This post is part of Grey Battle’s 2024 Lazarus Summer Internship.
A few months ago, as my grandmother lay in a hospital bed, she told me, "You may not make Southern food, but you cook like a Southerner." She was sipping Cauliflower Miso Soup from a teaspoon when she added, "What I mean by that is, you don't make what we make, but you love people with food the way we do."
I am a well-fed child, and my grandmother, great-grandmother, and aunts are all teachers. I learned to read by sounding out recipes in a small, blue kitchen nestled among the trees in Tanner-Williams, Alabama. Here, I learned to set serveware, spell name cards, grin and swallow casseroles, say please and thank you, and hold hands for prayer around the dining room table.
This project is an adaptation of four cherished family recipes, previously published in community cookbooks, to a plant-based style of baking. I have subbed ingredients, recalculated ratios, and transformed methods, allowing traditional recipes room to breathe, grow, and be inclusively shared and passed down.
The traditional foods found in this booklet connect me to the women who raised me, and through these adaptations, this bond is strengthened. The language of loving through food is not constrictive but endlessly creative—a language my family taught me to speak and one I now share with you.