USC Press Celebrates National Cookbook Month in October

October 10, 2025 | by uscpress

From family to historical recipes, bestseller lists to award finalists, USC Press has a delicious cookbook ready to take its place in your kitchen!

Have you been in a slump making the same dishes over and over again? Is everything on Pinterest uninspiring and the linked blogs too filled with ads before the recipe? Thank goodness for National Cookbook Month! October is the perfect time before the holidays to try some new dishes before you’re invited out to all those holiday dinners.

At USC Press, we have a great selection of cookbooks to inspire some kitchen creativity, with a nice side helping of history, family stories, and southern deliciousness.

If you’re in the mood for some Southern American history and comfort food, you’ll be interested Rachel Godin Barnett’s and Lyssa Kligman Harvey’s Kugels and Collards: Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina. Where people go, so goes their food. Barnett and Harvey celebrate the unique and diverse food history of Jewish South Carolina. Extensively illustrated with original and archival photographs, Kugels & Collards includes more than eighty recipes from seventy contributors, inviting readers into family homes, businesses, and community centers to share meals and memories. This book has been celebrated in Bitter Southerner’s 2024 Summer Reading Roundup, Food Network’s 35 Best Jewish-Authored Cookbooks, and The Local Palate’s Best Cookbooks of 2023.

We have a royal celebration in the form of Mary Martha Greene’s Cheese Biscuit Queen duo! Starting with The Cheese Biscuit Queen Tells All, Greene, a South Carolinian and former lobbyist, pairs more than one hundred tried-and-true recipes for dishes like country ham scones, Frogmore stew dip, shrimp and corn pie, and lemon pound cake with stories from her corner of the South. The book opens with the famous cheese biscuit recipe (complete with family secrets), and the pages that follow brim with fabulous characters, antic-filled anecdotes, and recipes so good they might just call for a change in State House rules (true story).

If that doesn’t fill you up, serve up a plate of seconds with Mary Martha’s second book, The Cheese Biscuit Queen, Kiss My Aspic! Organized by course and featuring 80 new recipes, this book includes delicious favorites like Shrimp Remoulade Deviled Eggs, Pride of the Pee Dee Chicken Bog, Chocolate Pound Cake with Pecan Fudge Icing, and Chatham Artillery Punch, plus Miss Willa's Cheese Tomato Aspic—that uniquely Southern staple of controversial appeal. Queen Mary Martha sets a place at her table for Southern hospitality newbies, experienced entertainers, and everyone who enjoys food made with love and seasoned with heartfelt stories.

For the hungry history buffs out there, you’ll love Chef Kevin Mitchell’s and Professor David S. Shields’ two books all about the food culture and history of South Carolina and Georgia. Primarily a historical text with delicious side helpings of Chef Mitchell’s original recipes, Taste the State: South Carolina's Signature Foods, Recipes, and Their Stories presents the cultural histories of native ingredients and showcases the evolution of the dishes and the variety of preparations that have emerged. This book’s accolades include 2021 Gourmand International Cookbook Award Finalist, Forbes’ 2021 Best New Cookbooks For Travelers, and Garden & Gun’s 2021 Best Southern Cookbooks.

Travel just a little further west to enjoy their second, and most recent book, Taste the State Georgia: Distinctive Foods and Stories from Where Eating Local Began. Arguing that Georgia was one of the first states to enthusiastically claim regional cuisine as a marketing tool, Mitchell and Shields explore each of the state's regions, highlighting foods such as Fort Valley Pecans from Central Georgia and Sapelo Island Clams from the Sea Islands. Sharing stories of heirloom cultivars and innovative kitchens, Taste the State Georgia is a testament to both the enduring memory and future possibilities of Georgian cuisine.

We’ll finish the meal with something a little unexpected but very special, the 200^th anniversary edition of The Virginia House-wife. First published in 1824, The Virginia House-wife has come to be regarded as the most influential American cookbook of the nineteenth century. This unique edition includes a complete facsimile of the original book—with recipes for delicacies such as lobster sauce and pumpkin pudding, and household tips on such things as curing bacon and making lavender water—plus additional recipes from the 1825 and 1828 editions. Historical notes by culinary historian Karen Hess explain Mary Randolph's influence on American culinary history, and a new foreword by Debra Freeman emphasizes contributions of the free and enslaved African American cooks on American cuisine.

Happy cooking!

Written by Dianne Wade, marketing assistant.