Customer Reviews

The Blue Willow Inn Bible of Southern Cooking: Over 600 Essential Recipes Southerners Have Enjoyed for Generations

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am a stay-at-home mother of two girls and a former Home Econ teacher. I looked this cookbook over three times before purchasing and I just couldn't walk away without buying. The cover and photos inside are beautiful, the layout is efficient and clear, and the authors look like people you'd love to have as family.

These recipes are not fancy and probably wouldn't do for a lovely dinner party. But if you want recipes to gather family and friends, this cookbook should be on your countertop.

I like the quickness and ease of prepared foods as some of the ingredients. My youngest daughter helps in the kitchen and if the recipes were too hard or time consuming, we wouldn't have as much fun cooking together. Plus, since we live in a rural area all the ingredients used are things we can find.

Gratitude to the authors for a wonderful book.

When I think of southern cooking, I think of my grandmother and our family gatherings. She would go all out. Fried eggs, grits and buscuits for breakfast. Fried chicken, rolls, beans, greens and potatoes for dinner. I loved her cooking and her she has always been the baseline I use for good southern cooking.

After reading through a few of the reviews for the Blue Willow Inn Bible of Southern Cooking, I felt comfortable with my purchase. However, the moment I cracked open the book, I felt let down. Most of the dishes include canned vegitables over fresh. Processed foods over basics. Not the way I remembered things and certainly not the way I prefer to cook today.

However, it was the biscuit recipe that drove me to return the book. The recipe uses self-rising flour over baking powder or cream of tartar. I don't know of a single southern grandmother that didn't use baking powder when I was growing up.

I realized that the book is the actual recipes for the Blue Willow Inn and that when cooking in mass quantities, they appear to take shortcuts to save time and energy. Understandable if you are cooking for dozens of families a day perhaps. But again, not the way I cook.

If you are looking for quick and easy recipes, this book is for you. But I don't think that this could be considered true southern cooking from the past.

I think this cookbook is great. I have given this book as wedding gifts numerous times. It never fails that someone else who sees it wants to know where I got it. It is great for the new cook because the recipes are easy to follow and contain basic ingredients that most people have on hand. It also brings back memories of grandmother's special treats. The Lane cake was always a traditional Christmas cake, and the Tea cake cookies were decorated for us kids every year. This book is filled with all the basic good food that we grew up with.

The Blue Willow Inn recipe book is outstanding. I purchased it because I am a patron of the restaurant in Social Circle, Georgia. Every dish on the buffet is tasty. And every recipe from the book that I've prepared for my family has been likewise. There are some great cooks at the Blue Willow Inn. It's a five-star restaurant that prepares some of the best-tasting, southern- style food you will ever put in your mouth.

This cookbook is a wonderful example of what southern cooking is all about. It has basic recipes which are simple, traditional and flavorful. I have searched for some of these recipes for years and finally found them in this wonderful cookbook. Best cookbook I own!

I just got this book not long ago and I could not be happier with it. This is definitely traditional southern food as I know it. Some reviewers implied that the recipes are laden with convenience items but as I thumb through the book-there are just as many that contain fresh or basic ingredients. I mean, let's be fair,ANY collection of over 600 Southern recipes is going to include convenience items. As for the reviewer who returned her book because the biscuit recipe contains self-rising flour instead of using baking powder, well that is just plain silly considering that self-rising flour is just a combination of flour and baking powder and has been around about 100 years. This book would be a wonderful addition to any cook's collection.

It is one of the very best cookbooks I have and I have over 100. They have recipes that my Mother used to fix and I could never find them anywhere.They use good old fashion ingredients that make the food as good as it is...not your gormet stuff..It has become one of my top favorites along with my orginal Joy of Cooking..

The recipes in this book are thoroughly uninspiring. Over and over again, a recipe gives you a list of prepared items to purchase from the grocery store and the order in which to combine them to "create" the desired dish. This cookbook is the epitome of the kind of old south cooking that is boring, uninteresting and bland (and I am an old southerner).

On the positive side, the book is attractively typeset with good use of color and spacing, but the font size used for fractions is too small.

I should have listened to L. Ross' Review. The subtitle should have been Bible of 1950's Southern Cooking. Recipies heavy on the use of prepared foods and packet seasonings.
The book claims to contain over 600 Essential Recipies Southerners have enjoyed for Generations. Only a few are the traditional ones my Grandmother cooked at the turn of the last century (1900). This is a book I will pass on rather than keep.

This book was a gift from my teen-age son, who spotted quite a few recipes to his liking in it. Although there are tons of recipes that kids will love, this cookbook seems to have something for everyone and I have found that it is definitely most useful for cooking for gatherings. I wouldn't recommend it for everyday fare unless you have a need to double your weight within a year.

I like this book for two reasons. First, there's a big nostalgia factor. I grew up in the 60s and have found many recipes in this book for food that my grandmothers and great-aunts used to make for big family gatherings, but that I never had the recipes for. Now I feel that I do. I don't know if I'll make many of them, but simply reading them causes a flood of great family memories.

Second, I have found this book to be a great resource for potluck and progressive dinners, or any other function for which I've volunteered to contribute food. There are lots and LOTS of casseroles here that will please almost everyone, which unfortunately means they include one or more of the following ingredients that people amazingly used to cook with all the time: sour cream, sugar, mayonnaise, cheese (sometimes even Cheez Whiz) and Ritz crackers. If you are squeamish about clogging everyone's arteries, the salad section has a number of recipes that will liven up any buffet. There are also, as you might expect, some gelatin salads and ambrosias as well.

I particularly like the punch recipes in the Beverage chapter. Who makes punch these days? But you'll find that if you serve punch at a party, you'll always find a crowd hanging around the punchbowl. There are some really great desserts of every kind in the book, with just about every kind of cake you can imagine, including very southern ones like 7-Up Cake, Texas Sheet Cake, Lane Cake and Burnt Sugar Cake.

This is a cookbook that feels like Grandma's house. Who could not like that?