What could be more Southern than eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day? How about sweet tea, deviled eggs, pimiento cheese, ambrosia, three-bean salad, shrimp boats, red beans and rice, corn pudding, fried okra, red eye gravy, cream doughnuts, cup custard, lemon icebox pie and divinity? If your mouth is watering from that recitation of down-home specialties, you'll like Screen Doors and Sweet Tea, a Southern cookbook which escalates the competition in a crowded field.
According to her bio, author Martha Hall Foose is a Mississippi Delta cook who studied in France, and the cuisine bears this out. True Southern fare -- heavy on the influences delta and soul -- is approached with reverence and then presented with signature spin: Foose is not the first cookbook author to prepare banana pudding (page 198) in individual servings, but she may be the first to suggest you do it in canning jars. As far as I know, she is definitely the first to make sweet tea pie (page 203) -- a recipe so crazy and that it would have made my grandmother applaud and so good that, according to the head note, it got Foose into the state fair pie baking contest. She didn't win, but then again, the winner probably didn't go on to write a cookbook as good as this.
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