Weekend Cooking: The Carolina Table edited by Randall Kenan

I'm a Yankee born and bred, and when I was a child, I had a narrow view of Southern food. I thought it consisted mostly of collard greens, grits, sweetened iced tea, cornbread, and fried chicken. Of course, as I matured and traveled, read and cooked, I learned just how wrong I was.

The short essays collected in Randall Kenan's The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food celebrate all kinds of Southern food and especially its connection to family and tradition.

The stories take us back to grandmother's kitchen or an aunt's vegetable garden. They remind us how a family recipe can resurrect precious memories. They return again and again to the role food plays at all of life's important moments, not just deaths and births but Sunday supper after church and lazy summer picnics.

The thirty pieces in The Carolina Table are varied and deeply personal. Here are a few highlights:

• I chuckled at Northerner Fran McCullough's discovery of the proper way to cook butter beans.
• Lee Smith pondered the differences between the food her mother cooked for the bridge club and the everyday dinners she made for the family.
• Bridgette Lacy made me miss summer with her essay on the splendor of garden-fresh tomatoes and the perfect mater sandwich.
• Daniel Wallace convinced me that the North Carolina Piedmont is the place for barbecue.
• I agreed with Marianne Gingher that "you can taste 'loving care' if foods are truly prepared with it."
• I smiled at Cathy Cleary's description of how homemade pork sausage changed her diet.
• Who could resist an essay that begins "Food is her only currency"? Diya Abdo, a Southern transplant from Jordan, tells that story.

Several of the essays in The Carolina Table are accompanied by a recipe, like Jill McCorkle's family pound cake, but the collection is at heart a love story to family and a confirmation of the way food binds us across space and through time.

If you like food writing, personal essays, Southern writing, and just plain good writing, you'll love the essays Randall Kenan gathered between the covers of The Carolina Table. Pour yourself a sweet tea, settle into the porch swing, and enjoy an afternoon of reading.

Published by Eno Publishing, 2016
ISBN-13: 9780997314403
Source: review (see review policy)
Copyright © cbl for Beth Fish Reads, all rights reserved (see review policy)

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Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book reviews (novel, nonfiction), cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs, restaurant reviews, travel information, or fun food facts. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page.

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Starting from Page 1: Six Summer Picks

It's July 4, which is American Independence Day and thus a day for being with friends and family, grilling, being outside, and watching fireworks. Yesterday, I was thinking about what I might want to read today and on all the warm summer days and evenings of the coming months.

Although some of the books I plan to read in the next eight weeks won't be published until later in the fall, I wanted to tell you about a half dozen titles that are out now or will be by the end of August. One way I choose my next book is by reading the opening lines, and I love it when bloggers share the first sentence or two of their current book. Here's what I read this morning.

Karen White
The Beach Trees
Penguin / New American Library, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780451233073
Fiction

Death and loss, they plague you. So do memories. Like the Mississippi's incessant slap against the levees, they creep up with deceptive sweetness before grabbing your heart and pulling it under.

Craig Nova
Brook Trout and the Writing Life
Eno Publishers, 2011 (new edition)
ISBN-13: 9780982077146
Outdoor writing / essays

Often the connection between things is not obvious to the eye, and even when it is, it can take years, if not decades, for me to see just what is associated with what. The events of my life and brook trout often meet at the line of demarcation between the world of the fish and the world of the fisherman, between the seen and the unseen.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh
The Language of Flowers
Random House / Ballantine, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780345525543
Fiction

For eight years I dreamed of fire. Trees ignited as I passed them; oceans burned. The sugary smoke settled in my hair as I slept, the scent like a cloud left on my pillow as I rose. Even so, the moment my mattress started to burn, I bolted awake.

Darin Strauss
Half a Life
Random House, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780812982534
Memoir

Half my life ago, I killed a girl.

I had just turned eighteen, and when you drive in new post-adolescence, you drive with friends.

Amy Hatvany
Best Kept Secret
Simon & Schuster / Washington Square Press, 2011
ISBN-13: 9781439193310
Fiction

Being drunk in front of your child is right up there on the Big Bad No-No List of Motherhood. I knew what I was doing was wrong. I knew it with every glass, every swallow, every empty bottle thrown into the recycle bin. I hated drinking. I hated it . . . and I couldn't stop.

Christie Watson
Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away
The Other Press, 2011
ISBN-13: 9781590514665
Fiction

Father was a loud man. His voice entered a room before he did. From my bedroom window I could hear him sitting in the wide gardens, or walking to the car parking area filled with Mercedes, or standing by the security guard's office or the gate in front.

From the opening lines, which of these would you read first? I'm not sure where to begin.

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