Hot Chicken Cookbook: The Fiery History & Red-Hot Recipes of Nashville's Beloved Bird

Nashville-style Hot Chicken is the Music City’s claim to culinary fame. Entrenched in the city’s history, but also fresh enough to contribute to Nashville’s exploding national popularity as a creative urban scene, Hot Chicken is an addiction and a sweet, spicy salvation to those who've had it.

In The Hot Chicken Cookbook, Timothy Davis, a chef, writer, and Nashville resident, traces the dish’s origins back to the late 1930’s at Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, a story of love gone wrong, and follows the trail to its white-hot buzz of today. For more perspective on devotion, he visits the Nashville Hot Chicken Festival and talks chicken with The Chew's Carla Hall, Food Network personality Andrew Zimmern, Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, writer of “Return to Hot Chicken”, Joe Kwan of the Avett Brothers, and other culinary luminaries like Edward Lee, Linton Hopkins, Sarah Gavigan, Steven Satterfield, and Hugh Acheson. Featuring over two-dozen recipes from the finest Hot Chicken restaurants in Nashville and beyond, The Hot Chicken Cookbook tells the tale of Music City's fiery bird going global to influence a world of chefs and eaters.

Timothy Charles Davis has written for a host of outlets, including Saveur, the Christian Science Monitor, Gastronomica, Mother Jones, Salon.com, and The Oxford American. He is a former staff writer and food columnist at Creative Loafing in Charlotte, NC and Weekly Surge in Myrtle Beach, SC. He contributed as an associate editor for Gravy, the official magazine of the Southern Foodways Alliance, and was also a co-writer of The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook. He lives in Nashville, TN, where he’s written for outlets including Nashville Scene, Nashville Lifestyles, and The East Nashvillian, and worked in more restaurant kitchens than he’d care to mention. He’s a “hot, extra bread, extra pickles” kind of guy, sometimes dropping down to a “medium” for a few weeks in the interest of self-preservation.