Southern Regional Cookery

The South is often defined as the eleven states that lie south of the Potomac River, or those of the Confederacy (Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee), but many inhabitants of Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia, and Oklahoma consider themselves southerners because of shared history and culture, if not geography. Though not separated from the rest of the country by dramatic natural borders, the South has, from its beginnings, been a separate region that is divided into several geographical areas with distinct histories. As the population of the South increases at twice the national rate, mostly from interstate immigration, the region no longer resembles the mid-twentieth-century South with its shared bond of the Confederacy.