THE OCTOBER DAY when Christopher Robbins and Pete Wyrick approached me at the Charleston Farmers Market will be indelibly etched in my mind for all time. I was reluctant to take on this project, but the two have led me through a most exciting, new adventure. Both are wonderful men, and I cannot thank them enough for the final arm twist it took to do this book.
Had my son, Thomas, not taken the journey—not only by boat but by being my partner in our canning venture for all of those years when we struggled to make the business viable—we would never have had the products that we created. Working with one’s father has got to be difficult, if not impossible, yet he stuck it out. His palate is flawless, and his understanding of what most people want is uncanny. This book is as much his as mine, for many of the recipes are ours.
After forty years without an English professor circling my punctuation errors and correcting my grammar in red pencil, I have found that I have much lacking in the field of the written word. Along came Cordon Bleu, Grand Diploma graduate and renowned, award-winning food writer Holly Herrick to the rescue. Her professional knowledge and ways guided me many times through the switchbacks of this culinary mountain road. When the recipes had been reduced for home use, she helped me test them, and it was she who added and subtracted ingredients to create the subtle nuances that make each recipe successful. More than that, she kept me smiling and going when I sometimes felt more like crying and quitting. Holly is a big part of this book.
A book is no different from the manufacture of a car or an airplane. The writer is the guy who gets his name on the book cover, but there are sixty or so other people of equal importance in the process. Each works as hard as the author, maybe harder and longer. To the entire family at Gibbs Smith, Publisher, the team of which I am a part, I thank you and I apologize if I made your tasks more difficult than they needed to be.
—Steve Dowdney