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    The Southern Living Community Cookbook: Celebrating food and fellowship in the American South
    The Southern Living Community Cookbook: Celebrating food and fellowship in the American South
    The Southern Living Community Cookbook: Celebrating food and fellowship in the American South
    Ebook588 pages3 hours

    The Southern Living Community Cookbook: Celebrating food and fellowship in the American South

    By The Editors of Southern Living, Sheri Castle and Matt & Ted Lee

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    About this ebook


    Southern food and food stories are bound together. This book will reflect people, regardless of where they come form, who claim Southern food as their own, whether for a lifetime or a mealtime. People feel deep affection for their local community cookbooks, especially those well-worn volumes that serve as a timestamp of a particular place and time. No other type of recipe collection is more generous, gracious, and welcoming. Before we give you a bite, we Southern cooks have to tell you about what we've made. Southern food is evocative, so our food and food stories are bound together in our communities. A memorable Southern cookbook holds good food and a good read, the equivalent of a brimming recipe box plus the scribbled notes and whispered secrets that cover the tips, advice, and stories that a generous cook shares with family members, friends, and neighbors. These recipes bring all sorts of cooks, recipes, and stories to a common table to bring readers a cookbook filled with good things to eat that have something to say.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLiberty Street
    Release dateOct 13, 2016
    ISBN9780848752941
    The Southern Living Community Cookbook: Celebrating food and fellowship in the American South

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      The Southern Living Community Cookbook - The Editors of Southern Living

      Carolina

      Community Cookbook: Recipes Good Causes and Memories

      Good Food, Good Read

      A community cookbook is a collection of recipes submitted by members of a local group, intended to be sold as a fund-raiser or as memorabilia. While that is true, it says little about its long-lasting allure. Community cookbooks are, of course, cookbooks. But they are also histories, storybooks, souvenirs, and heirlooms. When it comes to their devotees, you have us at spiral bound.

      Recipes

      A great vintage community cookbook, especially one created in the South, holds good food and a good read, the equivalent of a brimming recipe box plus the scribbled notes and whispered secrets that cover the tips, advice, and stories that a generous cook shares with family members, friends, and neighbors. Although some community cookbooks are highly polished productions, most are humble, homey paperbacks full of cherished recipes from home kitchens.

      Community cookbooks are scrapbooks of vernacular cooking. They give us a peek into the way people lived, cooked, and ate in a specific place at a specific time. Finding an old community cookbook is like opening a time capsule.

      Although there is likely a community cookbook somewhere that touches on nearly every subject and locale, no one book set out to be an exhaustive encyclopedic tome. Cookbook committees aimed to sell a collection of local recipes in the service of a good cause. It’s as though the cookbook committee, which was often a one-woman force of nature, asked their cohorts to prepare their signature recipes for a potluck dinner fund-raiser. A great community cookbook not only shows who brought what, it gives us a copy of all the recipes to boot.

      Good Causes

      Community cookbooks might be written for a bit of posterity, but most are written to sell, and sell big. These books are fund-raisers.

      Historians tell us that Maria J. Moss wrote the first community cookbook in 1864. A Poetical Cook-Book was a small, simple volume that she sold in Philadelphia to raise money for Civil War field hospitals. In a time when nearly all women were financially and politically dependent on men, producing and selling a cookbook was a rare opportunity to make money and direct its use. Determined women could band together to produce a cookbook without overstepping their social bounds. It was a benign yet effective way to give themselves a voice on local issues and to fund their chosen causes. In turn, purchasing a cookbook was an innocuous way for a housewife to donate money.

      By 1920, as many as 6,000 community cookbooks had been published in the United States. Working primarily through churches, the most powerful avenue of the time, women were raising money to fund civic causes even though they were not yet allowed to vote. It was also a way to be acknowledged. Having a recipe in a community cookbook was the only place that many women would ever see their names in print, even though they were usually only the Mrs. that preceded their husband’s name, a practice that persisted in some communities until the 1970s.

