The Kitchen I Came Home To: Big Flavors and Tall Tales from My Corner of Kentucky - Hardcover

Bradley, Sara; Timberlake, Emily

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593837401 ISBN 13: 9780593837405

Publisher: Ten Speed Press, 2026

Synopsis

Two-time Top Chef finalist Sara Bradley invites you to pull up a chair for a celebration that’s a little bit Sunday supper, a little bit Saturday night, with over 100 recipes packed with big flavor, moxie, and plenty of heart.

“This is the kind of cookbook that makes you slow down, gather the people you love, and cook with joy. Rooted in Kentucky and brimming with Southern warmth, it’s a beautiful reminder of how powerful food can be.”—Kristen Kish

Sara Bradley always knew the kind of food she wanted to cook. Growing up Jewish in Paducah with her mom and grandma's twists on Kentucky classics, Sara developed a deep love for exploring different cuisines while also staying rooted in the regional traditions that make the city what it is: not just the midwest, not just the south, but the middle of everywhere.

Sara's recipes don't use any fancy ingredients or tools and are based in easy-to-learn techniques she learned in her childhood and culinary school. Like how to know when heirloom stone-ground grits are done cooking (hint: use the roof of your mouth) and what it takes to make a steak that's perfectly charred on the outside and medium-rare on the inside (lots of butter). Alongside these techniques are tips on how to use up leftovers and make them into something new, as well as stories showing just how deep the love for food runs in Sara's family.

In The Kitchen I Came Home To, Sara shares more than 100 recipes, including:

• Beer Cheese with Crudités
• Duck and Dumplings
• Goat Cheese and Honey Kugel
• Sweet Tea–Brined Chicken Thighs
• Cornmeal-Coated Catfish and Fried Pickle Chips
• Roasted Garlic Matzo
• Braised Pork Pot Roast with Fennel Aioli
• Strawberry Basil Pie with Black Pepper Whooped Cream
• River Bottom Peanut Butter Fudge
• Green Onion Dressing, aka GOD Dressing

With heartfelt and hilarious stories, plus more than 100 recipes, The Kitchen I Came Home To will fill you up with joy, laughter, and delicious food.

About this title

About the Author

Sara Bradley grew up in Western Kentucky. She has cooked professionally for more than twenty years, including for Michelin-starred chefs in New York and Chicago. In 2015, she opened her own restaurant, freight house, back home in Paducah, Kentucky, and in 2025, she was a James Beard Award finalist for Best Chef: Southeast. Sara is a two-time runner-up on Top Chef, a Chopped Grand Champion, and the first-ever Chopped Legend. In 2025, she was the first rookie competitor to ever make it to the finals of Food Network’s Tournament of Champions. When she’s not at the restaurant, you'll find her digging for lucky rocks with her husband, Austin, or chasing dreams with her daughters, Lula and Hazel.

Emily Timberlake is the coauthor of award-winning and bestselling books including House of Nanking with Kathy and Peter Fang, I Sleep in My Kitchen with Mariam Daud, Foodheim with Eric Wareheim, Cure with Neal Bodenheimer, and Chapter One with Bobby Flay. A former senior editor at Ten Speed Press, she has edited more than sixty-five books on food, beverage, and pop culture. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband, daughter, and two cats.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Welcome to Paducah

Here’s the thing about my hometown of Paducah, Kentucky: Even if you’ve never heard of it, even if you couldn’t possibly guess its location on a map, I guarantee you know somebody who knows somebody who has a connection to this place.

Seriously, now that you’ve picked up this book, you’re going to start noticing mentions of Paducah everywhere—in old country songs, in history books, on road signs on your next long car trip. When people ask me about Paducah, I half-jokingly describe it as “the middle of everywhere.” On the one hand, this is my way of pushing back against the idea that I grew up in some Podunk, middle-of-nowhere place. But geographically speaking, it feels true! Paducah, and Kentucky for that matter, is a place that is hard to categorize. It isn’t exactly Southern, or exactly Northern, or exactly Midwestern; it’s all and none of the above. And one thing I’ve learned in my life is this: No matter how far I travel, no matter which direction I go, for me, all roads lead back home to Paducah.

Nestled on the banks of a river (several, actually), Paducah is a classic American “micropolis.” The streets of the downtown historic district are lined with wrought-iron streetlamps and nineteenth-century brick buildings, many with brightly painted facades. Picture a Hallmark movie, with a quaint, tree-lined Main Street and quilting museum . . . That’s Paducah. (No joke; Hallmark is literally filming here as I write this.)

