Deep South: New Southern Cooking

Here is a very perplexing cookbook. Deep South is all about Southern cooking and Southern ways—yet it was published in the UK, and its primary ingredient measurements are metric. Our accustomed American units are in parentheses, and more often in fractions, thus making them rather inconvenient for our own home cooks. Written by chef Brad McDonald, its subtitle is New Southern Cooking, though the recipes are mostly of the old style. If you are looking for simple Southern recipes, you will be mostly disappointed. These are involved, and some are very complex, with scores of ingredients and just as involved preparations, such as making muffuletta or supposedly simple Southern Fried Chicken. And to find many of the ingredients, you need to live in the South (ramp, Muscadine grapes, tay berries). The recipe instructions are good, and the headnotes are sometimes quite extensive. Included are such recipes as roasting a whole hog. The book is richly illustrated with very good Southern street scenes and foods. McDonald included several essays interspersed among the recipes (on Southernness, on smoking foods, on hunting). This cookbook may be a good addition for Southerners if they are willing to accept the inconvenience of the measurements. The index is poor and virtually unusable.