History, recipes and essays fill new cookbook ‘When Southern Women Cook’ 

In 2014, I also started volunteering at the Cambridge Women’s Center, a community support space for women of all backgrounds and identities in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I come from a line of women who gave me a crash course in feminism through their lived, sometimes difficult, experiences. My mom, who wanted to be an artist, became a doctor after learning from her mother a hard lesson about the importance of creating economic independence. Their resilience inspired me, at a time when I was defining my own feminism to do some- thing to empower women in need. I started answering a helpline (some called looking for advice; many were lonely and just looking for someone to listen) and eventually co-facilitated a support group for women and nonbinary trauma survivors, which I still do today. I learned that, like me, so many turned to art, writing, and, notably, food to navigate life’s trials.

My work at Cook’s Country and at the Women’s Center fueled me, but the idea of melding my culinary career with my passion for supporting women seemed improbable. That was until Toni Tipton-Martin became Cook’s Country editor in chief, and we began to explore this intersection of food and empowerment. It turns out, both Toni and I had been thinking a lot about how to give women space in a world that tells us to be smaller.

When Southern Women Cook is the outcome of many meaningful conversations. With Toni’s journalistic approach to telling stories in Cook’s Country magazine, we were positioned to make the book of our dreams. To start, we already had a deep archive of well-tested recipes. As I learned more than 10 years ago, we start recipe development with research, from reading cookbooks to interviewing experts. From there we cook five versions to cover different ways people make a dish. Then it all gets kind of scientific: We facilitate side-by-side taste tests until we are satisfied that a recipe is foolproof. And while this creates a recipe that is reliable, flavorful, and accessible to as many cooks as possible, it can also obscure a recipe’s origins. With this book, we would bring the people and traditions that inspired us to recreate these recipes in the first place to the front.

We studied the archives to pull out the recipes that were both distinctly Southern but also windows into women’s culinary experiences. And we brought on food historian KC Hysmith to help us put the recipes into context: The South is a place, as the U.S. Census Bureau defines it, but it’s also, as KC taught us, well, a feeling. And so, the South in this book is vast. It includes Florida and Texas (even though each is so diverse, it could carry its own book). Within these Southern borders, we tour many corners—from the multinational Latinx communities in Miami baking festive pan de jamón and pouring out coquito to the Gullah Geechee women of the South Carolina Lowcountry celebrating their ancestral ingredients in brilliant rice dishes and deeply flavored gumbo stews.

We go back in time to capture those who built the foundations of Southern food—unnamed women firing the flames of stew stoves at Monticello; enslaved women like Marie Jean, who carried on Black and Indigenous tradition through the outdoor barbecue; chefs like Zephyr Wright, who cooked for presidents while changing history; entrepreneurial women selling handmade fried chicken to hungry railroad travelers, piping-hot fried calas or sweet pralines in New Orleans, or bowls of chili in San Antonio. And we highlight women innovating the cuisine today. These are women like Teresa Finney and Chanel Watson with cottage businesses baking Mexican conchas of every shape, flavor, and color. Like Alba Huerta, who captures the global flavors of Houston in each updated julep variation on the menu of her chic cocktail bar of the same name. Like Jordan Rainbolt, who amplifies the South’s Indigenous roots through outdoor dinners and dishes like her Grit Cakes with Beans and Summer Squash, a creative take on the Three Sisters.

To tell a fuller story, we opened the writing to more than 70 Southern women—food writers, authors, journalists, historians, chefs, aficionados, and culture keepers—to cover topics close to them and their stitch in the tapestry of Southern food history. Find my fellow North Carolinian, chef Vivian Howard, writing on the painful challenges of cooking in a male-dominated world, and poet Crystal Wilkinson honoring her ancestors through her hands, through baking blackberry jam cake. Read Virginia Willis’s piece on the complexities of weight management for women raised in traditional Southern society— on a traditional Southern food diet. Or learn from Carlynn Crosby about the Prohibition-era women who ruled the sea with their lucrative rum enter- prises. Their stories season the recipes they appear alongside for a cookbook that, while not exhaustive, shares the tastemakers as much as it does the tastes.

Although I spent the majority of my life in the South, this book gave me a new view of what Southern food means. While it does have its fair share of recipes for fried chicken (we’ve included eight) and biscuits (also eight), it has so much more than that. The stories in this book show that food can be a lens through which to learn about our shared history, to pay homage to those who came before us, and to help build a better, tastier future.
Cooks like Fannie Lou Hamer and Georgia Gilmore pushed the Civil Rights Movement forward through pork and slices of pound cake. Queen Maggie Bailey sent kids to school through bootlegging. Today, another queen, Dolly Parton, raises money for children’s literacy through her cookbooks, and chefs like Maneet Chauhan and Asha Gomez broaden the definition of Southern food through what it means to be “Brown in the South.” From them, I learned that melding a food career with women’s empowerment was never improbable; food is and always has been a tool for women’s empowerment. So whether it’s baking messages for social justice into pies like Arley Bell or just getting the grits on the table to fuel another long day, Southern recipes represent a part of our place in a world where we increasingly take up more space.

