text useful as both a reference and a narrative on the history of food.

A gifted chef, restaurateur, and writer working at a time when Americans were beginning to take a new interest in their culinary heritage, Bill Neal (1950-1991) helped raise Southern food to national prominence. Having rescued spattered and faded recipe cards from the Chapel Hill restaurant they founded together, Bill's former wife and business partner, Moreton Neal, has compiled a book that embodies the diversity and range of his cooking and illustrates the aesthetic that he applied to making meals. Remembering Bill Neal features more than 150 recipes--most of them never published before--from all stages of Bill's career: classic French dishes from La Residence, Southern traditional cooking from Crook's Corner, and fast and easy recipes from home. Moreton's introductory passages and headnotes introduce Bill to readers and put his recipes in the context of his career and his legacy as a chef. Part cookbook, part memoir, this volume both instructs and entertains, showing the lasting importance of Bill Neal's influence in the American regional cooking movement as well as being a muse and a mentor to a generation of Southern home and professional cooks.

From the legendary editor who helped shape modern cookbook publishing-one of the food world's most admired figures-comes this evocative and inspiring memoir. Living in Paris after World War II, Jones broke free of bland American food and reveled in everyday French culinary delights. On returning to the States she published Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The rest is publishing and gastronomic history. A new world now opened up to Jones as she discovered, with her husband Evan, the delights of American food, publishing some of the premier culinary luminaries of the twentieth century: from Julia Child, James Beard, and M.F.K. Fisher to Claudia Roden, Edna Lewis, and Lidia Bastianich. Here also are fifty of Jones's favorite recipes collected over a lifetime of cooking-each with its own story and special tips. The Tenth Muse is an absolutely charming memoir by a woman who was present at the creation of the American food revolution and played a pivotal role in shaping it.