Buford woman turns food blog into ‘My Southern Table’ cookbook

BUFORD — Above all else, Lana Taylor Stuart comes by her love of food and cooking honestly.

Growing up in southwest Georgia, Stuart learned her way around the kitchen from her mother, grandmothers and aunts, all top-shelf cooks. Through the years, she collected hundreds of recipes reflecting what she terms “Southern comfort food and cooking.”

In 2009, Stuart — who now lives in Buford — began a food blog, sharing the many recipes in her repertoire, and that blog has grown to the point where she gets between 5 million and 6 million page views each year. When folks started asking her about a potential cookbook, Stuart got busy.

The result is “My Southern Table: Recipes from a Georgia Kitchen,” a fully illustrated book with 246 of Stuart’s favorite dishes.

“The book is the culmination of 14 years of food blogging,” said Stuart, who was the webmaster for the Dougherty County School System in Albany before retiring in 2016. “Once I retired, I started the food blog full-time. When I started, I was doing it as a hobby and a way to record those old recipes I grew up with, cooking with my mom and grandmother and aunts.

“Then over time it grew and it got to the point where so many people were asking me if I’d written a book. I finally sat down and said, ‘I’m going to choose out of all these hundreds of recipes I have the ones that I think are the most special and best represent Southern comfort food and cooking. I also added some new recipes that had never been on the blog, so it’s not all drawn from the blog.”

Stuart self-published “My Southern Table” with counsel from her husband, William, a young-adult fiction author who wrote and published “The Gemstone Chronicles” series of books. The reaction has been most favorable as “My Southern Table” was Amazon’s No. 1 new release in U.S. Southern Cooking and the No. 1 new release in Holiday Cooking.

“We’ve been really pleased with the success so far,” she said. “People are really liking it; I’ve been surprised.”

The book contains a lot of time-honored culinary standards (“heritage recipes”) but also shares some recipes that are a little out of the ordinary. She said two of the oldest recipes in the book are for Corn Dodgers (cornmeal dumplings, typically served with turnip greens or collard greens) and Chicken Jallop (a stew-like delicacy that requires cooking dry flour in the oven before adding it to the dish).

Asked her favorite recipes, Stuart said it was hard to pick a favorite but mentioned Copper Pennies, a World War II-era salad her grandmother used to make with carrots, onions and bell peppers in a marinade that includes tomato soup. And she quipped that the recipe for the family’s barbecue sauce almost caused an uprising.

“It’s a sauce that nobody has ever published before, and my sisters almost had a heart attack when they heard I was going to publish it,” Stuart said of the tomato-based, vinegary concoction. “But I published it, and they’re holding up.”

Stuart assented that assembling “My Southern Table” not only gave her an opportunity to collect more than 200 of her recipes, it also provided many nostalgic trips back to her hometown of Colquitt and the many meals created and enjoyed by her family.

Asked if she planned a follow-up cookbook, Stuart said, “I haven’t started anything yet. There’s an idea in the back of my head that there could potentially be another volume. But at this point, I’m just focused on the first one.”

“My Southern Table” is available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other book purveyors and through her blog, www.lanascooking.com.

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