(pensive music) (bell dings) (typewriter whirs) - [Morgan] Hi, I am Morgan Bolling.

- [Toni] And I'm Toni Tipton-Martin, - [Morgan] And this is "When Southern Women Cook."

- This cookbook is quite big.

The work that has to have gone into creating this is incredible.

300 recipes, 70 essays, all of which are incredibly moving and relevant.

I wanna hear some more about how you put this all together.

- We focused more on the people behind the recipes.

Traditionally, most recipe books, most recipe stories, foodways history, it's always about the recipe.

And even when it is about the people, we notice that there's sort of a pattern.

Some people are minimized, marginalized, even erased.

And we don't always think about women in that way.

But that was a passion for me, was to wanna make sure that we could bring life to the women and their stories.

So what we have in this book, in that 70 contributors, is a variety of women.

We have journalists, we have scholars.

There's a poet, farmers, chefs, restaurateurs.

We asked them to all speak in their own unique voice, which is unusual.

Oftentimes books, you know, they want everybody to have a uniformity about their tone and their approach and we didn't want to do that.

(upbeat music) - I mean, there's a lot of great individual stories in here, but I think to me, like, the overall message that feels exciting here is just to highlight some of the things women have done and this idea of like, women can be empowered and can use their voices and can also, like, really gain, I mean, there's so many stories of like economic independence through food.

So I feel like just like trying to lift women up while also, like, showing some delicious recipes and, like, highlighting really good food.

So I feel like to me, that's a big theme in here.

- Ladies, thank you so much.

(uplifting music) Congratulations on this amazing achievement.

It's been lovely to talk to you.

- Thank you, we're so excited about it.

So thank you for having us.

- It was great to be here.

Thank you.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words."

I'm J.T.

Ellison.

Keep reading.

(bell dings) - [Morgan] I think they said we spent $5,000 on each recipe in ingredients, because we're testing it so much, yeah.

So, but hopefully then it means they're really good recipes.