Southern

I think people who say they hate grits just haven’t had them prepared correctly. Basic grits are pretty simple, and you can add what you like to make them tastier. My sister experimented with this flavorful herb and garlic cheese version for a yummy twist on an old southern favorite.

My daddy loved boiled okra, but it’s too slimy for me. Fried okra, on the other hand, is great with everything!

I make this with our home-canned green beans, but canned green beans from your grocery store cook down nicely with a little help from a ham hock. The recipe says to cook these for 30 minutes. I would really say just to cook them to death, but 30 minutes sounds sweeter.

We call these butterbeans in Georgia. I serve them with Baked Ham with Brown Sugar Honey Glaze (page 88) and Potato Salad (page 53). In college I had a friend named Tina, who is from Mississippi. When I would go home with her for the weekend, she would put mayonnaise in her butterbeans. Don’t try this at home, because you will love it and it’s more added fat that none of us need! (Okay, try it once!)

I could live on collard greens and corn bread! I like collard greens better than turnip greens because I think collards are sweeter. When I make my corn bread and greens bowl (crumbled-up buttermilk corn bread covered with collard greens and a little juice), I add a little hot pepper just for fun. In the South, collard juice, or the cooking liquid that accumulates, is often called pot likker. My daddy always planted a big collard patch every spring, not only for the family but also to share with friends. Through the years, friends knew the patch was just out back of the barn and they were free to drive in and help themselves.

My mom made this cheese sauce when I was a child, mostly to pour over vegetables she was trying to get us to eat. I was a grown woman before I realized that steamed broccoli didn’t have to be served with cheese sauce! It does make this homemade mac and cheese taste amazingly good, though!

Growing up, I was lucky to have a catfish pond just down the hill on our farm. My daddy had created the pond from a natural spring when I was a little girl and stocked it with catfish and bream. We had many a wonderful fish fry with freshly caught catfish from our pond all through my childhood. Fresh fried fish served with Mama’s Cornmeal Hushpuppies (page 140)—you couldn’t ask for a better meal! My only suggestion is that you let someone else dress the catfish. Yuck!

Comfort food. That’s all I’ve got to say!

As a young man, my dad worked with the State of Georgia Extension Service, where he learned to barbecue chickens by the hundreds. Over the years, he cooked thousands of chickens that were sold on the town square, at football games, or horse shows. He and his friends would build a huge pit with cement blocks and top them with specially made racks that could hold about 50 chicken halves each. To turn the chickens, another rack was placed on top, and two men, one on each end of the racks, would flip the entire rack at once! My mom has adapted Dad’s recipe to serve a family, not the whole town.

This is a nice recipe for southern girls like me who love fried chicken but realize they can’t eat it everyday. The cornflakes give you that crispy crust like fried chicken without all of the added fat of deep-frying—not that I’m saying there’s a thing wrong with deep-frying! My motto is “Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

My biggest complaint about fried chicken is that all of the flavor ends up on the outside, and the meat is usually bland. Not my mama’s! The secret is in the prep. When you soak the chicken overnight in salt brine, the salt infuses into the meat and makes it so tasty! When I asked my mom how long to fry the chicken, she said, “Just cook it ’til it sounds right.” I have since fried enough chicken to completely understand this sentence, but at the time—you can imagine! As chicken begins to fry, it’s loud because of all the water cooking out into the fat. It gets quieter as it gets done. Who knew? Now you do!

You see this recipe a lot in the South. It’s great because you do all the work the night before; the next morning, this wonderful meal bakes while you’re having a nice, leisurely cup of coffee! Beth makes this on Christmas Eve so it can bake Christmas morning during the present-opening frenzy.

I respect people who won’t share old family recipes, but when I find something good, I want everybody to be able to make it for themselves, and that’s how I feel about my daddy’s barbecue sauce. I truly believe Daddy could have bottled and sold this sauce, it was so popular! It’s a personal preference, but I like a thin, vinegar-based barbecue sauce instead of the thick, ketchup-based sauces.

Since moving to Oklahoma, I have noticed that a lot of the barbecue there is made with beef. I started making these Georgia pork ribs a couple of years ago for the Fourth of July, and they quickly became tradition around here. Cut the racks into two-rib portions and serve them with Easy Baked Beans (page 133) and Fourth of July Coleslaw (page 54) for an awesome holiday feast!

I love homemade biscuits, and I love meatloaf, so it’s no surprise I’m pretty fond of this recipe. The sauce is so terrific, especially poured over that wonderful homemade biscuit dough with a little ground beef rolled inside. Yum!

Browning the almonds in sugar gives a great sweet crunch to this salad. I have to state for the record that this is one of the best salads I’ve ever tasted.

My sister Beth’s sister-in-law, Margaret, makes this salad, and it’s a nice alternative to plain cranberry sauce for holiday meals. In fact, it’s rich enough to serve as a dessert!

We always made this to take to Family Night suppers at church. Its official name was Congealed Fruit Salad, but it was known at our house as pink salad, because, well, it’s pink! Besides, anything with the word congealed in the title just sounds gross to me, and this is anything but.

My daddy was a great cook, and many of the recipes in this cookbook are his. If there was a fund-raiser in Monticello, people would always ask, “Is Jack making the Brunswick Stew?” or “Is Jack cooking the chickens?” before they bought their tickets. The food was usually prepared outside in very large quantities with the help of members of the sponsoring organization. Brunswick Stew is one of those classic southern dishes that varies from region to region, but I’ve never had Brunswick Stew that tasted like my dad’s. In his version, everything is ground through a food grinder, so it’s more like a wonderfully rich soup than a stew. His version also fed 160 people, so we’ve reduced our recipe to serve a cozy 16!

My grandmother, Lizzie Paulk, was an amazing woman. She worked the fields in South Georgia with my grandfather Winnes, raised three children, and somehow still found time to put three home-cooked meals on the table every single day. She passed away when I was in junior high, but I have wonderful memories of her laughter and her love for her family. Mama had always complained she could never get her dumplings to come out as thin as her mom’s, but the first time she made them after Grandma died, she said it was as if Lizzie were guiding her. Maybe she finally decided it was okay for Mama to be able to make her dumplings! They’ve come out perfectly every time since.