The Glory of Southern Cooking: Recipes for the Best Beer-Battered Fried Chicken, Cracklin' Biscuits, Carolina Pulled Pork, Fried Okra, Kentucky Chees

This is now one of my "go to" books for Southern cooking and after receiving my copy I've given it as a gift several times. Highly recommended.

A fabulous book. I have been seeking a good Southern cookbook for the past several years, ever since I borrowed Damon Lee Fowler's classic from the library and then later realized it was out of print. This one seems to cover all of the classic recipes I was seeking, along with other wonderful surprises. It really fits the bill! The first recipe I made was the pimento cheese, and it was great. Highly recommend.

`The Glory of Southern Cooking' by outstanding American culinary journalist, James Villas is, in many ways, an answer to my quest for a `definitive' cookbook of Southern cuisine. Villas himself is too modest to claim being the final authority on Southern cooking. He even cites three works which are closer to being the `Mastering the Art...' for Southern cuisine than this work; however, he does attest to the fact that it is far more comprehensive than any of his earlier `general' cookbooks, which are based on his mother's North Carolina cooking experiences. For those who don't know Villas, he is the author of thirteen (13) earlier books, the best of which are collections of his columns from `Town and Country' and other culinary and lifestyle magazines. As such, Villas has been researching the far corners of `Southern Cooking' for the better part of 40 years, largely from the same insider's point of view as his friend, Craig Claiborne. After all this time, Villas' great hypothesis, for which he offers this book as a verification, is that the cuisine of the American South is as rich, diverse, and as involved as those of France, Italy, or China. Many writers have approached `Southern Cuisine' from the bottom up, such as Edna Lewis in her `The Taste of Country Cooking', Justin Wilson's several cookbooks, or Sallie Ann Robinson's `Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way'. Even more, it seems, have approached things from the top down, from the point of view of high-end restaurants specializing in Southern cuisine. Prime examples are celebrity chefs such as Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse and Frank Stitt. Books which seem to combine these two approaches are the many cookbooks from Paula Deen, based on her `The Lady and Sons' Savannah restaurant, the `Mrs. Wilkes Boardinghouse Cookbook' and the recent `The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook'. Of all these books, Villas seems to have three distinct advantages. First, his broad and long experience has enabled him to cover the cuisine(s) of the entire south (from which he excludes Texas, which he considers something of a land unto itself). Unlike, the Lees, the Deens, Wilson, Stitt, and Lagasse, he is not bound to the Tidewater, Cajun, Creole, or `soul' food styles. Second, his point of view has an element of the scholarly about it. Thus, while he may not be giving us the very best or most elaborate recipe for pimento cheese spread (he does that in `Stalking the Green Fairy'), we are assured of getting the recipe most familiar to the greatest number of `Southern Cooking' practitioners. Third, Villas explores that great middle ground of genteel home cooking and entertaining, below the great New Orleans restaurant practitioners but above the raw roots. A fourth virtue of Villas' presentation is that while many of his headnotes include personal information like the Lee Bros. chitchat, he goes into greater depth regarding the cachet surrounding various dishes and their role in Southern cuisine at large. These four poin