Pat Willard takes readers on a journey into the regional nooks and crannies of American cuisine where WPA writers-including Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Nelson Algren, among countless others-were dispatched in 1935 to document the roots of our diverse culinary cuisine. America Eats!, as the project was entitled, was never published. With the unpublished WPA manuscript as her guide, Willard visits the sites of American foods past glory to explore whether American t...

A cornucopia of culinary essays from "the Henry Miller of food writing. His passion is infectious" (Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal).Jim Harrison was one of this country's most beloved writers, a muscular, brilliantly economic stylist with a salty wisdom. For more than twenty years, he also wrote some of the best essays on food around, now collected in a volume that caused the Santa Fe New Mexican to exclaim: "To read this book is...

**Recommended by Chef José Andrés on The Drew Barrymore Show!A portrait of American food--before the national highway system, before chain restaurants, and before frozen food, when the nation's food was seasonal, regional, and traditional--from the lost WPA files**From the New York Times bestselling author who "powerfully demonstrates the defining role food plays in history and culture" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution).In the throes of the Great Depr...

A collection of 70 recipes celebrating the history and stories of the classic American soda fountain from one of the most-celebrated revival soda fountains in the country, Brooklyn Farmacy.A century ago, soda fountains on almost every Main Street in America served as the heart of the community, where folks shared sundaes, sodas, ice cream floats, and the news of the day. A quintessentially American institution, the soda fountain still speaks of a bygone era of innoc...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Part cookbook, part memoir, these “rollicking, poignant, sometimes hilarious tales” (USA Today) are the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s loving tribute to the South, his family and, especially, to his extraordinary mother.Here are irresistible stories and recipes from across generations. They come, skillet by skillet, from Bragg’s ancestors, from feasts and near famine, from funerals and celebrations, and from a...

Whether you live below the Mason Dixon Line or just wish you did, The Southerner’s Handbook is your essential guide to Southern living and the good life. Curated by the editors of the award-winning Garden & Gun magazine, this compilation of more than 100 instructional and narrative essays offers a comprehensive tutorial to modern-day life in the South.From Food and Drink to Sporting & Adventure; Home & Garden to Style, Arts & Culture, you'll discover essential ski...

"Like many miniencyclopedias, this one is studded with often intriguing facts."—KirkusNew York Post Required Reading and an Entertainment Weekly Top 3 Must-Read!**From the chief historian at HISTORY® comes a rich chronicle of the evolution of American cuisine and culture, from before Columbus's arrival to today.Did you know that the first graham crackers were designed to reduce sexual desire? Or that Americans have tried fad diets...

At the intersection of food and story, The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food offers a collection of food-related stories set in North Carolina, though geography is sometimes secondary to the main theme, which is food in any form: meals and manners, cooking and ingredients, recipes and recollections. Novelist Michael Parker writes about his mother's reluctant, but exclamation-point-laden food column for her husband's newspaper; Celia Rivenbark remembers her summer job at the on...

The multiple-James Beard Award–winning restaurant critic for Los Angeles Magazine delivers an arresting exploration of our cultural demand for "artisanal" foods in a world dominated by corporate agribusiness.We hear the word "artisanal" all the time—attached to cheese, chocolate, coffee, even fast-food chain sandwiches—but what does it actually mean? We take "farm to table" and "handcrafted food" for granted now but how did we get here? In Finding the Flavors We Lost

In the mid-1990s, Chris Kimball moved into an 1859 Victorian townhouse on the South End of Boston and, as he became accustomed to the quirks and peculiarities of the house and neighborhood, he began to wonder what it was like to live and cook in that era. In particular, he became fascinated with Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. Published in 1896, it was the best-selling cookbook of its age-full of odd, long-forgotten ingredients, fascinating details about how the r...

“Ian Jackman had the fool-hearty courage to set out armed with the two most dangerous tools for traveling in America, an inquiring mind and a hungry stomach. He lived to tell the tale with wit and charm.” — Mark Kurlansky, bestselling author of The Big Oyster and CodIan Jackman believes that life is too short to deny yourself our nation's true culinary treasures. Guided by food experts throughout the land, he travels from east to west—from small t...

Winner of the James Beard Cookbook of the Year award, Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread & Scuppernong Wine combines delicious recipes of Appalachian cuisine with the folklore surrounding the area's pioneer and present-day homesteaders.A modern-day classic, Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread & Scuppernong Wine serves up scrumptious Blue Ridge hill-country food and folklore in celebration of the fine people, rich traditions, and natural beauty found in one of th...