This cookbook is dedicated to the truth that southerners are just as skilled and generous with the snack as they are with their bounteous, overflowing meals. In seventy-seven recipes that range from classic to contemporary, Perre Coleman Magness embraces the southern approach to snacking, including all the small bites you'll need for any event, whether a football game, a party, or, if things are looking down, a funeral. Many of the recipes are inspired by southern community cookbooks, home cooks, and chefs who put new twists on southern flavors. Highlighting local ingredients and traditional techniques, these snacks—from Fried Dill Pickles with Delta Comeback Sauce to Louisiana's Natchitoches Meat Pies and Charleston's Benne Wafers—shine a light on the diversity of regionally distinct southern cuisine. The contemporary recipes work ingeniously with familiar southern ingredients, from Field Pea Hummus and Country Ham Pate to Smoked Catfish Spread and Sweet Tea Pecans. The recipes are enriched with delightful stories and lore, along with thirty-six lush color photographs. Getting together with friends and family? You will never arrive empty-handed again.

“Meat pies, po’babies and other Southern nibbles will ‘delightfully extend’ cocktail hour . . . You could party all year with this little book.” —The Dallas Morning News Southerners adore their appetizers, and this collection of sixty recipes—served up with a healthy dose of Southern hospitality—shows why. Smoked pecans on the sideboard, cheese straws on the coffee table, an array of hot dips on the dining table, and pickled shrimp on the porch are just some of the myriad dishes found in this volume that prove food is the life of the party. Tips on creating the ideal party flow, being a gracious host, arranging flowers, sending out invitations, and planning the perfect menu ensure any event will go off without a hitch. Both a lovely hostess gift and a party-planning idea book, Southern Appetizers is all anyone needs for a successful gathering with Southern style. “A collection of 60 crowd-pleasing recipes for laidback entertaining, along with seasoned advice for acting as a gracious host and pulling off a party to remember . . . From ‘Pick-Me-Ups’ like handheld snacks, dips, and spreads to heartier starters for sit-down dinners, Denise presents an assemblage of fine-tuned recipes that spans traditional favorites and innovative combinations of familiar flavors . . . [a] scrumptious compilation.” —Southern Lady “I found it easy to follow, with accessible recipes and with great photos. Many of the dishes make me think of great Sunday brunches or get-togethers in the South.” —Life’s a Tomato

This definitive guide to Southern cooking methods and techniques by the creators of the PBS show New Southern Cooking features more than 600 recipes. In Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking, Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart present the most comprehensive book on Southern cuisine in nearly a century. Based on years of research, Dupree and Graubart embrace the great Southern cookbooks and recipes of the past, enhancing them with the foods and conveniences of today. With more than 600 recipes and hundreds of step-by-step photographs, Dupree and Graubart make it easy to learn the techniques for creating the South’s fabulous cuisine. From basics such as cleaning vegetables and scrubbing a country ham, to show-off skills like making a soufflé and turning out the perfect biscuit—all are explained and pictured with clarity and plenty of stories that entertain.

Southerners adore their appetizers, and this collection of 60 recipes—served up with a healthy dose of Southern hospitality—shows why. Smoked pecans on the sideboard, cheese straws on the coffee table, an array of hot dips on the dining table, and pickled shrimp on the porch are just some of the myriad dishes found in this volume that prove food is the life of the party. Tips on creating the ideal party flow, being a gracious host, arranging flowers, sending out invitations, and planning the perfect menu ensure any event will go off without a hitch. Both a lovely hostess gift and a party-planning idea book, Southern Appetizers is all anyone needs for a successful gathering with Southern style.

A modern-day Southern cookbook that celebrates the region's growing diversity, from chef and restaurateur Rob Newton. "There's no genre of American cuisine as storied as Southern," says Rob Newton. In his debut cookbook, Newton brings to life the regional distinctions and new influences that make up the changing face of Southern cuisine--a category of cooking as cutting-edge as any other in the world. As Southern regions' demographics shift and food cultures bump up against one another, Chef Newton reveals just how diverse Southern cuisine really is. As Newton explains, the pork and beans he grew up eating in the mountains of the Ozarks is very different from the shellfish-heavy food of the Lowcountry or the Cajun-influenced fare along the Gulf Coast. And though often overlooked, historically underrecognized populations have constantly reimagined what the Southern table looks like with their culinary contributions: Enslaved African cooks perfected fried chicken, Middle Eastern communities helped introduce spices such as sumac to the Mississippi Delta, and Korean and Mexican immigrants continue to reinvent the grilled meats and pickled vegetables that Southerners know and love. In Seeking the South, Newton brings his unique perspective to show readers there's much more to the food below the Mason-Dixon Line than meets the eye. Crisscrossing the South (the Upper and Deep South, Gulf Coast, Coastal Plains and Piedmont, and Lowcountry and Southeast Coast), Newton shares more than 125 recipes as old and familiar as Pork Hocks with Hominy, and as current as Okra with Sichuan Peppercorn and Black-Eyed Pea Falafel. To Newton, Southern cuisine delights because it is delicious and, above all, endlessly dynamic. In this cookbook, he brings this exciting evolution of flavors to your table.

This lively, handsomely illustrated, first-of-its-kind book celebrates the food of the American South in all its glorious variety—yesterday, today, at home, on the road, in history. It brings us the story of Southern cooking; a guide for more than 200 restaurants in eleven Southern states; a compilation of more than 150 time-honored Southern foods; a wonderfully useful annotated bibliography of more than 250 Southern cookbooks; and a collection of more than 200 opinionated, funny, nostalgic, or mouth-watering short selections (from George Washington Carver on sweet potatoes to Flannery O’Connor on collard greens). Here, in sum, is the flavor and feel of what it has meant for Southerners, over the generations, to gather at the table—in a book that’s for reading, for cooking, for eating (in or out), for referring to, for browsing in, and, above all, for enjoying.

With empathy, grace, humor, and piercing insight, the author of gods in Alabama pens a powerful, emotionally resonant novel of the South that confronts the truth about privilege, family, and the distinctions between perception and reality---the stories we tell ourselves about our origins and who we really are. Superheroes have always been Leia Birch Briggs’ weakness. One tequila-soaked night at a comics convention, the usually level-headed graphic novelist is swept off her barstool by a handsome and anonymous Batman. It turns out the caped crusader has left her with more than just a nice, fuzzy memory. She’s having a baby boy—an unexpected but not unhappy development in the thirty-eight year-old’s life. But before Leia can break the news of her impending single-motherhood (including the fact that her baby is biracial) to her conventional, Southern family, her step-sister Rachel’s marriage implodes. Worse, she learns her beloved ninety-year-old grandmother, Birchie, is losing her mind, and she’s been hiding her dementia with the help of Wattie, her best friend since girlhood. Leia returns to Alabama to put her grandmother’s affairs in order, clean out the big Victorian that has been in the Birch family for generations, and tell her family that she’s pregnant. Yet just when Leia thinks she’s got it all under control, she learns that illness is not the only thing Birchie’s been hiding. Tucked in the attic is a dangerous secret with roots that reach all the way back to the Civil War. Its exposure threatens the family’s freedom and future, and it will change everything about how Leia sees herself and her sister, her son and his missing father, and the world she thinks she knows.