Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
YANKEES, BEWARE! This will kill y'all., June 29, 2003
Lots of folk have read "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe," by Fannie Flagg. Even more have seen the movie, "Fried Green Tomatoes" <and was anybody else concerned about the movie's ambiguous ending?>. I read Ms. Flagg's cookbook with delight, anticipation, more than a few hunger pangs, and a profound sense of relief that somebody, somewhere had the good sense to preserve these fine old dishes of the deep South and pass them on. Her recipe for "Chicken'n'Dumplings" matches the faded 3x5 card version I inherited from my mother almost to a tee. Her "Fried Chicken" is enough to send the health-conscious into a coma! Well, y'all. Welcome south. We fry things down here, but at least the food has some flavor and texture. Take "Fried Green Tomatoes," as one example. You can't "boil" green tomatoes; nor can they be broiled, roasted, or baked. Honey, they gots to be FRIED. But one bite, and your taste buds done boarded the glory train to paradise, 'specially if you wash it down with the "house wine of the south" <thanks to "Steel Magnolias">, a big tall glass of homemade ice-tea.
Miss Flagg's cookbook brought back a comforting time of nostalgia, when momma's Sunday dinners were a treat looked for all week long, and us kids hated it when the preacher came by of a Sunday evening. It also brought back several dishes I thought had perished when the Interstate Highway system destroyed the back byways and unimproved roads that lead to the "old home place(s)" throughout the South. The ham and "red-eye" gravy recipe alone is worth the cost of the book, and even a Yankee girl can make it if she takes her time and doesn't try to "fix" it.
Salt abounds. Calories flourish. Fats lurk everywhere. And cholesterol and other nefarious substances <yes, I went to college too, y'all> are omnipresent. But the things that'll come out of your kitchen will amaze you, content your spouse, make your children smarter and more obedient, and fill your house with the smells associated with happier simpler times, when meals were shared by the family, enjoyed by all, and digested sitting on the porch with an old AM radio tuned to the only clear channel, and the night creeping up out of the ground.
Thank you, Ms. Flagg.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent and Authentic, November 17, 2005
As a Mississippian currently living up North, I'm always very suspicious of allegedly "Southern" cookbooks. While the charity-league cookbooks from Southern towns often have delicious recipes, they're almost always a compilation of impressive special occasion dishes and party foods. Meanwhile the "New South" types of recipes (e.g. Southern Living or lord-help-us, the New York Times) are almost always comprised of recipes that attempt to redesign Southern cuisine to the latest food trends and dietary fads. And then there are the campy cookbooks, usually written by someone from New York or San Francisco, that provide the heaviest, most tasteless recipes imaginable and insult Southern cooking while pretending to be humorous.
Fannie Flagg doesn't do any of that in the Original Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook. This cookbook is the real deal. Here are the recipes for the wonderful everyday and Sunday-dinner meals that you grew up on. We've had the book for about a year and a half and we've already got it looking beaten up simply because we use it so often. Only our Joy of Cooking gets as much use as this one.
Absolutely everything we've tried from it has been absolutely right. These are recipes that your grandmother knew how to make without a recipe...which is why it's hard to find their authentic versions in any cookbook. If you're a Southerner, you know soul food is our food: many recipes in this book will taste like the things your mother or grandmother served; the rest will taste like things your best friends' mother or grandmother served-- you know, the people whose home cooking is a subtle variation that you can trust and for which you ask them for the recipe.
Miz Fannie includes exact (but easy to follow) instructions for each recipe. I have never had a recipe fail to come out as good as I expected. I've never had to "doctor" any of these recipes to make the food taste right. The book is well organized; although there is no index, the recipe you need will be easy to find.
It is amazing how rich, flavorful, bold, and subtle Southern food can be when cooked properly. If you've never had it right, you've *never* had it. That's why this book is so good: it'll do you right.
Squash casserole! The real one! Need I say more?
I should stress too, that it is a delight to read through this cookbook. Flagg's anecdotes are not only interesting and authentic, but they also also communicate and generously share the perspective that good people, who happen to be Southerners, have. If you grew up in the South, no matter your era, no matter your race, no matter how rich or poor, Flagg's recipes and stories are affirming -- its our culture expressed in recipes, not in a voice of moonlight-and-magnolias, but with that peculiarly gracious Southern practicality that is the gentle voice of someone who *knows* what's good and wants you to know better and pass it on.
Beware: if you're not Southern, you will be assimilated once you taste this food...and you're welcome!
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What put the meat on Idgie's bones., July 1, 2001
I bought this cookbook because I loved the movie (of course) and because I was a military wife at the time and living far away from my southern homeland. I grew up eating southern food, but somehow, I never learned to make it (there was always an abundance of those kind of women in the kitchen, making biscuits from scratch and fatback and greens). I figured this book would help. It's written in the true style of a southern scratch cook - one has to use a bit of common sense - but you won't be disappointed. And let me say, the key lime pie recipe is absolutely DIVINE!!! None of that watered down Red Lobster stuff; this thing is full of tangy flavor and soooooo easy to make. Some of the other recipes take a bit more work, but stick with them, they'll do ya good. THe homilies and old-fashioned pictures make the book a joy to read as well, and Ms. Flagg is over the top in the very best way with her southern girl sass. If you have a drop of southern blood or at the very least a love of the South, it'll bring a tear to your eye. The very highest recommendation and thanks for writing it. As a quick aside, my grandfather's favorite evening snack was something (obviously) not included in this book. Make yourself up a batch of Martha White white cornbread, fill up a tall glass with WHOLE milk, crumble in the cornbread until mush, and eat it up with a spoon. It's called soakie, and Granddaddy would just as soon as not have used buttermilk, but I never could stomach that. It's a tasty treat!
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