The Family Table is an aptly named cookbook. Be prepared for warm, funny, and memorable stories spun from generations of a southern family and punctuated with prized recipes. The well-tested dishes you can make with this cookbook will be welcome additions to your kitchen repertoire, but you also have the chance to experience family lore unfolding. You'll feel a kinship with the honorable patriarch GrandSir, be swept up in tales of Grammy's youth, and wish terribly that you too had been able to bunk with the giggling Eubanks cousins at the island cottage. Paula Eubanks' family recipes allow us to taste the past, but the stories and photographs in this collection allow us a figurative taste of history as well -- and at a close, personal level that you rarely find in the biography section of the library. The author is an artist and her natural aesthetic awareness and enjoyment is soaked into her cookbook, a joie de vivre that will forever inspire your own role in daily life, family history, and cooking.