100 Books Like Southern Food

Without a doubt, David Wondrich is the preeminent cocktail historian of our time. If that doesn’t sound like a real thing…well, just start reading his work.

No one else has his mastery of our drinking history or a gift for communicating all its twists and turns. Every book he’s written is a great read, but this book is the best jumping-off point, following the story of mid-19th-century bartender Jerry Thomas with colorful tales and excellent recipes.  

This book is a people’s history of the modern south, told through what people in the region have cooked and eaten. 

Edge is my former student who became the founding director of the Southern Food Alliance and the author of more than a dozen books on food.

He tells a story of what the modern South inherited in terms of cooking ingredients, techniques, and traditions, and he shows the central role that cooks and waiters served in the civil rights movement. He is particularly adept at sketching profiles of southern food leaders from Paul Prudhomme to Colonel Sanders.

The book is perhaps best in showing the changes in the southern food scene over the last three centuries so that now southern food has become a shared culinary language for the nation.   

Guitierrez forged a hybrid cookbook around the blending of Southern and Latin American ingredients and cooking techniques.

In the process she gives readers a glimpse into the twentieth century South of increasing ethnic and cultural identity. Like many recent cookbooks, hers is as much memoir as cooking guide.

She relates her memories of living part of the year in Guatemala and part of each year in North Carolina. She claims that southern food found her soul and she discovered a southern belle within herself.

Gutierrez has taught thousands of people how to cook, and she uses her educational skills to highlight the surprising affinities between the foodways of Latin and southern regions, including diverse ethnic roots in each tradition and many shared basic ingredients.

Filled with 150 innovative recipes that show the delights to the palate of blending two notable cuisines into one new, contemporary southern one.

Who doesn’t love a cookbook that includes A Thermos of Hot Virginia Country-Style Beef Consommé as the first item on a picnic list?

The Taste of Country Cooking is a cookbook and narrative of life in Freetown, Virginia where Lewis grew up. I feel comforted and assured reading Lewis’ stories and recipes. Here is an expert relating a way of life where eating is seasonal, healthful, and communal.

Recipes are directions on how to prepare and serve food, sure, they’re also medicinal formulas (lemonade is technically medicinal!), ethnobotanical records, and historical documents intimately tied to how humans all over the world live lives. I am a sucker for cookbooks tied to seasons, foodways, and history.

Lewis’ recipes are presented seasonally and organized into menus linked to events: Emancipation Day Dinner, A Cool Evening Supper, Morning-After-Hog-Butchering Breakfast. Food is what we eat but also who we are.

Reed is a leading scholar of southern culture, and he brings his considerable knowledge of the region to bear in a slim book loaded with stories and recipes about barbecue.

Since early settlement of the South, southerners have held barbecues to mark homecomings, holidays, reunions, and political campaigns.

In a lively and witty style, Reed traces the story of southern barbecue from its root in the sixteenth-century Caribbean, showing how the slow, smoky cooking of meat established itself in the coastal South and then spread inland.

He discusses how choices of meat, sauces, and cooking methods vary from one place to another in the region, reflecting local environments, farming practices, and ethnic traditions.

He suggests that barbecue in the South, in its diverse expressions, is the closest thing we have in the United States to Europe’s traditions of wines and cheeses, as one finds mustard sauce in South Carolina and… show more.

Capitalizing on the charming landmark “Cross Creek” novel about her fish-out-of-water life in central Florida’s backwoods in the 1920s, Rawlings shares recipes using ingredients she harvested from her primitive surroundings.

There isn’t much call in the Instacart and UberEats era for entertaining dinner guests with Pot Roast of Bear, Lamb Kidneys with Sherry, or Alligator-Tail Steak. The days of serving Jellied Tongue have long passed, thankfully. Rawlings and her Cross Creek neighbors ate those dishes by necessity more than choice.

You devour what the land provides, whether it’s by shovel, by hook, or by gun. When the world gives you loquats, you make Loquat Jelly.

Norman Van Aken is known internationally for introducing "fusion" into the lexicon of modern cookery as the founding father of New World Cuisine. 

Van Aken found his cooking voice in Key West by marrying Caribbean ingredients and spices with classic cooking techniques. 

He wrote this landmark book while helming Key West's Mira restaurant, where he showcased lobster terrine with caviar on a champagne yogurt dressing, curried carrot and chicken soup, and grilled marinated shrimp and chorizo.

Chef Charlie Trotter once called Van Aken, “the Walt Whitman of American Cuisine.” That would make this book his “Leaves Of Grass.” Poetry indeed.

It’s all here—from George Washington’s penchant for cracking walnuts with his teeth to Biden’s famous weakness for ice cream—Dinner with the President is a fascinating peek into the First Families’ eating habits en famille, as well as the diplomatic maneuvers behind state dinners and the gastro-intrigue girding geopolitics.

By the coauthor of Julia Child’s memoir, My Life in France, this meticulously researched account of White House meals is part history book, part food biography. Juicy behind-the-scenes accounts shed light on events like Andrew Jackson’s 1829 inauguration party, Richard Nixon’s improbable gastro-diplomacy in China, and Jimmy Carter’s brokering peace in the Middle East over 13 days of food. 

Last, readers will appreciate a compendium of selected White House recipes (some modernized to today’s tastes and accessibility of ingredients), historical photographs (such as notable events at the White House and a few of the kitchens through the years), and images of… show more.

This sequel to From the Desk of Zoe Washington shines a light on a topic I haven’t read about in children’s literature: the reintroduction of former prisoners into society. Author Janae Marks approaches it through the POV of a very relatable and determined heroine, 12-year-old Zoe Washington.

I loved how Zoe worked through her own misconceptions and biases around this sensitive topic, then turned around to help her former prisoner father fulfill his dreams of running his own restaurant by advocating for his rights through her podcast. Plus, reading this book made my mouth water as I imagined all the yummy food her exonerated father wanted to cook in his new restaurant.

This book is powerful to me because of the intense mother/daughter conflict she relates. My mother was lovely, well-read, and held an important position at our state university. However, she was also extremely critical of her children. Because I never rebelled against my mother, I was entranced with Joanne Harris’ young character, Framboise, who plans and carries out a rebellion against her mother that is worthy of the French resistance. Many years later, when Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous woman they hold responsible for a tragedy during the German occupation.

The past and present are inextricably entwined in a scrapbook of recipes and memories that Framboise inherited from her now-deceased mother. The journal contains the key to the tragedy that indelibly marked that summer of her ninth year. The mother… show more.