INTRODUCTION

Southerners are good at many things. We’re good at telling tales, preserving tradition, and greeting strangers on the sidewalk. We mind our manners, honor our heritage, and remember not to wear white after Labor Day. But what Southerners are really good at is food.

Just as we are instructed as children not to sass our elders, we learn early on that food is not only for eating. It is also for expressing sympathy, showing appreciation, demonstrating concern, and conveying excitement. Food that we share with others invites us to do more than ice a cake or bake a casserole. It affords us the opportunity, over and over again, to show we care.

Patsy Caldwell has felt at home in the kitchen for as long as she can remember. It started some six decades ago while standing by her mother at the stove, and has since that time led her to feed preachers, executives, politicians, athletes, and brides and grooms as a professional caterer. If you pressed her, I think Patsy would say her favorite mouths to feed are those belonging to her family.

Be it her son and daughter and their families when they come for Sunday dinner, or her grandchildren when she hosts the high school seniors for a multicourse, sit-down meal, complete with candles and cloth napkins, to celebrate their proms.

“Food is at the heart of the family,” says Patsy. But her idea of “family” is not limited to those she claims as kin. Patsy welcomes all comers, from the undertaker to the sheriff and anyone else who might be hungry for food and fellowship. Such hospitality epitomizes the spirit of Southern cooking in general and the philosophy of the covered dish in particular.

Although I am not as skilled in the kitchen, and I am not as quick as Patsy to invite twenty people over for dinner “just for fun,” I, too, value the power of food to nourish both body and soul. Like many of you, I associate several of my life’s milestones with food: my first father-daughter lunch, just the two of us, when Daddy ordered me a shrimp cocktail at the Russian Tea Room in New York while Mother was out shopping with my two older sisters; the first meal my husband made for me, which tasted not so great but showed me, at age forty-one, what true affection looks like; and the box lunches the women of my childhood church prepared for my family so we could have a bite to eat as we caravanned from the church to the cemetery, a drive of some 160 miles, to bury my father.

It’s not just any kind of food, mind you, that enriches the stomach and the heart. It’s the kind of food that is prepared with love. While you mix and whip and fold in, you’re consoling your childhood friend, now all grown up, who has received a challenging health diagnosis. As you chop and dice and simmer, you’re honoring the church organist who is retiring after fifty years in ministry. When you grease the baking dish with the butter wrapper, you’re tending the elderly neighbor who doesn’t get out much anymore.

Because Southerners are a humble people, we don’t like to call attention to ourselves while we’re working our fingers to the bone in the kitchen. Onion tears, scalded hands, and undercooked eggs are part of the territory. Don’t you worry about us; we’ll be fine. Making an extra casserole to put in the freezer “just in case,” is what we do. It’s who we are, mothers who write “big hit at potluck” on an index card before nestling it back into the recipe box. Daughters who add a note to “use more cream” in the handmade cookbook passed down from a grandmother, often a small, threering binder full of notes and recipes and newspaper clippings. Such scribblings are more than suggestions for how to cook; they are instructions on how to live.

Regardless of your culinary skills or your food preferences, what it comes down to is this: What might look like a simple chicken potpie sustains the friend who had surgery last week. That strawberry cake you’ve made a hundred times reassures your elderly aunt that she has not been forgotten even though she can’t make it out to the family reunions anymore. Whatever you do, don’t underestimate the power of the covered dish to celebrate, commiserate, and console. Maybe it can even save the world.

It is our hope that you will take and eat—and share—from Bless Your Heart, secure in the knowledge that when you feed someone you give one of the greatest gifts a person has to offer: yourself.

Amy Lyles Wilson