A Love Affair with Southern Cooking: Recipes and Recollections

A charming read for its reminiscences of Southern food and descriptions of food history, and well as filled with good, cookable recipes. Anderson is serious about both food and Southern food, and she knows what she's doing.

A caveat: Although I adore this book for its content, but I do have two problems with it: no photographs at all, and a production design that looks like the menu for Buckaroo Bob's Steak House. I hope this book is hugely successful and that in future editions it will be re-designed, with a more graceful layout and with photos.

Like most transplanted Yankees, I have a collection of personal stories I like to tell about how I became acclimated to living in the South. I talk about my shock when I discovered the word barbecue didn’t refer to chicken or ribs, my gradual acceptance of sweet tea as our national drink, the day I found myself hunting for Duke’s mayonnaise in the supermarkets up north when I visited my parents. I tell funny stories about my horror when faced with the Southern idea of “chicken and pastry,” and I can document how my vocabulary has changed over time—how the pop I used to buy when I was growing up in Buffalo became “soda” when I moved to Boston for college, and has become “coke” now that I am permanently situated in the Bible belt. It is basically a series of stories that chronicles one woman’s slow immersion into a foreign culture.

A Love Affair with Southern Cooking (Morrow, $32.50), Jean Anderson’s new cookbook/memoir/foodie celebration/compendium of trivia is very much in the same mold. It is a chronicle of one woman’s discovery of an entirely new cuisine and culture. A cuisine she converted to with all the enthusiasm of the born-again. Mind you, when I came south and first ate shrimp and grits, I was about 30. When Jean Anderson first discovered what it meant to be “Southern fried and sanctified” she was about five. So she’s had a bit longer to get used to the idea of mini marshmallows in her sweet potato casserole than I have.

The book is exactly what its title suggests—a paean to all the wonderful foods the author grew up eating in defiance of her midwestern mother’s ever more feeble objections. Anderson, who has a long and varied career as a food critic, journalist, agricultural extension worker, and most recently “recipe doctor,” gathers together in this unusual and diverting cookbook about two hundred different recipes that range from the classic (“Nana’s Lima Beans”) to the weird (“Pine Bark Stew,” which is not nearly as awful as it sounds and does not contain any actual pine bark). Recipes are usually accompanied by stories—either stories of where she first ate the dish or where the dish was first historically served—whichever, frankly, sounds better in the telling. Among the recipes are vignette histories of famous Southern foods—Moon Pies and Krispy Kreme Donuts, but also Planters Peanuts and Maxwell House Coffee, the latter an item many Southerners don’t like to brag about. And if this weren’t enough, she fills any leftover space on the page with food quotes and an extended timeline of important Southern foodie moments—from the time Ponce de Leon first set foot on the Florida peninsula (and presumably started looking for something to eat) to the celebrated re-opening of George Washington’s plantation still earlier this year. . .read the full review