'Craig Claiborne's Southern Cooking'Craig Claiborne with foreword by John T. Edge and Georgeanna Milam
University of Georgia Press -- 2007 (originally published in 1987 by Clamshell Productions, Ltd.)
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"It is not a question of chauvinism, but I have always averred that Southern cooking is by far the vastest and most varied of all traditional regional cooking in this country," wrote Craig Claiborne in the foreword to this pan-Southern paean to the cuisine of his childhood.
While Claiborne fled the physical South -- and his legendarily smothering mother, Miss Kathleen -- in favor of a stint in the Navy, hotel school in Switzerland and a multi-decade tenure as food editor of the New York Times, his palate remained staunchly attuned to the servant-cooked colloquial fare he'd enjoyed at his mother's boardinghouse.
What we tested and whether the book's worth buying after the jump.