      Community cookbooks remain powerful fund-raisers. A volume can stay in demand for decades. For example, River Road Recipes from the Junior League of Baton Rouge has sold over 1.3 million copies, resulting in donations in excess of $3 million to local causes. Not all books have sold that well, of course, but if we imagine their cumulative effect over the years, their benefit is formidable.

      That being said, it would be unfair to exclude the community cookbooks that were written solely as love letters, gifts, and mementos. A reunion cookbook that gathers and memorializes a family’s recipes is invaluable. A collection of recipes from the annual dinner on the grounds at a local church is surely some of the best food ever committed to paper. A construction paper cookbook compiled by a group of kindergarteners is priceless. Those cookbooks go right to the heart of the matter.

      Considered individually, a community cookbook is a snapshot of local appetites and proclivities. Considered collectively, these books serve as a documentary of American foodways. They reveal how our regional cooking evolves and changes, swiftly and profoundly at times. We can see one era’s bedrock ingredients, techniques, and dishes nearly disappear, to be replaced by more modern and convenient ways. We see the introduction of new foods, sometimes displacing or diluting local traditions. We see ingredients that were once exotic become ordinary. We see the effect of new appliances and technologies. We see classics endure and silly trends come and go. We see cooks respond to times of privation and we see them celebrate abundance.

      As both personal and social histories, community cookbooks are mirrors and projectors, diaries and exhibitions. A defining characteristic of a community cookbook is that they say much more about the contributors and their circumstances than about any intended audience. These books are, at their core, a form of folklore.

      Memoirs

      Almost everyone who owns cookbooks has a community cookbook in their collection. For many cooks, this was the only type of cookbook they ever bought or consulted. The worn and spotted pages reveal the favorite recipes. The stains and drips are badges of honor. If, heaven forbid, we dropped our most-used community cookbook into a pot of water, it would make tasty broth.

      Community cookbooks have integrity. A volume from our hometown, school, church, or club bears the names of people we know and trust. Even when we don’t know a particular group firsthand, we know people like them, so we give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they shared a good recipe, or at least gave it their best shot. We give community books latitude we never grant to professional cookbooks.

      Although there have been glossy exceptions in recent years, most community cookbooks weren’t orchestrated. The group might have had an agenda, but the contents of their book do not. When it came to recipe selection, all comers were welcome. If eight cooks submitted a recipe for deviled eggs, then the book included all eight. Recipes were printed verbatim and afforded equal regard and respect. Locals might well know whose version of a recipe was best, but the book’s pages remained impartial. Then again, what cook would submit a recipe that reflected poorly on his or her cooking skills?

      Cooks were writing for other cooks, as peers. Until only a generation or two ago, it was not a leap of faith for a recipe writer to assume that anyone who planned to use a cookbook could cook, or at least had a working knowledge of the basics. Their rudimentary recipes listed ingredients and a few expedient words of instruction or advice. The users filled in any blanks later, based on their own experiences and adaptations, sometimes literally. People who would never dream of writing in any other book often wrote in their cookbooks. The cookbook marginalia scribbled along the edges of the page are equally precious to collectors and inheritors of community cookbooks.

      Community cookbooks are the source of some of the best recipes ever penned. Nonetheless, it would be naive to imply that there were never any bad recipes in these books. Oh yes, there were. Some recipes are infamous for their awfulness. Outdated, obsolete, and outlandish recipes can sometimes be more entertaining than the great ones. Tastes change and time marches on. Thank goodness.

      Many paths can lead a community cookbook into our kitchen. We buy books in support of the cookbook’s charity, as souvenirs, or because we remember them from our past. Perhaps we inherit them. These books take on heirloom status as part of our family history. Sometimes the names of our relatives are in the book, giving us a glimpse of our culinary genealogy. How the book was used within a family, and by whom, adds another facet to the story, imbuing the book with even more value. Dishes, recipes, and foodways take on cachet the more generations they are handed down, not necessarily because they were the best, but because they mattered enough to be kept.

