Description: When Joyce White moved to New York City from Alabama, she left small-town life behind and landed a job as a food editor at a major women's magazine. Weekends, however, found her visiting churches in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, looking for a taste of home. Food has long been a part of the spiritual life of African-American churches, and what she found there, along with what she missed from home, was the comforting blend of cooking and fellowship that feeds both body and soul. In this warm and joyful collection, White offers more than 150 recipes for the foods that worshipers look forward to after services, and she captures the spirit of these sociable meals with warm, conversational, and occasionally poignant reflections from African-American churchgoers around the United States. From delicious renditions of classics such as Sugar-Crusted Biscuits to updated favorites such as Black Beans with Sun-Dried Tomatoes, as well as special fare for entertaining and Kwanzaa, the pages of Soul ...

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Reviews: "Praise the Lord and pass the cornbread! That's what happens in African-American churches all over our country and now -- Rejoice! Oh, rejoice! -- a new cookbook has gathered 150 homey, mouth-watering recipes from these bastions of bounty. Grits, gumbo, jams and jambalaya share the pulpit in Soul Food. Stories from the women who serve up the church suppers are here, too, like Mattie Hodges, a leading cook at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, who cooked her first meal when her mama got sick: Eggs and ham. She was 5 at the time. As warm as these stories are, the recipes sound even better. Chicken and dumplings, anyone? Hallelujah!"-- New York Daily News, 1/21/98

"The pages of Soul Food are filled with grainy black-and-white snapshots of church suppers and women in aprons tending big pots of greens on the stove. It is not the first African-American cookbook to wander down this memory lane. But unlike many such books, this one is written with an alluring combination of personal attach...

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