In the trauma support group, we end each session asking women to share one way they’re planning to take care of themselves in the upcoming week. Without fail, someone mentions food, whether it’s to cook something healthy, enjoy ice cream, or just force themselves to eat anything at all. I hope this book gives you a little sustenance in this complex world. Yes, it can be hard, but it can also be damn delicious.

by Morgan Bolling

Foreword

In the summer of 1999, I received an invitation to a weekend meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, from the Southern sage and award-winning journalist John Egerton, who cleverly Southernized his signature with these words: “on behalf of the add hock organizers.”

Egerton’s fiddling with the term ad hoc intrigued me. I looked up the definition: “A group organized for a specific purpose; a temporary opportunity to accomplish something great.”

I was awed by the way that he substituted the spelling of “hoc” with the word for a fatty pig bone that spends most of its time in the mud. As a Southern California native, I reasoned that my participation would be like seasoning a kettle of simmering greens with a piece of smoky pork. I accepted the invitation to get into a little hot water by stirring the pot of Southern food history.

This call to action was anything but spontaneous. Years earlier, both author Edna Lewis and food editor Jeanne Voltz had led efforts to “establish an organization that would bring together people from all over the region and beyond who grow, process, prepare, write about, study, or organize around the distinctive foods of the South. “The women failed.

Egerton, the author of the acclaimed book Southern Food: At Home, On the Road, in History, knew that I also shared this belief in the power of food to unify people, because he helped cultivate it. Since our chance meeting in Atlanta five years earlier, he and I bonded over our desire to untangle the knotty history and mixed messages ingrained in American race, gender, class, and food conversations.

A month after his letter arrived, I joined nearly 50 other invitees at Southern Living magazine’s offices; by the end of the weekend we had founded the Southern Foodways Alliance, an organization dedicated to preserving, celebrating, and promoting the diverse food culture of the American South.

We gathered annually in Oxford, Mississippi, after that, listening to scholars and folks with lived experience as they challenged established notions about the region. Attendees came as strangers from all over the country and between bites of barbecued quail, corn pudding, and slaw, we grieved together about prejudice and bias. And yet, come Sunday morning, everyone departed with a sense of hope. We believed that eventually these honest conversations would bring about a kind of equity that politicians, educators, historians, and others had failed to achieve.

I reveled in the strength and power of the women I met each fall. While shopping in one of Oxford’s secondhand stores, author and anthropologist Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor taught me to trust my cultural impulses, while Marcie Cohen Ferris helped me value my journalistic instincts as we crunched on North Carolina peanuts. From novelist and cookbook author Dori Sanders I learned the important art of storytelling while pondering the sweet, nuanced flavor of freshly picked South Carolina peaches. Mildred Council (aka Mama Dip) taught me to value examples of culinary excellence hidden in a pot of green beans. Ronni Lundy and I became friends while debating whether sugar belongs in cornbread. And Nathalie Dupree’s “pork chop theory” of mentorship became the foundation of my passionate pursuit of culinary sisterhood.

Once I became president of the organization, one woman after another confided her frustrations about the ways Southern women were still being portrayed, in history generally, but also by SFA, specifically. The whispers turned into open criticism in 2020 when former founders, board members, alliance staff members, and others called for SFA to change its structure and programming.

When Southern Women Cook is a child of these experiences.

Written, edited, and designed by a diverse group of female changemakers, this curated collection of recipes and stories became a reality shortly after I became editor in chief of Cook’s Country, the same month that SFA was responding to demands for progress. With past as present, we invited more than 70 bold, bright women contributors to explore the womanish side of Southern food through their particular lens. The book is by no means a complete story, but it could be the starting point for a movement.

For as long as I can remember, I have fantasized about restoring a Victorian house in the South as a place where women would come together, cook for one another, and exchange cultural stories.

With this book, and my own nonprofit organization, I am reimagining that goal.

We will still want to learn more about Pardis Stitt and Subrina Collier, women who masterfully operate iconic restaurants alongside their chef husbands. More must be said about the women thriving in the beverage world—women like Ann Marshall, co-founder of High Wire Distilling; Susan Auler, a pioneer in Texas winemaking; master sommelier and award-winning hospitality group leader June Rodil; and Tahiirah Habibi, founder of the Hue Society, a group that provides uplifting cultural wine experiences. We want to dig deeper into the history- and science-based baking lessons taught by Stella Parks, Kentucky pastry chef and award-winning author of Bravetart: Iconic American Desserts. And we are eagerly looking forward to the day when articles describing the mouthwatering cooking of successful American men, such as James Villas and Craig Claiborne, also consider the mothers, aunties, and grandmothers who inspired them to greatness.

In the meantime, this collection, written by scholars, journalists, chefs, restaurateurs, farmers, and poets, brings you authentic truths shared by women who are resisting marginalization with determination and supporting each other with tales of female perseverance. They do so while making amazing food.

To describe this book more simply, I adapted a quote from the French feminist writer Hélène Cixous:

“We [are learning] to speak the language women speak when there is no one there to correct us.”

by Toni-Tipton Martin

Stuffed turkey wings

Gobi Manchurian

Buttermilk coleslaw

Aunt Jule’s pie

Banana pudding pie

Chocolate-lemon Doberge cake

Excerpted from “When Southern Women Cook” by Toni Tipton-Martin and Morgan Bolling. Published by America’s Test Kitchen. All rights reserved.