American

A mandoline or V-slicer makes quick work of slicing the radishes.

It's not Easter dinner without the eggs. In this recipe, they are boiled just until the yolks are set, then sliced and topped with a fresh herb sauce.

Lime is a good match for red cabbage, and its acid keeps the color bright. Napa cabbage is a delicious alternative.

This is one of our most popular cakes at the bakery. Half of the customers love it because they haven't eaten it since their grandmother made it when they were kids, and the other half because they think the red color is really neat. But everyone thinks it's delicious.

Looking for a fast weeknight dessert? Johnnycake—essentially a cross between a pancake and corn bread—isn't fancy, but it's delicious when made with delicate pears and maple syrup.

This is the perfect antidote to the Sunday blues, not least because there will be enough left over to pack sandwiches for Monday's lunch. A mix of beef, pork, and bacon ensures meatiness, with Worcestershire sauce, chopped prunes, and cider vinegar added for good balance and occasional suggestions of sweetness. Because the loaf is baked without a loaf pan, there's plenty of well-browned crust to go around.

An extra dose of decadent chocolate gives this classic layered dessert new life.

This winter dessert is based on traditional stack-cake recipes from Appalachia. Small layers (baked in muffin tins) are sandwiched together with a jamlike apple filling to create individual desserts that are unlike any cake you've come across.

While this little square cake may appear modest, its caramel flavor drew everyone in our test kitchens back for seconds and even thirds. Buttermilk lends a subtle tang and tenderizes the yellow cake, but it's the sweet glaze that really makes this dessert special.

Nothing says festive as eloquently as a towering white coconut cake, and this particular one is breathtaking. Better yet, it's delicious—we've brushed each layer with a syrup made from coconut water and sugar to ensure that every bite is succulent. Shreds of delicate fresh coconut far surpass the packaged kind.

Beans have sustained people—black, white, and Native American—in the South for centuries. Miss Lewis first developed this recipe as a way of jazzing up canned green beans, which she appreciated for their economy. These days, fresh green beans are available and affordable all year long, so we happily adapted the recipe. Don't rush the cooking time and the goodness of these beans will be a revelation: smoky, luxuriant, and vegetal.

Like many an accomplished hostess in the South, Miss Lewis was a dab hand at making yeast rolls and always generously anointed them with butter before putting them in the oven. Dinner rolls should be brought to the table hot, so if you make them early in the day, you will want to reheat them gently. (Leftovers are great for breakfast the next morning, split, buttered, and served with homemade strawberry or fig preserves.) Mashed potato is a traditional addition to a yeast dough like this one; it helps the rising and also contributes to its tenderness. These rolls have outstanding flavor and are so light and fluffy they almost levitate.

"Smothering" means braising a tough cut of meat to tenderize it. Slow simmering also concentrates the flavor of the gravy.

Potatoes aren't a backbone starch in the South, but they're one vegetable, notes Miss Lewis, that is good in all seasons.

This "assembly of greens," as Miss Lewis would say, has a supple texture that works nicely with cornmeal dumplings.

Residents of Brunswick, Georgia, and Brunswick County, Virginia, are both fiercely protective of the provenance of this dish, but let's face it—hunters have lived off this sort of thing forever. Like all stews, this tastes even better the next day.

Miss Lewis mentions buttermilk cookies, which she pairs with ice-cold lemonade, but as far as we know, she never committed a recipe to paper. When we developed one, the big debate was about texture: Soft or crisp? What you see here is the cookie of your dreams, with a tender interior and the slightest bit of crispness around the edge.

"There is a dish that originated in Charleston called Hoppin' John," Edna Lewis writes in In Pursuit of Flavor, "which we had never heard of in Virginia." This (along with the fact that she found black-eyed peas a little dull) goes a long way toward explaining why she decided to gussy up its scrupulous simplicity—virtually unchanged through the centuries—with tomatoes. Well, nobody's perfect. Here you'll find the real thing, traditionally eaten on New Year's Day for good luck. Serve it with extra black-eyes and their pot liquor on the side to add more moisture, as well as a platter of Simmered Greens .

Moonlight-and-magnolia myths aside, this is one of the world's great libations.