Southern writers share best recipes in an excellent community cookbook
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An excellent community cookbook feels like a cherished hand-me-down. It's food history, generally reflecting a specific ethnic group or region. That's what you'll discover in "The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook." Like something a proud parent places in your hands -- a treasure, saying, "This is for you, my best recipes. The ones I love the most. You'll take good care of them."
A collaborative project, the book took three years to produce, with recipes culled from Southern Foodways Alliance members. That's the secret to quality. Choose a great community of food people and food lovers, and you get great recipes.
The Southern Foodways Alliance, of which I am a proud member (although not a cookbook contributor), documents, studies and celebrates the diverse food of the changing American South. The group is headquartered at the University of Mississippi, and it is an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
Sara Roahen is a co-editor of the book. Author of "Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table," Ms. Roahen hails from Wisconsin but relocated to the Crescent City. She described the effort to create a volume that was "geographically and spiritually representative of the SFA membership."
At first, it was to be a compilation of collected recipes from the group's archives. "Something to give to members at a following symposium. Then it became clear no one wanted a book with untested recipes and complicated chef's preparations." So began the hard work of compiling and cutting, writing quirky, poetic headnotes and wonderfully unconventional chapter titles, such as "Garden Goods: Straight from the Dirt," "Yardbird, Chickens and Eggs," "Pig, From Snoot to Tail," and "Cane: Sweet Stuff from the Banana Republic."
Chapel Hill, N.C., food writer and educator Sheri Castle was the book's recipe tester. "We contemplated over 600 recipes," she said. "We tried so hard to do a cookbook that was reflective of our SFA community, a mixture of chefs, food writers and home cooks. We worked to balance regions and ingredients. I standardized the language and measurements, but I went out of my way in testing not to change anything, so the integrity of the recipe shined through."
First Published December 30, 2010 12:00 am
