The most commercial cookbook we’ve selected with which to work, The Southern Living Cookbook serves as a valuable comparison point for the more localized books in our collection. Rather than focusing on a more home-oriented collection of local dishes, Southern Living magazine compiled this cookbook to serve as a more widespread survey of Southern cooking, though as a result it isn’t as distinctly Southern as many of the other ones in the collection. However, there is a personal element to it; the recipes within the cookbook—which, by the way, does have newer versions, but we chose to work with an older one to see if there was any discrepancy resulting from time—came directly from the staff of Southern Living, who in turn drew from their family kitchens and inherited recipes to share with an audience wider than most cookbooks ever reach.

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Payne, Susan Carlisle. The Southern Living Cookbook. Oxmoor House Inc, 1987.