"Our food tells us where we came from and who we have become," Bill Neal writes in the introduction to this engaging cookbook about the breads, biscuits, cakes, pies, cookies, desserts, and delectables that have been the pride of Southern cooks for more than three hundred years.From his recipes for dumplings, hushpuppies, four styles of spoonbread, and Delta Dogs to fruit desserts like fools, roly polys, crackles, and cobblers, Bill Neal interweaves fascinating bits of social history with a countryman's knowledge of the cooking secrets of the rural South, as it was in the past and as it's preserved today.