Southern's Cook Handbook

Crispy fried chicken, field peas simmered with savory pork, crusty cornbread hot from the skillet, three-layer caramel cake, homemade peach ice cream-old-time dishes like these have made Southern cooking a cherished tradition. Southern cousins, Courtney Taylor and Bonnie Carter Travis, both experienced cooks and writers, now bring that traditon to you.
In "The Southern Cook's Handbook", Taylor and Travis get into the kitchen with you, explaining the fundamentals of Southern cooking and telling you how ingredients should look, feel, and smell. You can't go wrong with the extensive methods section, featuring step-by-step instructions for all the basics from pan-frying and making gravy to rolling out the perfect pie crust and whipping up the lightest cream cake.

You'll find a wealth of tips and techniques to make you an instant expert: a chapter on choosing fresh produce; charts for blanching, barbecuing, and measuring; a glossary of cooking terms; and much, much more. The authors also provide recipes for over 200 of the South's most popular delights-old favorites like mint juleps, gumbo, cheese grits, fried okra, pecan pie, blackberry cobbler, and fig preserves.

"The Southern Cook's Handbook" is a how-to manual, a primer for the new cook, as well as a refresher course for the old hand. It is an essential reference for any cook's kitchen.


Courtney Taylor was born and raised in Natchez, Mississippi, where she learned to cook as a child at her great grandmother's side. This marked the beginning of her lifelong fascination with food.

In her cooking career, Taylor has created food gift items for the Lee Bailey shops in Saks Fifth Avenue, developed the recipes for Lee Bailey's Southern Food and Plantation Houses (Clarkson Potter, 1989), wrote How to Eat Like a Southerner and Live to Tell the Tale (Clarkson Potter, 1990). For the past seven years she has been the food feature writer and food columnist for the Jackson (MS) Clarion Ledger. In 1997 she received an award for her newspaper column from the National Association of Food Journalists. Taylor now lives in Madison, Mississippi, with her husband and two children.

Bonnie Carter Travis

Bonnie Carter Travis grew up on a cattle farm outside Natchez, Mississippi, where she spent long hours in the kitchen with her mother and the family's two hired cooks, a brother and sister who were not only master cooks but also expert story-tellers. So, from the beginning, Travis associated the kitchen with good times and good conversation.

She received her B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Mississippi and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Southern Mississippi, where she later served as an English professor and Director of the linguistics program. Travis is the author of Southern Cooking: Methods and Memorable Recipes (Prentice-Hall, 1981), as well as five English textbooks. She was also instructor of writing for oceanographers at NASA, director of various writing workshops, contributor to humorous publications, and editor for scholarly articles and books. Travis lives in Madison, Mississippi, with her husband.


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