Aunt Runner's Recipes One of the site's best features is a "recipe lost and found." Many people use it, which means that, if you request an old, lost recipe, there's a good chance someone will find it for you. When I visited, someone was looking for a recipe for green grape preserves, and a desperate sounding woman was looking for the recipe for the spaghetti served long ago in her school cafeteria.

Cajun Cooking With Char Dishes are authentic and delicious.

Cajun Gumbo An excellent guide to Cajun cooking. It starts off with the basics: "In this section you'll find Creole seasoning blend, homemade stocks (you must do this!), and the essential New Orleans dishes: Gumbo, Jambalaya, Red Beans 'n Rice, and Shrimp Creole." And then it moves gloriously onward to great conclusions.

Cajun Recipes by the Thousand They're building the "largest and most accurate collection of Cajun recipes handed down from one Cajun cook to another." They had 876 when I last looked and are heading toward 1,000. I didn't see anything with Campbell's soup, indicating a good level of authenticity. The Pecan Gralle and the Shrimp Etouffee sounded like the real thing, all right, and the Pork Sausage Spicy Red Gravy made my mouth tingle.

     According to Johnny Cash: "Carl [Perkins] is countrified and country-fried, as country as country can be. Listening to him, you can still place him exactly, if you know what you're hearing: southwestern Tennessee, just as I still sound like a combination of southwestern Arkansas, where my parents grew up, and northeastern Arkansas, where I myself was raised. It's rubbed off a bit because we've both been to town, but it's still there. So is the need to keep going back to our basics, one way or another. . . .

     "I myself can't go too long without real Southern fried chicken, skillet cornbread, and all the other wonderful staples of my home food. It's one of the disadvantages of a life spent traveling internationally that that particular kind of cooking isn't much exported. You can find a burger almost anywhere in the world and dine well on French or Italian or Chinese food, but just try finding fried okra or black-eyed peas or skillet-cooked cornbread in Sydney or Singapore or Stuttgart."

From Cash: The Autobiography (HarperCollins, 1997).

La Lama Mountain Ovens A brother and sister are working "to record, test, and preserve the best of the Italian-American old family recipes, and translate them into repeatable techniques sized for today's family." Each month they add two more "family secrets." A beautiful labor of love.

Old Recipes from the Eastern Shore of Virginia Christmas Coconut Cake, Sweet Potato Biscuits, Hog Island Snow Cream, and what to do with Hayman potatoes if you're ever fortunate enough to have some. (They are GOOD!)