cover image Southern Cooking

Southern Cooking

Margaret Lupo. Dell Publishing Company, $9.95 (291pp) ISBN 978-0-440-50076-6

Cooks from any region who want to try Southern home-style cooking will find this volume a good place to begin. A revised and expanded version of a self-published cookbook by an Atlanta restaurateur, it offers mainstream American dishes as well as regional Southern. Lucid, succinct recipes are a pleasure to use. Fried steak in gravy, honey spareribs, streak o' lean (salt pork with a strip of lean meat running though the fat), shrimp Creole and beef and bean sprouts are among the entrees. An array of vegetable dishes includes honey-baked onions, souffles made from broccoli, yellow squash, spinach or baked grits, and stewed fresh corn, a simply flavored item that is the restaurant's most popular vegetable, selling 300 to 500 orders daily, according to Lupo. Complementing the main dishes are green-tomato chowchow, ginger pear salad, chicken pecan gravy and apple-cheese stuffing. For dessert, there are rum custard, bourbon-pecan pie and peach crisp. (Dec.)