Jean Anderson Shares Her Latest, A Love Affair with Southern Cooking on UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, Friday, September 5, at 9:30 PM

Part culinary love letter and part cookbook, A Love Affair with Southern Cooking takes the reader “back-roading” as Jean Anderson shares some 40 years of traveling about the South. In these pages, moreover, she assembles more than 200 of the best southern recipes she has collected both at home and on the road – the classic, the contemporary, the homespun, and the haute. She also introduces the characters she’s met along the way, the cranky as well as the comical, and dishes up plenty of chatty tales, bits of folklore, and fascinating back stories about southern cooks and southern cooking. No dose of history was ever easier to swallow.

In an all-new episode of UNC-TV’s local literary series North Carolina Bookwatch with D.G. Martin, premiering Friday, September 5, at 9:30 PM, Anderson shares many of the insightful images of the land and the food she captured in her latest offering.

After decades of researching and reveling in the foods of the South, Anderson admits, “My passion for southern cooking shows no sign of cooling, and it’s this passion that I’m eager to share along with a life’s worth of recipes and recollections.”

Interwoven throughout are snapshot biographies of those who have influenced southern cooking, figures like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington Carver, whose peanut research saved southern farmers from ruin after boll weevils had chomped their way through the cotton fields, Mary Randolph, who wrote America’s first cookbook, and Duncan Hines, one of American’s earliest and most respected restaurant reviewers. A Love Affair with Southern Cooking also presents capsule histories of the South’s most famous recipes including Pickled Shrimp, Brunswick Stew, Red-Eye Gravy, Cathead Biscuits, Hush Puppies, Lane and Lady Baltimore Cakes.

Jean Anderson has written more than twenty cookbooks and won five Tastemaker Awards (“cookbook Oscars”). In 1999 she was inducted into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame. She writes for Bon Appétit, Cottage Living, Family Circle, Food & Wine, Gourmet, and More magazines.

Don’t miss D.G. Martin’s engaging interview with Jean Anderson on North Carolina Bookwatch, Friday, September 5, at 9:30 PM, with an encore episode airing Sunday, September 7, at 5 PM.