Bill Smith's recipes are marvelously uncomplicated:  Tomato and Watermelon Salad, Fried Green Tomatoes with Corn and Mustard Butter Sauce, Cold Stuffed Pork Loin with an Artichoke Spread, Scallops with Spinach and Hominy, Really Good Banana Pudding, and Honeysuckle Sorbet. Structured around the seasons and inspired by the abundant local produce, these recipes not only reinvent classics of Southern culinary tradition, but offer up imaginative interpretations of bistro fare.
      Seasoned in the South captures the flavors of the freshest seasonal foods and the spirit of one of the South's liveliest and most innovative kitchens.

 My cooking harkens back to things I ate when I was growing up, but not in a museum-like way," says Bill Smith.  "This is not a theme park." .... Cooks like Smith have learned to keep the best of Southern cooking: farm-based freshness, seasonality and variety ...  Smith, who says he eats a bowl of collards and a bowl of black-eyed peas every day, grows positively rhapsodic when it comes to Eastern North Carolina corned ham.  (His father used to send him hams from New Bern before Smith learned the curing technique himself.) — News & Observer.

PRAISE FOR BILL SMITH:

An Article by Samia Serageldin in The Chapel Hill News
An Article by Grayson Currin in The Independent Weekly

FOOD AND WINE magazine says Seasoned in the South is a MUST-HAVE BOOK 2005: "You wouldn't necessarily expect a cookbook to tell a good story, but Bill Smith does."  It's also the #1 BOOKSENSE PICK for December 2005. 

It was a NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK for 2005.

Algonquin Books is releasing an expanded edition that includes seasonal menus and more recipes in 2006.

"With a narrative as rich as the stocks he cooks, Bill Smith shares truly magical southern dishes & unveils an exciting new chapter in our region's cuisine."
     --William Ferris

"I don't remember another cookbook that made me cry, laugh aloud, and drool. Herein you'll find the good food from Crook's, good writing, and good sense."
     --John Martin Taylor

"I have been waiting for Bill Smith to write a cookbook since first eating his food over 15 years ago. Seasoned in the South puts together the traditional and classic southern fare with his own unique style."
      --Sara Foster, author of The Foster's Market Cookbook

"Bill Smith's South is not fixed in some moonlight and magnolias past. At Crook's Corner, kindly grandmothers, Vietnamese immigrants, and scraggly rock and rollers hold sway; saffron and salt pork coexist; and the door swings wide to welcome all."
     --John T. Edge, author of Fried Chicken:  An American Story

"I love what Bill Smith does,"
     -- Dean McCord, eGullet.com

"He always seems to remember, uncannily, his guests' favorite foods..."
     -- Metro Magazine

"Crook's Corner . . . has spawned yet another chef's book by [Bill] Neal's extremely talented successor, Bill Smith. SIS is Smith's collection of wonderful, inventive recipes--most of them extremely Southern, but with a contemporary twist. . . . This is a superb yet simple work, a tribute to Smith's talent and dedication and a fitting legacy to Neal."
     -- PAGES magazine