Book Review: The Southern Heritage Company's Coming Cookbook

Title: The Southern Heritage Company’s Coming Cookbook

Author: staff of Southern Living magazine

Date: 1983

Publisher: Oxmoor

ISBN: 0-8487-0603-X

Length: 143 pages including illustrations and index

Illustrations: food photos

Quote: “Wherever you live, company’s on the way! Let’s give them a real Southern welcome.”

This book represents a transition point in its publisher’s history.

Real “heritage” menus and recipes tend not to be very popular these days. One reason is that the relative prices of foods have changed. Plain corn meal, homemade sorghum molasses, and other home-grown fare that used to be cooked with resignation, shame, or defiance, by poor people, have become gourmet specialty items. Oranges used to be special winter treats outside of Florida; now they’re in stores all year. People whose grandparents made meals out of burdock and other early-spring “weeds” now think of gobo as a new Japanese thing, and may not recognize it when they dig it out of the garden.

Another reason is that even the Atkins diet calls for less fat and fewer calories than some of our grandparents used. Today’s Southern Living magazine has had to recognize our emphasis on Cooking Light. Less butter in the biscuits, less grease in the gravy, and less sugar in the coffee, are important new rules for people who commute to office jobs rather than working in the field all day. Old-school Southern cooks sigh over modern versions of traditional recipes, and sweetly tell modern cooks, “I feel sorry for your husband.”

The recipes in this book aren’t “light” but they’re not as heavy as some Southern Grandmas would have made them. Very few call for a cup of butter, or insist that lean cuts of meat be covered with fat while they cook. These recipes recognizably derived from old Southern recipes, and may call for specifically Southern ingredients like rice, oranges, or pecans...but, on the other hand, most of these ingredients are now sold in supermarkets everywhere, even if they’re better, cheaper, and available longer in the Southern States. This is not a book of very specific regional recipes like sorghum gingerbread, pawpaw pudding, ground-cherry pie, fried morels (“Dry Land Fish”), or kumquat marmalade.

Vegetarian cuisine is not a Southern tradition. “Seasoning” cooked vegetables with a chunk of fatty meat is. Because corn and rice grow better than wheat in the Southern States, because sugar was often rare, and because cheesemaking was traditional in only a minority of families, there are a good number of wheat-free, sugar-free, and cheese-free recipes i this book. There are plenty of dairy-free dishes, too. There are many substantial vegetable dishes, enhanced with oil or nuts, that can be served as vegan entrées, but there aren’t any complete vegan menus in this book. People on special diets will need to select and adapt recipes.