'Long Nights and Log Fires: Warming Comfort Food for Family and Friends'
Commissioning Editor Julia Charles
Photography by Ryland Peters & Small
Ryland Peters & Small -- 2009
Buy it on Amazon

"When the cold wind blows and the snow piles up outside, where better to be than at the heart of a warm kitchen, enjoying the aromas of good home cooking wafting from the oven?" ponders the intro to the supremely satisfying "Long Nights and Log Fires" cookbook.

Crafting a comprehensive repertoire to all things comfort food, the gratifying collection dishes up everything from "soups and snacks," "sides and salads" to "one-pot wonders," "bakes and desserts" and even heart-warming drinks, including Mocha Maple Coffee and Mexican Chocolate with Vanilla Cream. Using a bevy of autumnal ingredients -- relying on fresh produce, flavorful herbs and spices and a comforting dairy element -- this cookbook features everything sweet, spicy and savory to satisfy palates on cold nights.

See what we tested and find out whether the book's worth buying after the jump.

Writing in The Root, Slate's online magazine covering African-American topics, Bryant Terry makes the argument that soul food has gotten a bad rap. Soul food is portrayed in popular culture as salty, fatty, sugar-laden comfort dishes like mac n' cheese, greens with ham hocks, fried chicken and lard biscuits. But half a century ago soul food meant the simple dishes Southern African-Americans ate for dinner, with plenty of fresh local ingredients - sauteed okra, stone ground grit cakes, homemade peach chutney. Sure there was fried chicken and cobbler, but that was hardly the whole picture, Terry says.

Terry, a Bay Area cookbook author originally from Memphis, hopes that bringing back locally focused, veggie-heavy soul food can help lower rates of obesity and diabetes in African-American communities. The article includes recipes for grit cakes and citrus collards with raisins. Yum.

When I saw a post on ZenKimchi Korean Food Journal about chitlins my first instinct was to exclaim, "Korean soul food? Say what!" Then I thought about it a little more, and I realized that with its hearty casseroles and stews, Korean cuisine has a lot in common with American soul food. It's just that the above dish of gobchang gui is, how to put this, a bit more soulful than other Korean fare I've encountered.

Technically, they're not chitlins, since they're beef, not pork, intestines. Either way, the dish sounds delicious. Some of you out there might be grossed out by the concept of eating a cow's small intestines. Not me, especially when I read that they taste like bacon and are stuffed with Korean pâté. Drool. To complete the organ meat orgy there was Makchang (sliced large intestine), beef heart and tripe smothered in pâté.

ZKFJ's author is lucky to be based in Korea. I've enjoyed Korean blood sausage in my native Queens, but have yet to encounter what amount to pâté-filled sausages. I gots to get me some gobchang y'all.

When a book goes so far as to put the phrase "from family and friends" in the title, you know it is going to be the type of book that a home cook can relate to. After all, we are generally cooking for our family and friends, aren't we? Brown Sugar: Soul Food Desserts from Family and Friends is the sort of cookbook that makes you want to cook for your loved ones, in addition to providing you with plenty of recipes that will put smiles on their faces.

The book is about soul food desserts and is, in fact, a follow-up to the author's previous work on that subject. The recipes have been collected from all over the country, so there is no regional bias towards any specific area, but the thread that connects everything is the "homespun style of African-American cuisine sprinkled with a healthy dose of brown sugar" - and while that sounds like a metaphor, there is quite literally brown sugar in just about every recipe in the book. They are all written in a casual, friendly style and are easy to follow. Some of the recipes include Raisin Oatmeal Cookies, Orange Buttermilk Pie and Burnt Sugar Ice Cream.

Who says that down-home soul food has to be unhealthy by definition? Soul food is about satisfying food that tastes great because it is made with flavorful ingredients and love. Both are things that can carry over to slightly lighter versions of favorite dishes without loosing anything but the fat.

Neo Soul is soul food with a healthy twist, but it is still only a twist because although this is a lower-fat cookbook, the author chooses to include some fat when flavor might suffer - a nice touch that some healthy cookbook authors forget about. Author Lindsay Williams grew up on soul food (he's the grandson of the founder of Sylvia Woods, founder of Silvia's restaurants and known as "the queen of soul food) and turned into a food addict. By tweaking his favorite dishes, he managed to put out some delicious food and loose about 200 pounds at the same time. If you need a little bit of convincing that healthy soul food is still soul food, try his recipe for Oven Fried Chicken before you buy the book.

When my dear friend Yukari brought my red velvet cake the other afternoon, I thought I must have died and gone to some sort of sugar-baked heaven. I asked her where she discovered this bizarre, deep red, Satanic looking concoction. Apparently it's all over Brooklyn, and she'd found out about it while working in the Buttacup Lounge.

For the unfamiliar, red velvet cake is party punch red and coated in thick white frosting. It's an equally decadent relative of chocolate cake. My own limited run-ins with it haven't yielded particularly chocolatey tasting encounters, but its richness and snowy cream cheese dressing could satisfy any chocolate lover's deepest desire.

A sort of red-velvet-legend attributes this cake to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. A guest ordered a slice and liked it so much that she asked for the recipe. The hotel gave it up and billed her $100. Furious, she spread the recipe around in chain letters.

I've read any number of pieces waxing rhapsodic about collard greens cooked the soul food way - about how delicious was the "pot likker" (I've really seen it spelled that way! honest!), about how wonderful the house smelled when you set the smoked pork products to cooking. About how nothing says comfort like the rich, tender, porky piles of essential vitamins and minerals. I doubted, but I figured I must be missing out on something really great. So, on slow cooking day, I set out to make soul food-style greens.

Neither my expensive Italian market nor my lower-priced supermarket had smoked ham hocks (and I was secretly relieved!) but they did have suggestion #2: smoked pork neck.

Here's how the recipe goes: you boil the smoked pork neck in several cups' water for hours until it's falling off the bone. I used one pound, although most recipes call for two. You clean, destem, and chop lots of collards - three to five bunches. I used three. You combine the mess and let it cook, stirring occasionally, until the collards are tender. Salt, pepper and hot sauce to taste.

I just don't love this. I didn't enjoy the smell, and I really could barely finish my serving of collards. My mom liked them, and so did a friend who's into soul food. Everyone else looked at them askance. I'll keep cooking collard greens - but I think I'm going to stick to my Mediterranean-inspired version.

[Photo Sarah Gilbert. And disclaimer: I totally stole the title idea from Love My Crock]

Newsweek recently featured an article about African-American chefs, restaurateurs and nutritionists that are trying to reinvent classic soul food dishes while keeping health in mind. Some shifts are simple: baked chicken instead of fried chicken; collard greens flavored with smoked turkey instead of ham hocks. Others, like the dishes of featured caterer Lindsey Williams (grandson of Sylvia Woods of Sylvia's in Harlem), deviate a little more. Williams' new cookbook Neo Soul was released this month by Penguin. Newsweek focues on dishes like veggie croquettes with tofu sour cream and Thai sesame dressing, but some of Williams' recipes listed by Penguin--trout stuffed with collard greens, okra gumbo, and "neo" sweet potato pie--sound a little more grounded. Another interesting item mentioned in the article was the Soul Food Pyramid, created by Hebni Nutrition Consultants in Orlando, Florida. Unfortunately, the Hebni site doesn't really let on too much about what's contained in the pyramid.