      Community cookbooks from our childhood are evocative. Coming across a misplaced volume in a yard sale, thrift shop, or while cleaning out the home place can turn us teary with nostalgia. So can coming across a long-lost recipe, one we never dreamed we would find again. Look! It’s the recipe for such-and-such that sweet ole so-and-so used to make for us! It’s not every day that we can reclaim a sliver of our past.

      In the end, however, no one can say definitively what makes a community cookbook feel valuable. All responses to great books are subjective. It’s the recipes, the stories, and the memories. It’s their pure entertainment value. It’s the facts we can articulate and the feelings that defy words. It’s also, surely, because community cookbooks are an exaltation of the power and persuasion of food in our lives, our families, and our communities. As the late John Egerton, one of the most insightful scholars of Southern food, wrote: In practically every good and lasting memory any Southerner holds—of family and friends, of home and countryside, of school and church, of joyful and even solemn occasions—food is there, working through all the senses to leave a powerful and permanent impression.

      In practically every good and lasting memory any Southerner holds—of family and friends, of home and countryside, of school and church, of joyful and even solemn occasions—food is there, working through all the senses to leave a powerful and permanent impression.

      Snacks, Nibbles, and Appetizers

      Spiced Pecans

      Makes 2 cups

      2 cups pecan halves

      2 Tbsp. butter, melted

      1½ Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce

      1 tsp. salt

      ¼ tsp. ground cinnamon

      ¼ tsp. garlic powder

      ¼ tsp. ground red pepper

      2 Tbsp. sugar

      1. Preheat oven to 300°.

      2. Place pecans on baking sheet. Drizzle with butter and Worcestershire; toss to coat. Spread nuts in a single layer.

      3. Bake at 300° for 20 to 25 minutes or until toasted and fragrant, stirring every 5 minutes.

      4. Meanwhile, stir together the salt, cinnamon, garlic powder, red pepper, and sugar.

      5. Remove the pecans from the oven, sprinkle with the spice mixture, and toss to coat. Cool completely. Store in an airtight container.

      From the kitchen of Diane Butts – Boone, North Carolina

      Taste of the South

      Pecans

      Is there a more versatile Southern nut than pecans? Although pecans are available year-round, they really do taste best in fall and winter, because they are a fall crop. That seasonality is probably why fresh nuts are so popular in holiday cooking. Think pecan pie, pecan toppings on sweet potato, and spiced pecans for snacks and jazzed-up salads.

      Crispy Cheese Wafers

      Everyone simply loves these savory shortbread crackers. These are extra crunchy from the addition of rice cereal. Most people expect a little heat in their cheese wafers, but you can tweak the amount of red pepper to your liking.

      Makes about 4 dozen

      2 cups (8 oz.) freshly grated extra-sharp Cheddar cheese

      ½ cup butter, softened

      1 cup all-purpose flour

      ½ tsp. ground red pepper

      1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce

      ½ tsp. salt

      1 cup crisp rice cereal

      1. Preheat oven to 350°.

      2. Mix together cheese, butter, flour, ground red pepper, Worcestershire, and salt in a large bowl until mixture forms a ball that lightly sticks together and pulls in all the flour. (Hands might work best for this.)

      3. Gently fold cereal into dough.

      4. Shape mixture into 1-inch balls. Place balls about 1 inch apart on an ungreased baking sheet. Flatten each ball with a fork, making a crisscross pattern.

      5. Bake at 350° for 15 minutes or until firm. Cool on pan on wire rack. Store in airtight container up to 1 week.

      From the kitchen of Susan Brown – Birmingham, Alabama

      Hint:

      When cheese is the star ingredient of a great recipe, the dish tastes best when made with freshly grated or shredded cheese. The term grated implies small, fine pieces, so a rasp-style grater works very well. The word shredded indicates larger pieces, such as from the large holes on a box-style grater. Most food processors have disks that can quickly grate or shred cheese. Chilled, firm cheese is easiest to grate or shred.

