The Gift of Southern Cooking: Recipes and Revelations from Two Great Southern Cooks.

The Gift of Southern Cooking is the celebrated collaboration between Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock, two of the most admired figures in American Southern cooking. Lewis, the granddaughter of formerly enslaved people who founded the Freetown community in Virginia, became known as the grande dame of Southern cuisine through such classics as The Taste of Country Cooking, championing the fresh, seasonal cooking of her Virginia childhood. Peacock, a younger Alabama-born chef, became her close friend and collaborator, and together they spent years preserving and refining the traditional recipes of the rural South. Published in 2003, the book gathers their recipes and reminiscences, from biscuits and fried chicken to the fundamental techniques of the Southern kitchen, and won the James Beard Foundation Award. It stands as a landmark celebration of African American and Southern culinary heritage.