28 Essential Southern Recipes and How to Make Them from Scratch
A vision of Southern cooking includes platters of biscuits, pimento cheese sandwiches, and sweet tea on porches — all very accurate. But Southern food is so much more than that too. Interested in mastering a few Southern classics? We’ve rounded up 28 Southern recipes from our archives — some very traditional, and some more contemporary. We’ll give you pimento cheese, and then we’ll show you how to use it in a deviled egg; we’ll give you cornbread, and then we’ll show you how to turn it into stuffing.
These recipes will help you fill your kitchen with the taste of Dixie!
The Stories
To help put a frame on the recipes listed below, let’s get in the mood with some thoughts and observations on Southern food, entertaining, life, and culture.
- The 10 Commandments of Southern Entertaining
- Appalachian Porch Parties: A Surprising Lesson in Mindfulness, Country-Style
- My Childhood on Granny’s Front Porch
- 5 Things All Southern Hosts Know
- How Dinner on the Porch Helped Me Love the South
Some of the Basics
Folks in the South have strong feelings about what makes their food Southern food. (You only have to barely whisper about adding sugar to cornbread to a Southerner to understand what I’m talking about.) Here is all the intel you’ll need on classic Southern foods such as grits and biscuits.
- Grits, Demystified: A Brief Look at a Southern Staple
- 8 Things You Should Know About Biscuits
- How To Make Southern Biscuits
- When a Southerner Tells You How to Cook Green Beans, Shut Up and Listen
- John T. Edge’s 5 Essentials for the Southern Kitchen
- One Tip for Better Skillet Cornbread
The Recipes
From cornbread to the Sazerac, we’ve got you covered with many of the classic Southern recipes, plus a few variations on the theme.
Southern Classics
Appetizers
- Edna Lewis’ Old-Fashioned Cheese Straws
- Classic Pimento Cheese
- Pimento Cheese Deviled Eggs with Toasted Pecans
- Southern-Style Pickled Shrimp
Main Dishes
Soups and Sides