      Cheese Dreams

      These little gems will be the first appetizer to disappear. They taste like a cross between a tiny cheese soufflé and a bite of a great toasted cheese sandwich. Cheese dreams are perfect for a party, but also make a lovely accompaniment with a bowl of soup or salad.

      Makes about 3 dozen

      2 cups (8 oz.) freshly grated sharp Cheddar cheese

      1 cup butter, softened

      2 Tbsp. heavy cream

      1 large egg

      1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce

      ½ tsp. salt

      ½ tsp. dry mustard

      Ground red pepper or hot sauce to taste

      1 (16-oz.) package firm white sandwich bread slices

      1. Preheat oven to 375°. Lightly grease a baking sheet.

      2. Beat cheese and butter until blended in medium bowl with electric mixer at medium speed.

      3. Beat in cream, egg, Worcestershire, salt, mustard, and ground red pepper.

      4. Spread cheese mixture on half of bread slices (about 1 rounded Tbsp. per slice); top each with 1 bread slice.

      5. Cut crusts from sandwiches. Cut each sandwich into 4 squares.

      6. Spread remaining cheese mixture over top and sides of squares. Place squares 1 inch apart on baking sheet.

      7. Bake at 375° for 15 minutes or until golden brown. Serve warm.

      NOTE: You can make these up to 1 day ahead and refrigerate before baking. You can freeze them for up to 3 weeks. Place frozen squares into preheated oven and increase the baking time by 10 minutes.

      From the kitchen of Julia Reed – New Orleans, Louisiana

      Fig and Blue Cheese Bruschetta

      People who love figs love them dearly. The same holds true for blue cheese. For those of us who adore both, these bruschetta toasts are nothing short of divine. Walnuts and port wine make excellent accompaniments.

      Makes 12 servings

      36 (¼-inch-thick) French baguette slices

      3 oz. cream cheese, softened

      ½ cup (2 oz.) crumbled blue cheese

      ¾ cup fig preserves

      Garnish: fresh rosemary

      1. Broil French baguette slices on a baking sheet 3 inches from heat 1 to 2 minutes on each side or until lightly toasted.

      2. Remove baking sheet, and reduce oven temperature to 350°.

      3. Stir together cream cheese and blue cheese in a small bowl until well-blended. Spread a heaping ½ tsp. cream cheese mixture onto each baguette slice. Top each with 1 tsp. fig preserves.

      4. Bake in center of oven for 8 to 10 minutes or until hot.

      NOTE: If blue cheese isn’t your thing, replace the blue cheese and cream cheese mixture with 5 oz. of trimmed Brie cheese.

      From the kitchen of Jill Kucera – Raleigh, North Carolina

      Classic Deviled Eggs

      It is impossible to serve too many deviled eggs. No matter how many eggs or how few guests, there is never a single one left over. Many of us own at least one deviled egg plate, a dedicated serving piece that can’t be used for anything else, which says much about our level of devotion. As one admirer put it, Take a couple dozen deviled eggs to a gathering, and they’ll disappear as fast as Vienna sausages before a flock of seagulls.

      There are endless variations, but this basic version is a great starting place for your own personal touches and creative additions.

      Makes 1 dozen

      6 large eggs

      2 Tbsp. mayonnaise

      1½ Tbsp. sweet pickle relish

      1 tsp. prepared mustard

      ½ tsp. salt

      Dash of black pepper

      Paprika

      Garnish: green onion curls

      1. Place eggs in a single layer in a medium saucepan (not nonstick). Add cold water to depth of 3 inches. Bring to a boil, remove from heat, cover, and let stand 12 minutes.

      2. Drain immediately and fill the saucepan with cold water and ice. Let stand until some of the ice melts and the eggs feel cool to the touch.

      3. Tap each egg firmly on the counter until cracks form all over the shell. Peel under cold running water, starting with the large end.

      4. Slice eggs in half lengthwise and carefully remove yolks. Mash yolks with mayonnaise in a small bowl. Stir in relish, mustard, salt, and pepper.

