On 6/6/2010 12:57 PM, TammyM wrote:
> Christine Dabney wrote:
>> Since Ginny challenged me to start my own thread, and cause she and I
>> are such genteel southern ladies, I thought I would start something on
>> southern foods. Especially those served by genteel southern ladies
>> and gents. Wayne, are you out there??
>>
>> Of course, you non southern gents and ladies can post too..
>>
>> So to start, I will repost my pimento cheese recipe, which is not
>> really mine. I got it from the venerable James Villas and his book My
>> Mother's Southern Cooking. His mother was very much a southern lady,
>> in that she entertained a lot and made wonderful southern foods to
>> serve at her functions.
>
> OK, I'm about to start a fight here. The southern recipes I see on the
> web by and large just sound AWFUL! A-W-F-U-L!! Look at southern cooking
> at about.com sometime. I don't even bother if a googled recipe comes up
> on that site. Having said that, I have a fabulous cookbook of desserts
> from the Carolinas. And having said THAT, I have seen a couple of
> recipes in Southern Living that sounded ... ok :-}
>
> Then again, I'm told that even though I'm a native Californian, I'm just
> a damned yankee and my opinion doesn't count :->

If you want to know what genteel Southerners cook, you might want to go
over to Amazon and plug in "<name of Southern city> Junior League" and
you'll find a whole bunch of cookbooks containing recipes of varying
quality contributed by genteel Southern ladies, some of them passed down
from before the Civil War. The most established and best known is
probably "Charleston Receipts" from Charleston, SC, but it's far from
the only one. Many are out of print but can be had used.