“In The Big Jones Cookbook, Fehribach has provided a firm sense of culinary place and heritage when it comes to southern food, along with recipes you can’t wait to make. He takes readers on a journey of the background of each recipe, both in his life and from a historical perspective. Time to go back to Chicago and enjoy eating his food in person again!”

Nathalie Dupree, co-author of Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking

“You need not be from the South to get the South and southern cooking; you simply need to be devoted. Fehribach is very devoted, complete with a side serving of biscuits smothered in savory debris gravy! He brings to his subject the factual ferocity and curiosity of a historian. He cooks it up with the contemplation and invention of a true artist. He serves it to us with genuine heart. I’d like to tell you a whole lot more about why I am giving The Big Jones Cookbook a wide space on my kitchen counter, but I need to go now and find the ingredients for Reezy-Peezy, ca. 1780. You should, too.”

Ronni Lundy, author of Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken

“Fehribach is a bighearted anthropologist, history nerd, and kick-ass kitchen technician—in other words, the ideal chef to introduce Chicagoans to the pleasures of regional southern cuisine. The Big Jones Cookbook distills the magic of his restaurant, the way Fehribach’s cooking manages to honor southern culinary traditions and ingredients in a resolutely contemporary way. This is food that tells stories, and here are all the hero recipes we’ve been craving, from Big Jones’s legendary fried chicken to classics like gumbo z’herbes to new originals like chicken-fried morels and benne ice cream. The Big Jones Cookbook is major news on the southern-food front.”

Matt Lee and Ted Lee, authors of The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen

“Fehribach has committed to memory the southern culinary canon, defined by writers like Grosvenor and Egerton. In The Big Jones Cookbook, he channels their ethics and aesthetics, shaping an agrarian approach that he calls ‘modern homestead cooking.’ From turnip greens with potato dumplings to pawpaw panna cotta, Fehribach renders a cuisine that's both erudite and stomach-rumbling.”

John T. Edge, coeditor of The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook

“Through extensive research, intuition and personal experience, Fehribach gives context to many of our great southern classics, and creates some of his own along the way. His reverence for southern cooking and the people who help sustain it shine through in every recipe. I have already dog-eared dozens of pages!”

Susan Spicer, chef and owner, Bayona, New Orleans

“Much as Rick Bayless has done for Mexican food, so Fehribach has done for Southern culinary traditions, excavating old recipes, researching the foodways that surrounded them, and seeking out hard-to-find ingredients, some of which seem exotic though they once grew abundantly, even in the Midwest.”

Chicago Tribune

“I love Big Jones, and Fehribach’s dedication to preserving and resurrecting dishes from a wide variety of Southern cuisines, and how those dishes are grounded in regional history. . . . I was not only expecting recipes that would bring the history of my own home country to my table; I was expecting them to be enriched with Fehribach’s lifelong interest in history and geography. I wasn’t disappointed. . . . It’s a concise introduction to Fehribach’s approach, which draws on home cooking and high cuisine, using modern techniques to ‘reboot’ old dishes.”

Chicago Magazine

“Fehribach may hail from the Midwest, but that doesn’t stop him from being a regional Southern cooking expert and taking the time to teach us a thing or two about it. The Big Jones Cookbook has recipes divided by geography. I happen to love this, because as we all know, preparations vary greatly depending on whether you’re in the coastal Low Country of South Carolina and Georgia, south Louisiana, or the Delta. With a little history and a lot of recipes, Fehribach takes you through regional cuisine that’s not only mouthwatering, but also easy to pull together.”

Washington Independent Review of Books

“A historic (and ground-breaking) take on Southern food.”

Eater

“An assiduous student of southern cooking, Big Jones’ owner Fehribach takes advantage of farm-fresh meats and produce to illustrate that even in an era of franchise fried chicken, genuine southern cooking can rise to haute cuisine. Scouring the legacy of the South’s best chefs, such as Edna Lewis and Paul Prudhomme, Fehribach advocates for stone-ground grains and old-fashioned sorghum molasses and lard. Recipes range from simple, traditional pimiento cheese and cornbread through freshly crafted headcheese and boudin sausages. He reveals his own long-guarded secret Kentuckiana fried-chicken recipe. The text’s depth and intelligence make this an appropriate cookbook far beyond regional boundaries.”

Booklist

“Organized by regions of the south, it’s a cookbook built on cookbooks, as Fehribach is a devoted digger into long-forgotten volumes. And there are fascinating sidelights on everything from the Italian etymology of the low-country slave dish reezy-peezy to the old Virginia origins of chicken-fried steak. At the same time, it’s not a book that belabors its subject—a more scholarly tome is up next for Fehribach—and it’s a highly practical book, based on oft-requested recipes time-tested in Big Jones’s kitchen.”

Chicago Reader, "Best New Cookbook from Chicago"

“Paul is unique in that he doesn't look forward at what Southern food could be, he's looking backward at what it once was. He loves 100 year-old handwritten recipes, time-honored technique, and heirloom ingredients.”

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