Books by Three Giants Back in Print
Camille Glenn and the late Eugene Walter and Bill Neal were arguably three of the best Southern food writers of the last century. Recently, four of their masterworks have been brought back into print in affordable new editions.

Camille Glenn’s The Heritage of Southern Cooking: An Inspired Tour of Southern Cuisine (Black Dog & Leventhal, $24.95), a modern classic that has never gone out of print, has been reinterpreted in a handsome new, color-picture-filled edition. Even if you have the original, you will find this book hard to resist.

Bill Neal’s Biscuits, Spoonbread, and Sweet Potato Pie (UNC Press, $19.95), originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, has come home to Neal’s first publisher. Neal’s inspired recipes and meticulous research make this a must-have for anyone interested in regional American baking.

Eugene Walter, a native of Mobile, is best known as the author of the best-selling American Cooking: Southern Style in the Time-Life Foods of the World series. Walter is an inspired storyteller. His Delectable Dishes from Termite Hall (The Bookshop Press, Townsend, Georgia, $18.95), originally published in 1982, has been reprinted with a foreword by Pat Conroy. This quirky book is full of riotous stories and truly delectable recipes.

Hints & Pinches (Hill Street Press, $15.95) is long on tall tales and short on verifiable history, but it’s vintage Eugene Walter: chock full of great recipes, Walter’s delicious pen and ink drawings, and plain good writing. Originally published in 1991, its return to print, with a new foreword by John T Edge, is most welcome.

Damon Lee Fowler

Brown Sugar: Soul Food Desserts from Family and Friends
By Joyce White. HarperCollins Publishers, $24.95.

Dessert is an essential part of any Southern meal, and we should never let the carbohydrate counters take that away from us. Alabama native Joyce White, whose earlier book Soul Food explored home-style African American cooking, here takes on the world of pies, cakes, cookies, ice creams, and jams and jellies that provide a proper, sweet ending for a Southern dining experience.

Some of the recipes are collected from family and friends; many are recipes that White herself perfected after eating a delicious dish for which the cook could not—or would not—share the recipe. I’m eager to try her watermelon ice cream, for which she devised a method of intensifying the watermelon flavor with a syrup of pureed watermelon and sugar.

White’s book is particularly welcome to those of us who no longer have mothers or grandmothers close at hand to answer questions about how to make the desserts we grew up with. Her discussion of caramelizing sugar is a valuable guide to the world of burnt-sugar candies and cake icings dear to the South. While all the recipes are rooted firmly in Southern tradition, many of them provide new twists on traditional favorites: peach coconut cake, spicy molasses pecan pie, a version of banana pudding with gingersnaps rather than the usual vanilla wafers. It’s a mouth-watering collection of recipes that confirms the generosity and creativity of the soul of the South.

Thomas Head

Pickled: Vegetables, Fruits, Roots, More-Preserving a World of Tastes and Traditions
By Lucy Norris. Stewart, Tabori & Chang, $22.50.

A popular conceit holds that only the freshest in-season foods should grace our tables for proper, healthful, and, let’s face it, morally sound meals. Unchecked, such policies might leave us bereft of such preserved pleasures as country hams, lowcountry atjar, chow-chows, and pickled peppers. Lucy Norris soundly plugs this philosophical bunghole with Pickled, her paean to the brined, fermented, and otherwise mildly rotten foods we can’t live without.

Pickled weaves oral histories gathered for a New York Food Museum project among some 80 family recipes documenting ethnic picking traditions. The celebrated pickles of Eastern Europe’s winter larder—dills, beets, sauerkraut—bob to the surface, but Norris successfully dips deeper for fried dills, watermelon flesh (the other watermelon pickle), Korean kimchis, ceviche, and preserved lemons.

Whether you regard them as summer in a jar or corruption in the cupboard, do yourself a favor: Make pickles before winter sets in. None of Norris’s recipes holds universal appeal—pickled duck tongues, anyone?—but the book is a gem for sensible cooks willing to buck a trend that implies pickles are déclassé, too much trouble, or, worst of all, just plain make you a bad person.

Matthew Rowley