My mother received a first edition of Calling All Cooks as a wedding gift in 1983. Being a midwesterner, she was lost when it came to southern cuisine. Calling All Cooks became her textbook and when I was old enough to reach the stove without a stepstool, it became mine as well. I grew up and moved far away from Alabama and went from cooking only southern food to cooking anything but. When I found a copy at a used book store in New Hampshire, I took it as a sign that it was time to revisit some of those classic southern dishes I grew up eating. Each time I crave a dish once prepared by my mother, father, or pretty much anyone in the Alabama branch of my family, I've been able to find the exact recipe or one that was pretty close in this cookbook. And this is not unique to my family, either. Most of the parents of childhood friends also had a well-worn copy of this on the kitchen counter. First editions are now highly collectable.

Calling All Cooks is a cookbook of collected recipes, not tested ones, so some are incomplete or just bad. I won't hold this against the book, since any community cookbook with have the same issue. Anyone with a baseline knowledge of cooking should be able to easily determine which ones to skip. Be sure to try the Hummingbird Cake on page 133. My grandmother used to make this cake for Easter lunch and it was always the highlight of the day. ( )

A HUGE cookbook with a better-than-usual array of recipes for an organizational cookbook. Lots of rich, "old-south" food with some lighter versions for variety. ( )