      5. Spoon yolk mixture into egg whites. Sprinkle tops with paprika.

      From the kitchen of Jill Connor Brown – Jackson, Mississippi

      Hint:

      The Deal on Peeling

      Deviled eggs look prettiest when the whites are smooth and unblemished, so we want the hard shells to slip off easily and cleanly. Properly cooking and cooling the eggs help this. To begin, place eggs in a single layer in a stainless steel saucepan. (Do not use nonstick.) Add cold water to depth of 3 inches. Bring to a boil over high heat. As soon as the water begins to boil, remove pan from heat, cover, and let stand 12 minutes. Drain immediately and fill the saucepan with cold water and ice. Let stand until some of the ice melts and the outside of the eggs feel cool.

      Chicks in a Blanket with Spicy Mustard Sauce

      This is an updated version of a classic crowd-pleaser. Little sausages are baked in warm bread and dipped in sweet-hot honey mustard sauce. No wonder people gobble them up.

      Makes 8 servings

      Spicy Mustard Sauce

      ½ cup honey mustard

      2 Tbsp. olive oil

      1 Tbsp. white wine vinegar

      1 tsp. dried crushed red pepper

      1 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

      Rolls

      1 (8-oz.) can refrigerated crescent rolls

      24 mini smoked chicken-and-apple sausages (12 oz.)

      1 large egg yolk, lightly beaten

      1 Tbsp. sesame seeds (optional)

      1 Tbsp. poppy seeds (optional)

      1 Tbsp. fennel seeds (optional)

      1. To prepare sauce, stir together honey mustard, olive oil, vinegar, red pepper, and black pepper in a small bowl. Serve immediately, or cover and chill up to 12 hours.

      2. To prepare rolls, preheat oven to 375°. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

      3. Unroll crescent dough; separate along perforations into 8 triangles. Cut each triangle into 3 long triangles to form a total of 24.

      4. Place 1 sausage link on wide end of each triangle; roll up dough around sausages starting at wide end. Place point-side down on baking sheet.

      5. Brush tops of rolls with egg yolk. If desired, stir together sesame seeds, poppy seeds, and fennel seeds, and sprinkle over rolls.

      6. Bake at 375° for 15 minutes or until golden brown. Serve immediately with Spicy Mustard Sauce.

      From the kitchen of Sara Foster – Durham, North Carolina

      Mary Ann’s Pimiento Cheese

      Makes about 5 cups

      ½ cup mayonnaise

      12 oz. diced pimiento, drained

      ¼ cup sliced green onions

      1 Tbsp. dry mustard

      1½ Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce

      1½ tsp. hot sauce

      ¾ tsp. celery seeds

      ¾ tsp. cider vinegar

      ¼ tsp. salt

      ¼ tsp. freshly ground black pepper

      5 cups (20 oz.) freshly shredded white Cheddar cheese

      Garnish: sliced green onions

      1. Stir together mayonnaise, pimiento, green onions, dry mustard, Worcestershire sauce, hot sauce, celery seeds, vinegar, salt, and pepper. Stir in Cheddar cheese until well blended.

      2. Cover and chill 8 to 24 hours. Garnish, if desired.

      From the kitchen of Taylor Bowen Ricketts – Greenwood, Mississippi

      Feta Spread Hitipti

      Makes 1 cup

      8 oz. crumbled feta cheese

      2 Tbsp. olive oil

      1 Tbsp. lemon juice

      1 tsp. finely chopped pepperoncini salad peppers

      1 tsp. minced garlic

      1 tsp. chopped fresh oregano

      ¼ to ½ tsp. dried crushed red pepper

      ⅛ tsp. black pepper

      Garnish: dried crushed pepper and olive oil

      Serve with: crostini or pita chips

      1. Pulse feta cheese, 2 Tbsp. olive oil, lemon juice, pepperoncini salad peppers, garlic, oregano, ¼ to ½ tsp. dried crushed red pepper, and black pepper in a

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