Home Plates

Born and raised about forty miles south of Atlanta in Locust Grove, Woodfire Grill's Kevin Gillespie learned to cook by watching his paternal grandmother prepare gargantuan smorgasbords of humble South Carolina Appalachian fare for an army of relatives who wandered in and out of her house daily.

Sonya Jones is the owner of Sweet Auburn Bread Company and the author of "Sweet Auburn Desserts: Atlanta’s Little Bakery That Could." Desserts were always in the house, and Jones often had a hand in baking peach and blackberry cobblers or apple pie.

Every holiday, Tony Morrow gathers with thirty or so family members at his mother and stepfather’s house for a massive feast that includes turkey and cornbread stuffing with giblet gravy, baked ham, chitterlings, collards, macaroni and cheese, cranberry sauce, and Irons’s signature sweet potato souffle—a creamy, nutmeg-spiced casserole thickly blanketed with a candy-sweet topping of coconut and pecans.

These easy slice-and-bake cookies melt in your mouth. Brazil nuts, now found bagged and shelled in many grocery stores, give them a distinctive flavor, but pecans, almonds, or other nuts can be substituted.

The Baltimore native’s love for vegetables began on summer vacations to her grandparents’ tiny farmhouse deep in North Carolina tobacco country. On the linen-covered dinner table, collards typically shared space with just-picked corn, tomatoes, and the beans and peas she and her siblings had shelled and snapped that morning. Meat, other than as seasoning, was often absent, and rarely missed.

Food stylist, cookbook photographer, and pastry chef Angie Mosier, who grew up in Tucker, is a past president of the Southern Foodways Alliance and a fervent supporter of numerous other initiatives that preserve regional traditions.

Cynthia Graubart studied journalism at UGA and earned her master’s degree in broadcast management at the University of Florida in Gainesville; one of her first gigs out of school was producing Nathalie Dupree’s PBS series 'New Southern Cooking' in 1985.

David Sweeney is best known for the stunning salads and vegan creations he served at his still-missed Old Fourth Ward restaurant, Dynamic Dish, which closed in 2010. He was born in Fort Gordon, Georgia, but his military family moved to Europe when he was young, and he lived there for nearly three decades.

Dinners at the suburban home of Ford Fry, chef-owner of JCT Kitchen and No. 246, typically revolve around the Big Green Egg perched on the spacious deck in back. What emerges from the ceramic smoker takes him back to gatherings he attended as a youth at his grandfather’s ranch outside of Houston.