OP: Craig Claiborne's Southern Cooking

Times Books, 1987. Hardcover. Very Good. Second printing.

After decades of championing the cuisines of the world and giving them their due on the pages of The New York Times, Craig Claiborne turns here to the food of his own upbringing in the American South.

He says in his introduction, “Nothing rekindles my spirits, gives comfort to my heart and mind, more than a visit to Mississippi and environs, to sit down to a dinner…and be regaled, as I often have been, with a platter of fried chicken, field peas, collard greens, fresh corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes with French dressing…and to top it all off with a wedge of freshly baked pecan pie.”

Southern Cooking reads as the most personal of Claiborne’s titles. Of course he tackles collard greens, various gumbos, and she-crab soup. But he also employs headnotes, telling us about his mother’s chicken spaghetti, a favored childhood dish that he continued to cook as an adult, the origins of which unknown to him. On the whole, the book is an elegant balance between the newspaperman doing his due diligence at covering the subject matter and the ordinary man with his own preferences, experiences, and expectations.