82 Books Like The Taste of Country Cooking

I believe 2 things without a shred of doubt: all humans are creative and anyone can cook. Samin Nosrat adds the critical finale: “…and make it delicious.”

Everyone can benefit from this book, especially those who appreciate good, well-executed dishes but don’t quite understand what makes them so irresistible. As someone who didn’t do much better than fail at high school and college science, Nosrat makes incredibly complex concepts simple and doable! Not to mention, it’s delightfully illustrated.

The infographics, tables, and flowcharts make the content engaging and accessible. It is a cookbook, indispensable kitchen reference, and testament to the power of creative collaboration. Here is evidence that cooking is an art and a science. 

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.   

In the Twentieth Century, the U.S. took stock of its regional specialties, resulting in landmark publications around the country. Many of the resulting books then and now tend to fixate on recipes alone, the tip of the culinary iceberg.  

During the 1980s, John Egerton meandered around the South looking for vestiges of vittles only found there at a time when regional cooking specialties across the US seemed to be fading fast.  With snippets of travel writing, interviews with artisans, anecdotes, and recipes, Southern Food demonstrated the culinary vitality and diversity of the South in one volume.   

Egerton’s work revealed the need for deeper research and more context to make sense of culinary traditions. It also helped casual observers to recognize the importance of Southern food, and that before mass-produced popular culture took hold, all food was essentially regional.

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.

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.

Wild Flavors follows Chef Didi Emmons over a year on farmer Eva Sommaripa’s farm 80 miles southeast of Boston.

Working as a line cook at Prune, Chef Gabrielle Hamilton gave me unforgettably simple advice as I struggled week after week to prepare a family meal on the fly: “you learn to cook by following recipes.” Duh! Five years later I followed recipes and learned to cook. I enrolled in herbal study at Commonwealth Holistic Herbalism in Brookline, MA.

I cooked out of Wild Flavors throughout my apprenticeship. Many of the plants we studied that year appeared in Wild Flavors in thoughtful, seasonal recipes that brought medicinal plants out of the classroom and into my kitchen, where they came to life.

Recipes like Chickweed Cheddar Grilled Cheese Sandwiches, sound familiar but feature unconventional, medicinal plant ingredients hiding in plain site in the fields and forests surrounding Eva’s Garden.

Dr. Annie Fenn is a board-certified ob-gyn and chef who focused her work on degenerative brain disease after her mother’s dementia diagnosis.

I worked as part of the food styling team on this book in Idaho and Wyoming cooking and eating from Annie’s garden and local farmer’s markets. Her Italian-American heritage shines throughout her book, organized by foods with neuroprotective properties, most of them plants. Each of the 100 recipes are brain healthy, flavorful, and deeply satiating.

The book is educational and hopeful: she sites study after study that found the number one dementia-reducing behavior is a brain-healthy dietary pattern. As an herbalist and someone who recently lost a loved one to Alzheimer’s, I know compliance is key.

We are all more likely to eat a brain health diet if it’s flavorful, satiating, and adaptable to our social lives and familial traditions. Annie is… show more.

Amy is a friend and phenomenal vegetarian chef who defined vegan food as the executive chef of one of my favorite NYC restaurants: Angelica Kitchen (RIP).

At Angelica Kitchen, Amy used food to create a space for deeply nourishing solace and retreat from the intense demands of living in a wonderfully hectic city. At Home in the Whole Food Kitchen gave each us the skills, knowledge, and recipes to bring that space into our homes. It is not only a cookbook but a guide to building a kitchen that sustains and nourishes the body and mind.

I’ve referenced this book so many times that the pages have separated from the binding. Once you master these recipes, ways to adapt them to the seasons, local produce, and your tastes reveal themselves. After nearly 10 years I still make the Coconut & Quinoa pancakes weekly.

Landon Carter was a fearsome Virginia tobacco planter, politician, and patriarch, with hundreds of slaves laboring under the lash on his plantation. As I learned from this book, he was also a total headcase. This book is based on the diaries that Carter wrote compulsively, alone, because he didn't have anyone to confide in. (It's lonely at the top.) 

The diaries reveal Carter as an anxious pessimist, constantly going into tailspins because his slaves, his children, and his fellow Virginia gentlemen constantly defied his authority. The icing on this lousy cake was the outbreak of the American Revolution, which upended Carter's world for good. I don't feel sorry for him, but I learned much about power by reading about his struggles and panics.

Not only is the Mrs. Murphy cozy mystery series written from the point of view of a sleuthing cat, it’s actually (allegedly!) written by a cat—the feline in question being Sneaky Pie Brown, author Rita Mae Brown’s real-life tabby companion, who supposedly makes use of Ms. Brown’s typewriter on the sly. Wish You Were Here is the first in a delightfully long series of cozy mysteries set in the fictional small town of Crozet, Virginia—where murders seem to happen with startling regularity, and where postmistress Mary Minor “Harry” Haristeen’s beloved cat, Mrs. Murphy, always seems to be one step ahead of the official investigators. I fell hard for the acerbic, no-nonsense Mrs. Murphy and for this series, which was a direct inspiration for my own “Homer Whodunit” mystery series.