Book Review: Southern Living Annual Recipes 2004

Trigger warning: This post contains photo links to several Southern specialty foods, most of which are fattening. If you're on a weight loss diet, read something else. In this post I'm celebrating Amazon as a specialty food supplier, but most U.S. readers already know cheaper local sources for these Southern foods.

Title: Southern Living 2004 Annual Recipes

Author: Southern Living magazine staff

Date: 2004

Publisher: Oxmoor House

ISBN: 0-8487-2826-2

Length: 334 pages plus 33 pages indices

Illustrations: photos reprinted from the glossy magazine

Quote: “I think you’ll notice more light and healthy selections in this book....But don’t worry—we aren’t budging an inch when it comes to flavor.”

For those who don’t know, Southern Living is the magazine that documents—Southern partying, actually. Recipes often include variations on cornbread and beans, turnip greens, sweet-potato pie, and redeye gravy, but always and only the trendy and chi-chi kind. You can probably afford (in terms of budget and calories and cholesterol) to play with these recipes now and then; they’re not for everyday use. Most of the sections are organized around the kind of social event at which these foods would be served, and some recipes are written to serve sixteen. Annual recipe collections contain enough recipes, mostly reprinted from the monthly issues with an extra section furnished by sponsors, that you could cook at least one every day. Although special diets aren’t a theme in the magazine, the selection of recipes is wide enough that readers can always find something that’s naturally dairy-free,gluten-free, sugar-free, vegetarian, or whatever else they need.

There is, of course, a tendency to revel in foods that grow in the Southern States (any or all of them, occasionally including western Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona). Recipes work in other places; a few are even credited to readers outside the Southern States, but it’s more likely that you’ll have a lot of pecans, lemon verbena, yellow tomatoes, Vidalia onions, or fresh peaches to use up if you’re in the South.



(The yellow tomatoes grown in my corner of Virginia are not Yellow Beefsteaks, as shown, but Yellow Pink Centers; they're known for their odd shapes and gorgeous lemon-yellow, light red, and pale green color mix. They are eaten fresh, usually with a spoon, often with salty cornbread to soak up their sweet juice.)

In fact, reading through these recipes, I find myself visualizing an editor saying, “Everything’s better with chopped toasted pecans on it.” Not all the recipes mention pecans—on pages 230-231, for example, both a grape sauce and a chili sauce are pecan-free—but, also on pages 230-231, recipes for corn pone, turkey, macaroni, and lemon-butter sauce do recommend pecans. Pecans also find their way into apple pie, rugalach, green beans, pesto, and tuna salad. Southern Living also delivers recipes for using up juicy citrus fruits, vine-ripened tomatoes, tomatillos, fresh strawberries, new potatoes, watermelon, wild morel mushrooms, sorghum molasses, cornmeal and grits, beans at all stages of ripeness, chestnuts, and prickly pears.

“Traditional” recipes for vegetables boiled just short of dissolution and seasoned with fat pork, pound cake made with a pound of each ingredient (butter, sugar, egg, flour, sometimes fruits and nuts), collard greens and blackeyed peas, are regularly featured, though usually with “lighter, updated” instructions. One-quarter of the amount of saturated fat a typical Southern cook used, a hundred years ago, still leaves results some people find oily. I like a light, flaky, mealy potato and can’t imagine where anybody got the idea that the first thing to do with a potato is to mash a lot of milk and butter into it, especially it’s one of the denser, oilier varieties of potato in the first place.



(These are the potatoes people used to raise in my corner of Virginia, supplied to Amazon by the company from which we usually bought them.)

Really traditional Southern cuisine was labor-intensive. “Beaten biscuits,” actually more like saltines, were leavened by pounding air into the dough until “blisters” formed on the surface; beating otherwise unleavened dough for a half-hour or more was probably a great vent for underpaid cooks’ emotions, and certainly helped burn off the calories from slathering the biscuits with full-fat country butter. Hickory-nut cake had to be made from shagbark hickory nuts (smaller, much harder-shelled relatives of pecans); in my experience, finding the nuts was one day’s work (in a good year), shelling them was another, and I never knew anybody who wanted to wait yet another day to bake a cake, so there was a saying that hickory-nut cake was only ever baked for very special friends--as in, when a girl baked one, the male guest of honor had jollywell better propose. Traditional recipes were usually simple, despite anomalies like fruitcake and molé, because the cook’s ingenuity was diverted into maintaining a wood fire at the right temperature.

Southern Living tends, as many Southerners now tend, to throw that tradition out the window. Lots of recipes rely on convenience food. For pasta sauce, they start with a jar of the pre-mixed kind and sprinkle in a little more basil. Dessert? Open a box of ice cream, a jar of caramel sauce, and throw in some more pecans. Secret ingredients in several recipes include Velveeta (“processed cheese food”), soda pop, and beer.



(Choose the Garlic & Herb flavor if you buy Hunt's pasta sauce...it's sweetened with carrot pulp and juice rather than nasty GMO corn syrup. There's a Twitter campaign to push Hunt's to find GMO-free corn syrup and/or corn-syrup-free recipes, but we realize that it will take time.)

Then there are the sponsors’ recipes, featuring things like catfish, Rotel, and Veg-All. Catfish are an icky bottom-feeding species, foreign readers, and Veg-All is a canned mixture of boiled white potatoes, carrots, corn, peas, and green beans. Rotel, you really might want to know about. Small cans of tomatoes with chopped peppers mixed in, with relatively little sugar, salt, or other preservatives, are flavorful enough to be a staple in the McDougall test kitchens. There are generic and store-brand versions but Rotel is, like Jello and Coca-Cola, one of those brands that are so popular they become the generic name for the product; while Southern Living says “10-1/2 ounce can tomatoes with green chili peppers,” real people are likely to say “Rotel, or the store-brand version of Rotel.”

One really easy thing to do with Rotel has been promoted in a series of television commercials that steal the Spanish word for cheese (any kind of cheese, alone or in a recipe) to mean Velveeta melted in warmed Rotel. People who eat Velveeta have known about this easy form of cheese sauce for a long time, but a few may have been introduced to it by Southern Living in 2004. Queso means any kind or combination of cheese; salsa de queso (Velveeta) con tomate (Rotel) would be the proper phrase, and it’s liked wherever its two ingredients are sold. Cheap and easy though it is, the recipe was, at least for a while, recognized as trendy enough to be printed alongside recipes for chipotle chiles and fish tacos.

People collect Southern Living annual collections and shelve them in sequence. By now an extensive collection of these books is quite a display. I have to admit that the copy of this volume I physically own was pulled off a shelf and sold cheap, apparently, after falling into a kettle. This sort of thing is why local lurkers get the books I physically own for typically $1, less if they buy several at one time. Online readers get books in better physical condition, thanks to Amazon.

Books published by magazines aren't Fair Trade Books; our profits on reselling them help support the Fair Trade Books, which aren't always very profitable. Amazon shows lower prices, but to support this web site you send us $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment. Southern Living cookbooks are thick books, printed on heavy, durable, high-quality paper for a lifetime of good service; you could fit several combinations of other books into a package along with one but I'm not sure one $5 package will hold two Southern Living cookbooks, although, if you order two, I'll try.