Southern from Scratch: Pantry Essentials and Down-Home Recipes

A guide to Southern scratch cooking—150 recipes for pantry essentials and modern twists on traditional recipes.

Build a from-scratch Southern pantry with 50 essential recipes, then discover the versatility and flexibility of cooking from your larder with 100 more recipes for fresh takes on Southern favorites. Learn how to make the most of local ingredients with recipes for pickles and relishes, jams and spreads, sauces and vinegars, and more that use whole, natural, and in-season produce. With these flavorful bases and embellishments on hand, Ashley English opens up a world of Southern cuisine by sharing ideas and recipes that incorporate these classic staples. Have a batch of Dill Pickles? Make Fried Dill Pickles with Sorghum Mayo. Not sure what to do with that Muscadine Jelly? Make some Pork Meatballs with a Muscadine Glaze. With recipes ranging from Southern Greens with Chow Chow, Pickled Beet Deviled Eggs, and Succotash to Cornmeal Catfish with Spikey Tartar Sauce, Slow Cooker Barbeque Chicken, and Grit Cakes with Country Ham and Applesauce, this is a warm and down-to-earth homage to Southern Appalachian home cooking.

ASHLEY ENGLISH is a lifelong cook, baker, and gardener with a wide breadth of knowledge on issues of sustainability and foodways. She has earned degrees in both holistic nutrition and sociology. She is a member of Slow Food USA and has worked over the years with a number of non-profit organizations committed to social and agricultural issues. She maintains a blog at www.small-measure.blogspot.com and a bi-monthly column at Design*Sponge (200K regular readers). Her Homemade Living series (Lark) launched in Spring 2010 includes four books total. She has regular columns in the new magazines Where Women Cook and Taproot. Ashley and her husband currently reside in Candler, NC, with their young son and a menagerie of chickens, dogs, cats, and bees, where they are converting their land into a thriving homestead.

Johnny Autry's work has been featured in Victuals by Ronni Lundy, Poole's by Ashley Christensen, and Buxton Hall Barbeque's Book of Smoke by Elliot Moss, as well as in Bon Appetit, Cooking Light, Southern Living, Better Homes & Gardens, GQ, and more.