For Her

Going Away Shoes
By Jill McCorkle

Eleven short stories, full of longing and laughter, from the “guardian angel of short fiction.”

The Dinner Diaries: Raising Whole Wheat Kids in a White Bread World
By Betsy Block

A humorous, life-changing book on mom’s mission to achieve the ultimate of all makeovers: improving the family meal. Complete with helpful charts, food lists, recipes, tips, and suggested culinary and farm programs for kids.

Last Bite: A Novel of Culinary Romance
By Nancy Verde Barr

Casey Costello, an executive chef at morning television show, is too busy for men…that is until she’s unexpectedly whisked off her feet by the adorable Danny O’Shea, a rising chef from Ireland who seems like he may be more trouble than he’s worth.

For Him

Hard Work: A Life On and Off the Court
By Roy Williams with Tim Crothers

An inspiring memoir from the head coach of the UNC Tar Heels Men’s Basketball team.

Boone: A Biography
By Robert Morgan

This rich, authoritative biography offers a wholly new perspective on a man who has been an American icon for more than two hundred years.

Far Bright Star: A Novel
By Robert Olmstead

Napoleon Childs, an aging cavalryman,  leads an expedition of inexperienced soldiers into the mountains of Mexico to hunt down Pancho Villa and bring him to justice.

For the Gardener

Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities
By Amy Stewart

An A to Z of plants that kill, maim, intoxicate, and otherwise offend.

A Rose by Any Name: The Little-Known Lore and Deep-Rooted History of Rose Names
By Douglas Brenner and Stephen Scanniello

With full-color art throughout, this eclectic little volume is a marvelous miscellany starring what is arguably the world’s most popular flower.

The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden
By William Alexander

Part humor tale and part garden memoir, The $64 Tomato follows Bill Alexander on his journey from organic idealist to pragmatic food producer, and from eager backyard gardener to tired gentleman farmer–taking time along the way to reflect on ecology, nature, and the meaning of it all.

For the Foodie

The Feasting Season
By Nancy Coons

Meg Parker is a harried mom in a lackluster marriage until she lands a dream assignment: to write a guidebook about French history. Follow her adventures as lamb daube, paella and rosé, bull steak and anchioade, Brebis and strawberries awaken her senses.

Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South
By John T. Edge

Spark a delicious road-trip with this guide to savory, Southern restaurants!

Seasoned in the South: Recipes from Crook’s Corner and from Home
By Bill Smith

Structured around the seasons and the freshest seasonal foods, this cookbook offers up marvelously uncomplicated recipes— Tomato and Watermelon Salad, Fried Green Tomatoes with Sweet Corn and Lemon Beurre Blanc, Pork Roast with Artichoke Stuffing, and his signature dish, Honeysuckle Sorbet—the new bistro food of the South.

For the 20-Something

Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small
By John Cook with Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance

The exuberant story–in words and pictures–of a much-loved indie record label that, despite the odds, has become a major success story.

Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers
Illustrated by Edward Hemingway; Text by Mark Bailey

The perfect blend of classic cocktail recipes, literary history, and tales of the good old days of extravagant Martini lunches and delicious excess.

Rock On: An Office Power Ballad
By Dan Kennedy

Kennedy chronicles his misadventures at a major record label. Whether he’s directing a gangsta rapper’s commercial or battling his punk roots to create an ad campaign celebrating the love songs of Phil Collins, Kennedy’s in way over his head in this power-ballad to office life and rock and roll.

For the Travel Enthusiast

A  Thousand Days in Tuscany: A Bittersweet Adventure
By Marlena de Blasi

In search of the rhythms of country living, Marlena and her husband move to a barely renovated former stable in Tuscany with no phone, no central heating, and something resembling a playhouse kitchen. They dwell among two hundred villagers, ancient olive groves, and hot Etruscan springs. Together, they discover the soul of Tuscany and explore all the land has to offer.

Very Washington DC: A Celebration of the History and Culture of  America’s Capital City
By Diana Hollingsworth Gessler

A travel guide with character, this fact-filled keepsake offers all the history, beauty, charm, and culture of our nation’s capital city. Also included are an index of sites and a useful appendix of addresses, Web sites, Metro stops, and phone numbers.

New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City
By Andrei Codrescu

New Orleans has been author Andrei Codrescu’s hometown for over twenty years. This collection of essays is an epic love song , a clear-eyed elegy, a cultural celebration, and a thank-you note to New Orleans in its Golden Age.

