Southern Comfort in a Cookbook
This New Release Is Exactly What Your Kitchen Needs Right Now
BY Catherine D. Anspon // 04.16.20An ode to southern dining traditions, "A Good Meal Is Hard to Find" serves up a collaboration between Amy C. Evans and James Beard Award-winning cook and author Martha Hall Foose.
One of the most unique art volumes this spring doubles as a cookbook — one of our favorite types of literature in our current shelter-at-home state.
We’re smitten with Chronicle Books’ new release, A Good Meal Is Hard to Find: Storied Recipes from the Deep South. Co-author Amy C. Evans is a Texas talent who straddles the world of art and food: She’s a nationally collected painter as well as a culinary historian.
A Good Meal serves up an ode to the region’s tradition of gathering around a home-cooked meal and represents a collaboration between Evans and James Beard Award-winning cook and author Martha Hall Foose, based in Mississippi.
Martha Hall Foose crafted the 60 recipes in this cookbook as a call and response to her collaborator’s 60 paintings, which were inspired by fictional Southern women and their prowess in the kitchen.
This book is a celebration to Foose’s accomplished comfort food, with a slew of metaphors folded in: the fortitude of getting through with ingredients at hand, and the power of ladies in the kitchen.
The sides are generous and important: drolly driven by Amy C. Evans‘ charming, direct artwork and character-fueled narrative.
Our fave mash-ups of cooking and art: Camille’s grandmother loved Duke’s mayonnaise and costume jewelry (detailing the recipe for Bridge Club Egg Salad), Clementine prayed over the queso (the book’s recipe for Crawfish Puppies Dipped in Queso, inspired by Houston’s shuttered old-school temple to Tex-Mex, Felix Mexican Restaurant), and the image that accompanies the recipe for the decadent Dot’s Sweet Potato and Bacon Purse Pie — Dot was running late, so she threw her breakfast in her purse and headed out the door.
Order this feel-good volume here.
Find Amy C. Evans artwork at Koelsch Gallery, Houston. The Houston-based artist will sign books and present a solo exhibition at Koelsch Gallery once the art world reopens.