Bryson Francine - Country cooking from a redneck kitchen

Once your lifelong dream has been fulfilled, what do you do next? Thats the question that kept running through my mind after I wrote my first cookbook, Blue Ribbon Baking from a Redneck Kitchen. After a whirlwind book tour, I suddenly had a bestseller on my hands. Then I got the call that gave me the answer. My editor asked, Are you ready to write another cookbook? Of course! So here we are, doing it all again, lifelong dream round two, and I couldnt be more grateful.

Many of you know that I am a proud national pie champion who cherishes every blue (and pink and red) ribbon I have ever won. But most people dont know that my first foray into the cooking competition circuit, at age sixteen, featured a savory dishan that won first place in its category. After that I was hooked and started experimenting with all of the classic Southern recipes I had grown up with. I tweaked and tinkered until I had something that tasted even better than the originalor until I proved that the original was, indeed, the best recipe ever.

While my friends wanted to be doctors and lawyers when they grew up, I hoped to become Julia Child or June Cleaver. My life revolves around food and always has. I come from a long line of Irish people who hold family in the highest regard. And if you really want to show someone you love them, theres no better way to do so than by cooking for them. Thats what I learned from the women in my family. My nana (Mamas mom) put the bee in my cooking bonnet. She taught me how to make my first pie crust at the age of four and let me climb up on a chair in her kitchen to stir the green beans for Sunday dinner. My granny (Daddys mom) was the mac-and-cheese maker. We had a standing date every Saturday. We would ride the bus into downtown Greenville and head to Tanners Big Orange for orange juice and a chaser of little gold-wrapped coffee candies. Back in the 1970s, before malls and superstores, downtown was the place to be for the best restaurants, bakeries, and shops. Granny would tell me stories of where I came from, how life during the Depression was, and how I am so much like my daddy that I should have been a boy. This all happened over food.

My mother and grandmothers never had a stand mixer between them, but that didnt stop them from baking and cooking up a storm. We thickened our casseroles the old-fashioned way: by cooking butter and flour together to make a roux. While the term roux may sound fancy, a roux couldnt be simpler to make. I watched those ladies stretch a dollar til it squeaked, as my mama said, and make something from nothing. I was also taught how to use canned goods that were on sale to make a dinner that didnt taste like it came from a can, and to whip up meals using the staples in our pantry between grocery store visits. Whenever we could, we grew our own food because we had the space in the yard and the vegetables we harvested were plentiful and cheap. Cooking whats local and in season has become a trendy thing, but every redneck knows its the cheapest way to feed your family well! When you stop to think about it, hunting and fishing are organic minus the packing house and all the fancy labels.

The recipes in this book are the ones that we Southerners go to when company shows up, when theres a dinner on the ground, or when the preacher is coming to visit. I was taught how to make great food that sticks with you and meals that get you through a day of hard work. Its not the fancy stuff served up with three sprigs of whatnot and a spoon of sauce artfully drawn on a plate, all to make you forget the food aint that goodor plentiful. No, the recipes in this book are Southern through and through, the ones people have been asking me for years to share. Youll find (yes, you read that right;) that is sure to make you the talk of the townin a good way.

I want to make you the hero of your kitchen, serving Southern food with pride. I hope that this book makes yall as happy as my first book did and that you can turn to it even more oftennot just when you want something sweet. So gather your family around the table, have everyone check their screens at the screen door, and get ready for lots of full-belly good-food moans, smiles, and compliments.