Regional Cookbooks of Kentucky and Tennessee

Much classic southern food originated from African ingredients and traditions and was transformed into a distinct cuisine. As acknowledged in The Blue Grass Cook Book, that cuisine was embraced by white southerners as their own. And as industrialization made food faster to prepare or eat away from home, southerners increasingly looked back with fondness at the labor required to make delicious food from whatever was at hand. Twentieth-century writers such as Marion Flexner (mother of Vanderbilt Professor Emeritus John Flexner) and Nashville’s own Phila Hach found audiences hungry for both simple and elevated approaches to traditional home cooking.