Southern

We’ve given this comfort food classic a refreshing spin by serving it over snappy Little Gem lettuce.

This hand-rolled biscuit recipe produces a fluffy (rather than flaky) biscuit, ready to be split and spread with flavorful honey butter.

Here, we make flaky biscuits with just 3 ingredients.

Good thing this cake serves a crowd—the creamy key lime topping will have everyone back for seconds.

Bob’s Red Mill makes a coarse cornmeal that’s perfect for these, but don’t stress if you can’t find it. A finer grind will just have less crunch.

Crisp and juicy pieces of slab bacon and just the right hit of red wine vinegar bring the perfect tangy-porky balance to these slow-cooked Southern greens.

If you prefer white-meat chicken, use skinless, boneless breasts that have been cut in half crosswise.

This sweet, rich Southern stunner, adapted from Patti LaBelle’s cookbook, LaBelle Cuisine, is the dessert we to turn to when the craving for sweet potato hits. We especially love the technique of sprinkling the crust with brown sugar before adding the filling, which creates a layer of delectable syrup.

"In a Southern family, there's always someone who makes one dish, one thing they're truly great at," says Tandy Wilson of City House, in Nashville, Tennessee. "These recipes tend to be 'talked,' passed down from cook to cook." That's the case with the chef's favorite sweet potato casserole, a dish inherited from his grandmother. Instead of the standard marshmallow topping, the recipe uses sorghum syrup for a rich, deep sweetness, and chopped roasted peanuts for a pleasing crunchy contrast. "Now every Thanksgiving," Wilson says, "it's my job to make Nana's sweet potato casserole."

Earthy and sweet with molasses, rich with cream, and bittersweet with dark chocolate, this sophisticated pie is a breeze to make.

Appalachian apple stack cake is communal cooking at its finest. Originally, each layer was baked at home by individual cooks, likely in cast-iron skillets, then brought together and assembled for church suppers and gatherings. Instead of the spongy cakes we're used to today, these layers are more like cookies—firmer, so they slowly soften beneath liberal applications of apple butter and cooked apples. This recipe stays mostly true to those principles. Instead of individually baking the layers one skillet at a time, though, use a cake pan to trace a pattern on parchment paper and trim circles of rolled dough to fit it. Bake two layers simultaneously (more if you have a convection oven). The edges of the cake layers won't be as perfectly neat as if you'd baked them in skillets or cake pans, but that's all right. This is a rustic cake.