Gourmet

Potatoes aren't a backbone starch in the South, but they're one vegetable, notes Miss Lewis, that is good in all seasons.

This "assembly of greens," as Miss Lewis would say, has a supple texture that works nicely with cornmeal dumplings.

Residents of Brunswick, Georgia, and Brunswick County, Virginia, are both fiercely protective of the provenance of this dish, but let's face it—hunters have lived off this sort of thing forever. Like all stews, this tastes even better the next day.

Miss Lewis mentions buttermilk cookies, which she pairs with ice-cold lemonade, but as far as we know, she never committed a recipe to paper. When we developed one, the big debate was about texture: Soft or crisp? What you see here is the cookie of your dreams, with a tender interior and the slightest bit of crispness around the edge.

"There is a dish that originated in Charleston called Hoppin' John," Edna Lewis writes in In Pursuit of Flavor, "which we had never heard of in Virginia." This (along with the fact that she found black-eyed peas a little dull) goes a long way toward explaining why she decided to gussy up its scrupulous simplicity—virtually unchanged through the centuries—with tomatoes. Well, nobody's perfect. Here you'll find the real thing, traditionally eaten on New Year's Day for good luck. Serve it with extra black-eyes and their pot liquor on the side to add more moisture, as well as a platter of Simmered Greens .

This is a time-honored way to sweeten mint juleps , lemonade, and iced tea.

Moonlight-and-magnolia myths aside, this is one of the world's great libations.

The brown sugar in the ingredients list below is there to mellow the acidity of the tomatoes, not to make this a sweet dish. Use a sturdy bakery loaf of white sandwich bread, not the packaged sliced stuff, for the topping. You will get enormous pleasure from serving people this dish.

For most people, the word gumbo immediately conjures the Cajun and Creole cooking of Louisiana. But okra (ngombo in Bantu), for which the soup-stew is named, reached South Carolina with the slave trade some years before Europeans settled in Louisiana, and the Creole world, where African, European, and indigenous cultures meet, actually extends up the southern Atlantic coast. There are many different gumbo recipes, all taking advantage of local ingredients and served with rice. This one is a heady, fragrant slurry thick with seafood. If desired, add filé powder (ground dried sassafras leaves), a Choctaw thickening agent with an almost lemony flavor, just before eating.

Almost every culture has an abiding, elemental hunger for greens, and in the American South, it's common to simmer a variety of them. Hopkins cooks his relatively quickly in a satiny béchamel. The nutty sweetness of the sauce rounds out the natural bitterness of the greens, thus lifting them into the realm of the spectacular. Think of this as a rough-around-the-edges version of creamed spinach, one with real backbone.

What gives this thick, voluptuous soup its deep-golden flavor and aroma is toasted dried summer-sweet Cope's corn. Chef Linton Hopkins embellishes the soup with tender, briny shrimp and foresty mushrooms, but it would also be delicious with crabmeat or bacon & or with nothing at all to distract you from its mysterious, soul-satisfying essence.

Boiling this strong coffee with eggshells clarifies it by helping the grounds to settle.

More nuts than filling and a seriously buttery crust make for a beguilingly sweet finish.

Think of the best sweet-potato pie you've ever eaten and then take away the crust so you can revel solely in its silky goodness. A bite of this pudding is full and round, with hits of chestnut and dried fruit.

In the discussion of preserving fruit By canning versus freezing, why doesn't this technique ever come up? Peacock credits the late Edna Lewis for teaching him to mix mashed fruit with sugar for a sort of jam that he says keeps for a year when refrigerated. (We only tested up to one month, but so far, so good.) "It's a very old-fashioned method," he says. "The flavor is fresh and intense and delicious spooned onto hot Buttered Buttermilk Biscuits or Yeast Rolls ." Try it with raspberries or strawberries, too.

These muffins truly give the flavor of corn its due. They're not sweetened like corn bread (meaning like "Yankee" corn bread, says Peacock), and they have a very fine, almost custardy texture, from the extra-fine grind of the cornmeal (which makes them reminiscent of spoon bread). "Honey and soft butter play to the creamy, tangy flavor of the muffins particularly well," says Peacock.

Edna Lewis trained Peacock's palate to detect the metallic undertones that commercial baking powders can impart, and he's never looked back. Here's their formula.

The cliché, in this case, turns out to be true: Biscuits benefit from TLC. Peacock recommends White Lily flour, one of the lightest available, along with lard for a flaky texture so fluffy and airy that the biscuits almost float off the plate. One bite may well move you to tears—either with memories of your southern grandmother, or with regret for not having had a southern grandmother.

In keeping with the rest of the menu, this is no shy salad. The sweet and acidic vinaigrette unites with the salty bacon and, along with the lettuces, produces fireworks in the mouth.

One of the most popular items on Peacock's menu at his Watershed restaurant, in Decatur, Georgia, these tomatoes are concentrated and soft, and sugar plays up their sweetness, making for a homemade flavor riff on ketchup that you'll want to serve with everything. The tomatoes shrink quite a bit—but a little definitely goes a long way.