The Council women are an established force on the Southern food scene. Their story started with Mildred Edna Cotton Council, better known as Mama Dip, who served up comfort food for fifty years at the Chapel Hill institution Mama Dip’s Kitchen. Though she passed away in 2018, her legacy is very much going strong. One daughter started Sweet Neecy, a cake mix company. A granddaughter founded Chapel Hill–based Tonya’s Cookies. Erika, another granddaughter, is the force behind Bomb Biscuit Co. in Atlanta. And daughter Spring, who ran her mother’s restaurant until its closure in 2024, has just come out with a new cookbook, Southern Roots: Recipes and Stories from Mama Dip’s Daughter.
In it, she weaves together family stories and a hundred recipes—some passed down, others of her own creation—in homage to the woman who started it all. “Looking back on the way Mama welcomed me and my siblings into her kitchen, I now realize that, as a curious child, I didn’t grasp that she was preserving her heritage by teaching us to cook through oral tradition,” Spring Council writes in the introduction. “Her repertoire of recipes and flavors was not written on note cards or kept in a recipe box—it lived in her mind, taste buds, and heart, and was conveyed to us directly.”
Though Mama Dip went on to write cookbooks of her own, Spring has plenty more recipes to share from her own point of view. There’s a pinto bean bowl with fatback cornbread, smothered fried chicken with andouille sausage, old fashioned lemonade, goat cheese pound cake, and butter pudding.
And then, for a lighter touch, tea sandwiches—perfect for a fancy afternoon or an Easter, Derby Day, or Mother’s Day spread. “Whenever I prepare for a tea party, it conjures up memories of the beautiful one-hundred piece floral tea set my sisters and I received one Christmas as kids,” she recalls in an essay. To recreate the elegance and fun of those childhood tea parties, she invented the perfect sandwich trio below.
Garden & Gun has an affiliate partnership with Bookshop.org and may receive a portion of sales when a reader clicks to buy a book. All books are independently selected by the G&G editorial team.
