Our Year at Southern Living

Dear Friends,

With the 2016 volume of Southern Living Annual Recipes, we share all the great recipes we have featured in the magazine during our yearlong 50th anniversary celebration. In planning our February feature “50 Years of Southern Recipes,” our staff pored over every issue ever produced, and one thing became apparent: The foods we Southerners have long revered are as hot as ever…everywhere.

By looking back at the way we cooked and ate when the magazine was first unveiled in 1966 until today, the evolution of Southern food became apparent. Each of the magazine’s 600 issues is a reflection of the way Southerners cooked at a particular point in our history. Yet the old adage “What was old is new again” also rang true. Trends do indeed come and go, but we could see them returning again and again. Even today, old-fashioned humble foods like potlikker and johnnycakes are being highlighted on five-star restaurant menus across the country, right beside “artisanal” this and “heritage” that. Southern Living has been celebrating and elevating our regional ingredients and dishes for 50 years and has been a key player in putting Southern food on the national culinary map.

Southern Living is in the midst of a renaissance too. We are embracing the digital age and complementing our beloved print publication with handy new digital extensions via the launch of the newly designed SouthernLiving.com, online videos, and social media, so you can get the content you love—including the great recipes from the South’s most trusted kitchen—wherever you go and however you like it served to you. Our new 40,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art kitchen studios boast 28 individual kitchen bays with all the bells and whistles a cook could dream up. This is where our recipe developers and testers work their magic to create the delicious recipes that you’ve counted on us to deliver for the past five decades. Now, when a dish is perfected, it can be photographed just steps away in one of the dozen natural light studios our photographers and stylists use as their sets daily.

Through innovation, integration, and creative collaboration, Southern Living is excited to share our next 50 years with you.

Cheers!

Katherine Cobbs

Senior Editor