Fewer than thirty thousand people live here, but Paducah’s got a ton of character. It’s an old city that was on the Lewis and Clark expedition maps, and it’s even UNESCO-certified as a notable place for craft and folk art because of that quilting museum and our long love affair with fiber arts. Okay, that doesn’t exactly make us sound like a swinging party town, but I’m telling you, Paducah is cool. You can definitely take your drink to go when you’re bar—or restaurant—hopping downtown. I’ve even seen quilters carrying cups of red wine as they mosey from one art studio to another. When I moved back home in 2015, I immediately sensed an energy that hadn’t been there when I left fifteen years earlier. There were all these young people running around, all these interesting businesses. I’m really proud to call this place home and to have become a part of the local economy and cultural scene.

Take a short trip out of town and you’ll find yourself in one of the richest agricultural regions in the country, with pristine lakes and green, fertile farmland that is fed by the Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, Cumberland, and Mississippi Rivers. My restaurant, Freight House, is actually housed in an old vegetable depot—a train station on the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway (NC&StL) lines that was built in 1921 and is on the national register of historic places. For years and years, all the beautiful produce from the region arrived from nearby farms on the backs of trucks, then got loaded onto trains and transported down the line. I love that one hundred years later, our restaurant is still a depot of sorts, a place for people to taste the fruits, vegetables, and dishes of our microregion.

The origins of Paducah’s name aren’t entirely clear; it may have been named to honor Chief Paduke, a legendary Chickasaw leader, or possibly the Padouca tribe of Native Americans who lived here before Europeans arrived. Paducah really is in the middle of everywhere, and that’s why I think our food is so damn good. Kentucky is where all of America’s best culinary traditions converge. It’s a land of smoky, salty barbecue; rich, gumbo-like burgoo; beautiful freshwater fish; sweet greens; casseroles; cornbread; and of course, plenty of delicious bourbon to wash it all down.

Because of its location at the confluence of so many important rivers and railroads, Paducah has, since its founding by European settlers in the early 1800s, been an important trade outpost. From Paducah you can travel northeast up the Ohio River to Cincinnati, and you can taste that Rust Belt influence in dishes like Goetta Meatloaf (page 161), which I make with a cinnamon-chili glaze and serve over spaghetti. (Don’t knock it till ya try it!) If you go west on the Mississippi River you’ll end up in St. Louis, or you can take a train to Chicago. Head south on the Cumberland River and you’ll soon find yourself in Nashville, or take the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf and New Orleans. That’s how dishes like Mussel Gumbo (page 79), pickled shrimp (page 95), and Crawfish Pot Pies (page 175) end up in this book.

There was a time when I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get to run a restaurant in my hometown. This industry is notoriously tough, and I worried that the only way I’d have a shot at success was to open in a big city with an established dining scene. But now, nearly a decade in, I can’t imagine Freight House existing anywhere else. Before opening in 2015, I’d worked all over the country: Birmingham, Charlotte, New York, Chicago. In New York and Chicago, people approached me about doing my own thing. But whenever I thought about the food I wanted to cook, and the people I wanted to cook it for, a not-so-quiet voice in my head told me that I needed to get back to Kentucky.

One day, when my family and I were on vacation together, drinking cheap beer and shooting the shit by the pool, I said aloud something I’d been thinking for some time: “I wish I could just open up a restaurant in Paducah. But I don’t think I’ll ever get to do it.”

My sister, Ellen, whom I often call my spiritual sous-chef, looked at me and said, “Why not? If that’s what you really want to do, just do it.” I always take my sous-chefs’ feedback seriously. So, within a year, I had moved back home—to my parents’ extra bedroom, to be exact, which wasn’t easy for me as a thirty-two-year-old—and signed a lease on a vacant, run-down railroad depot. Nine months later, my folks and I had whooped that space into a fully running restaurant.

Freight House has always been a family affair. Everyone chipped in one way or another. My sister gave me the confidence to move back home and really go for it. My brother offered sound business advice (and some other shit—love ya, Joe). My father helped me develop the business plan. The winter I moved back, there was a brutal storm and I was snowed in for a week at my folks’ home with nothing to do but write fake schedules, price out ingredients, and pick Dad’s brain. My mother found the location—she was chatting someone up at the gym, and they said, “Oh, you have to show this space to Sara.” For the first five years, my mother worked at the restaurant nearly every day, as our pie chef and kitchen mom. She’s since retired to a life of grandchildren, golf, and “running logistics” for the restaurant—that’s what we call going to the grocery store and taking items to the post office.

Most important of all, I credit my mother with sparking my interest in the culinary arts. She is the person who taught me, from a very young age, the joy and magic of a good meal, and that the best food is food that’s made with love.

Unlike so many American kids of my generation, my brother, sister, and I didn’t grow up eating lots of fast food or takeout. Bebe (now that I have kids, we call her by her grandma name) is a great cook, and our table was always filled with beautiful food that blended her Jewish heritage with Kentucky classics. Today, I like to joke that my signature style is taking classic Jewish dishes and making them treif, or unkosher. We’re all very proud of our Jewish roots, but none of us are giving up pork. It just ain’t happening.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ten Speed Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593837401
• ISBN 13: 9780593837405
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272