For the Pet Lover

My Therapist’s Dog: Lessons in Unconditional Love
By Diana Wells

An intriguing exploration into the rewards of relationships–both the canine and human varieties–begins when the author agrees to dog-sit for her therapist. What follows is an exploration of our canine connection: what we name our dogs, how we breed them, how we’ve explored the wilderness with them, the kinds of literature we write about them, why we love them, and, most important, what we can learn from them.

First Dogs: American Presidents and Their Best Friends
By Roy Rowan and Brooke Janis

A lighthearted romp through American history, packed with drawings and paintings from early America, plus photographs, starting with Abraham Lincoln’s Fido all the way to Obama’s Bo.

Enslaved by Ducks
By Bob Tarte

Bob gets more than he bargains for when he marries Linda and moves to rural Michigan: there’s Binky, a belligerent rabbit who craves high voltage wires; Ollie, a tyrannical parakeet who brutally attacks the Tartes; and Stanely Sue, the gender-bending parrot; and more. This hilarious account gives us the other side of animal ownership: the complicated logistics of blending species under one roof, the intricate routines that evolve before you realize it, and ultimately, the distinct and insistent personalities of every animal inside—and outside—the house.

-christina

It’s been a couple of years since the revised and updated paperback of Southern Belly hit bookstore shelves. Every so often, I come across a few places that should have made the book. Here, and on www.southernbelly.com, I’ll add short updates that I consider to be worthy addendums to a roll call of great eats backed by great stories.

Walker’s Southern Style Bar-B-Que
10828 Haynes Blvd.
New Orleans, LA
504-241-8227

In the early 1990s, while running a catering company, Wanda and Skip Walker began smoking pork for cochon de lait poor boys and selling the sandwiches at rural festivals. By the early years of the 21^st century, they were serving those poor boys at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

The naming of the sandwich was a bit of a conceit. In Cajun Country, to the west of New Orleans, cochon de lait translates from the French as a whole suckling pig, roasted over a wood fire.

The Walkers took what was once a boucherie standard and, by way of cooking bone-in pork butts instead of whole suckling pigs, modernized it. In the process, they codified a new poor boy style.

At Walker’s Southern Style Bar-B-Que, their hutch of a restaurant by the Lake Ponchartrain levee, they cook those pork butts in a Southern Pride brand smoke box, pull the smoky pork into shreds, pile on coleslaw, and — in a tip of the hat to the emerging import of Vietnamese cookery and culture — tuck the whole into pistolettes, sourced from Dong Phuong Oriental Bakery.

Wonder Bar
Bridgeport Hwy.
Clarksburg, WV
304-622-1451

Perched above a 4-lane highway, at the top of a vertiginous road, the Wonder Bar, open since the 1940s and constructed to recall a lodge in the Rocky Mountains, is a steakhouse of the Red Velvet Bordello School.

The walls are flocked with photos of long serving cooks like Sam Hunter, a giant of a man famous for wielding a giant spatula. The wine list is serious, a leather-bound volume with true heft.

The draws are big hunks of meat, swamped in butter, topped with sweet and hot peppers.

Like pepperoni rolls, which are the preferred snack food hereabouts, the Wonder Bar is a vestige of days when West Virginia’s coal mining industry drew scores of Italian immigrants.

Drive the streets of Clarksburg and you’ll spy a number of southern Italian spaghetti and steak restaurants. The Clique Club comes to mind. So does Minard’s Spaghetti Inn. But The Wonder Bar, run by Debbie Folio Cherubino, daughter of founder John Folio, and her husband, Mickey Cherubino, is a true keeper of the red sauce flame.

John T. Edge is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. The SFA documents, teaches and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South. The SFA has completed more than 400 oral histories and 20 films, focusing on the likes of fried chicken cooks, row crop farmers, oystermen, and bartenders.

Edge writes a monthly column, “United Tastes,” for the New York Times. He writes a restaurant column for Garden & Gun. He is a longtime columnist for the Oxford American. His work for Saveur and other magazines has been featured in seven editions of the Best Food Writing compilation.

Edge is the editor of seven books, including the foodways volume of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. He is the author of six books, including Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South, and the James Beard Foundation Award–nominated cookbook, A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South. In 2009, he was elected to the Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America.