Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen by Trisha Yearwood

Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen
by Trisha Yearwood

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Inside the List

By DWIGHT GARNER

Published: May 25, 2008

SOUTHERN COMFORT: If you are looking for a cookbook by a hardier hungry girl, you could do worse than snag a copy of Trisha Yearwood’s superb “Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen: Recipes From My Family to Yours.” (It is No. 9 on the advice list.) It’s a smart, generous, friendly and no-nonsense comfort-food primer. Yearwood, a country singer who is married to another (Garth Brooks), put her book together with her mother and sister, raiding her family’s bountiful store of recipes. There are some almost dainty things to eat here (cheese straws, a minty Greek salad), but Yearwood isn’t playing to the foodie cognoscenti — she’s not afraid to use canned ingredients when the moment seems right, and she’s great on toothsome Southern classics like fried chicken, pink salad, pork ribs and something she calls “cooked-to-death green beans.” Yearwood won me over when she suggested (for her mashed potatoes) pulling out a pressure cooker, an old-fashioned device that’s wonderful for flushing out food snobs. I haven’t seen one since the glorious kitchens of my youth, my mother’s and my grandmother’s. Mine’s been broken for years. It’s time to buy another.