The Soul of Southern Cooking

This cookbook, with integrated brief essays, was a regional bestseller for the University Press of Mississippi when it was published in 1989. Republished now with a new introduction, the book collects a fine black cook’s recipes from a hard-scrabble heritage of surviving and enduring while rejoicing in the family ties that bind. The foods that Kathy Starr describes rise from the common experiences of Deep South blacks, who established a distinctive style of cooking, often with make-do ingredients. Its “soul,” the author confides, comes from the art of simmering. Its heritage is preserved here in a collection that captures the essence of black foodways in the American South.