10 Southern Cookbooks Guaranteed to Spice Up Your Kitchen

Country music sensation. Lifestyle guru. New York Times bestselling author. Jessie James Decker is all that and more, and in her long-awaited first cookbook, she invites fans into her kitchen to share a variety of mouthwatering yet simple-to-make recipes, mixing Italian, Cajun, and Southern-inspired dishes often handed down to her from her mother. 

Filled with photos of Decker and her family, as well as delectable dishes that you’ll want to cook today, Just Feed Me gives Jessie James Decker fans exactly what they’ve been craving.

Vivian Howard owns and cooks at the acclaimed Chef and the Farmer restaurant in Kinston, North Carolina. Now, the star of PBS’s A Chef’s Life and Somewhere South brings her unique culinary style to this IACP Cookbook of the Year, which captures the distinctive flavors of North Carolina’s coastal plain. 

From blueberry BBQ chicken and pork ribs in red curry-braised watermelon to new twists on classic Southern desserts like pecan pie and banana pudding, this “must-read compendium of wisdom” (Booklist) offers not only a glimpse into the culinary traditions of a time and place, but a wealth of amazing recipes, to boot.

Miss Robbie Montgomery learned how to cook soul food in her family’s St. Louis kitchen, where she was the oldest of nine children, and on the road as a backup singer for Ike & Tina Turner, touring the restaurants of a segregated 1960s America. 

Today, the 84-year-old Miss Robbie is the owner of the Sweetie Pie’s chain of restaurants and the star of the former OWN reality show Welcome to Sweetie Pie’s, which ran until 2018. In Sweetie Pie’s Cookbook, she brings her classic soul food recipes to readers, and hopes to help establish the tradition of soul food cooking for future generations.

In this “fascinating” (New York Times Book Review) James Beard Foundation Book of the Year, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty traces the fraught history of Southern cooking and its ability to bring people of all races to the table. 

The result is “an exemplary, inviting exploration and an inspiration for cooks and genealogists alike” (Kirkus Reviews) that is “a valuable addition to culinary and Old South historiography with lip-smacking period recipes” (Library Journal).

Few places are as synonymous with food as the Big Easy, and in this cookbook bursting with iconic recipes – from po’boys to jambalaya to beignets and King Cake – the owner of CajunChefRyan.com brings you the flavors of one of the world’s most unique cities. 

Besides recipes and can’t-miss spots for food, drinks, and more for those who are visiting the Big Easy, every recipe in The Best of New Orleans Cookbook comes with lagniappe. What’s a lagniappe? It’s a Southern Louisiana colloquialism that means “a little something extra,” and in this case that includes everything from quick cooking tips to fascinating histories behind specific dishes and drinks.

With nearly 150 original recipes, this one-of-a-kind cookbook from TV favorite Carla Hall – a beloved contender on Bravo’s Top Chef and host of ABC’s Emmy Winning The Chew – explores her Nashville roots in a “new classic” that “reveals layers of her personality, heritage, mission, and deep centeredness in African American culinary tradition while reflecting the dynamism, diversity, and improvisational genius that tradition inspires” (culinary historian Michael W. Twitty). 

From traditional Southern favorites such as black-eyed pea salad or tomato pie to roasted cauliflower with raisins, Ghanian beef stew, and Caribbean smothered chicken, there’s a recipe here for almost any taste, that will give you a taste of Carla Hall’s unmistakable soul food style.

For 22 years, Dora Charles worked in the kitchen of one of Savannah’s most famous restaurants, Paula Deen’s Lady & Sons, which helped catapult Deen to stardom. Now, in a book that is “long overdue” (Eater.com), a woman who “never imagined she would have to practice signing her name for fans” (New York Times) brings some of her favorite recipes to readers for the first time. 

“Even just reading the names of recipes in Savannah chef Dora Charles’ debut cookbook is making us wild with hunger,” raves People.com, and reading and cooking those recipes is even better!

Southern food may be many things, but it isn’t always easily vegetarian-friendly. So, when popular TV chef Damaris Phillips met and fell in love with her vegetarian husband, she had to learn a new way of cooking the Southern dishes she had grown up with. 

The result is more than 100 recipes that retain the flavor and comfort of classic Southern cooking, with a vegetarian twist, including mock tuna noodle casserole, bourbon spaghetti with pecan meatballs, gouda and pistachio sausage, and much more. Celebrity chef Bobby Flay raves that, “Damaris Phillips has the knowledge, the experience, and the down-right courage to take on her native Southern cooking and turn it on its head … vegetarians everywhere will be thrilled!”

Southern hospitality is about more than just food. It’s also about presentation, and in The Southern Entertainer’s Cookbook – named a “must-have” by Southern Living Magazine – Courtney Dial Whitmore, host of the popular lifestyle site Pizzazzerie.com, doesn't just bring heirloom recipes from her own Southern family’s cookbooks to the table. She also shows how to present them to their best effect for would-be hosts on any budget, and at any scale, combining classic Southern charm with modern sensibilities that will delight guests and hosts alike.

What could be more emblematic of Southern cooking than warm, fluffy biscuits fresh out of the oven? From your classic Southern biscuits to more complicated recipes featuring biscuits embellished with everything from creamy goat butter to pimento cheese, this “worthy undertaking” (Washington Post) serves up a how-to guide for making just about every kind of biscuits you can imagine, all accompanied by mouthwatering photographs taken by Rick McKee that will make you want to fire up the oven right now!