Southern Cookbook Roundup

Spring is around the corner, and while there’s plenty to look forward to—warmer weather, the return of local farmers’ markets—don’t overlook the season’s crop of cookbooks. We’ve rounded up our favorite new Southern tomes, along with a sampling of recipes to give you the flavor.

Big Easy Brunch
Brunch isn’t just for Sundays, especially after a night out in New Orleans. In her latest cookbook, New Orleans Classic Brunches, author Kit Wohl pulls together fifty of the Big Easy’s best lazy-morning recipes—pancakes and praline bacon, fried chicken and waffles, and of course, milk punch and Bloodys. It’s the best hangover balm around.
>Click here for chef Tory McPhail’s recipe for Huckleberry Pancakes.

The Global South
Part cookbook and part culinary road trip, The World in a Skillet, by Paul and Angela Knipple, explores the influence of international cuisine on Southern foodways through profiles of first-generation immigrants turned restaurateurs. This is the South in all its diversity, with recipes that range from Korean pork dumplings out of Lexington to hand-rolled Bosnian sausages from Mobile.
>Click here for chef Michael Ton’s Vietnamese-Style Imperial Rolls.

Lone Star Leanings
James Beard Award–winning food writer and G&G contributor Robb Walsh knows Texas cooking better than just about anyone, and his latest cookbook, Texas Eats, is a carefully curated collection of stories and recipes amassed over the course of twenty years spent in Texas kitchens and dining rooms. The cookbook covers the whole range of the state’s culinary traditions, from the German and Czech flavors of the Hill Country to Cajun influences in the bayou to vintage Tex-Mex and classic cowboy cooking.
>Click here for chef Bryan Caswell’s family recipe for Barbecued Crabs.

Savannah Sweets
She was a Soul Train dancer. He was a funk musician. Today, Griff and Cheryl Day dish out homespun desserts and rustic breads from their Savannah bake shop. The duo’s first cookbook, The Back in the Day Bakery Cookbook, hits the sweet spot with nostalgic Southern favorites such as lemon meringue pie and pecan sandies, but it also scores with equally satisfying savories such as Griff’s ham-and-cheese pastry puffs.
>Click here for Cheryl’s Girl Scout-inspired S’mores Pie recipe.