Southern culture is so distinctly tied in with the rituals of eating, no refugee can escape its pull for long. From the moment we're fed that first bite of sweet potato pie while screeching in our high chairs, Southerners see food as far more than nourishment.
Most Southerners can and will argue until they're blue in the face about the whats, whens, wheres and hows of our cherished regional cuisine, and, frankly, so could we. But instead of riding the fence and, bearing in mind it's impossible to please everyone, we came up with our own simple set of criteria. The South, for the purposes of including cookbooks here, stretches from Virginia to Florida and from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean.
