Ashley Strickland is an associate producer with CNN.com. She likes tackling English toffee, channeling summer with sunflower cheesecakes, sharing people-pleasin' pizza dip and green soup, cajoling recipes from athletes and studying up on food holidays.

There is a grace in the harmony of simple flavors and taking the time and care to introduce them to one another. I like to think it’s embodied in a perfect pound cake.

Take a moment to get to know the grand dame of Southern desserts.
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This year, the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrates women, work, and food. Today's subject is Karen Barker, who was happily co-proprietor and pastry chef of the Magnolia Grill in Durham, North Carolina (1986–2012). Now, happily, she is not.

I grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, where there was a very strong corner-bakery culture but little actual home baking. People tended to purchase their breads and desserts rather than produce them out of cramped urban kitchens.

I was lucky that my maternal grandmother, an exception to this rule, lived upstairs. She was a Russian immigrant who barely spoke English, had no written recipes, and never used standardized measures. Bubby Fanny turned out an amazing array of Eastern European specialties and taught me that homemade sweets were a tribute to one's family and always included the ingredients of time and love.
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More from CNN's Inside Africa

Previously - The cook who picks cotton: reclaiming my roots and Marcus Samuelsson: How I got here

This year, the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrates women, work, and food. As we embark on new documentary projects in keeping with this theme, we'd like to share some of the wonderful stories we already have in our archive. Today, we introduce you to Alzina Toups of Galliano, Louisiana, whose interview is part of our Down the Bayou oral history project.

Alzina Toups’ paternal ancestors came to Louisiana from Nova Scotia, as did so many Cajuns. Her mother’s family - “great, great cooks” - was Portuguese, though both of Alzina’s parents primarily spoke French at home. Alzina still peppers her conversation with French words and phrases. A woman whose faith infiltrates all areas of her life, Alzina treated us to a French prayer-song during the interview below.
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Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. We've been sharing dispatches live from their 15th annual Symposium "Barbecue: An Exploration of Pitmaster, Places, Smoke, and Sauce" in Oxford, Mississippi, over the past few days. Dig in.

North Carolina writer Randall Kenan delivers the opening keynote address at the 2012 SFA symposium, a literary meditation on the importance of the hog in Southern culture. Kenan is introduced by Ted Ownby of the University of Mississippi. It's saucy.

Previously - Alton Brown on the science of cooking whole hogs

Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. We'll be sharing dispatches live from their 15th annual Symposium "Barbecue: An Exploration of Pitmaster, Places, Smoke, and Sauce" in Oxford, Mississippi, over the next few days. Dig in.

This year's Saturday Viking Range Luncheon was prepared by chef Ashley Christensen of Poole's Diner in Raleigh, North Carolina. Ashley prepared a "Piedmont Root-to-Stem Harvest Feast," shaking up the weekend's theme by applying barbecue-inspired techniques to an all-vegetable meal. Of course, not everything was baptized in smoke, but the lunch did include coal-roasted sweet potatoes and beets. (Ashley picked up the coal-roasting technique on a recent trip even further south, in Uruguay, where she and the Fatback Collective schooled themselves on the asado.)

The lunch - from pimento cheese and homemade crackers to pumpkin hummingbird cake with peanut custard - was served family style, fostering the sense of a common table and opening up a space for conversation around the food.
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Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. We'll be sharing dispatches live from their 15th annual Symposium "Barbecue: An Exploration of Pitmaster, Places, Smoke, and Sauce" in Oxford, Mississippi, over the nest few days. Dig in.

Last night's festivities kicked off with nips and nibbles. What else were you expecting from an SFA symposium?

Whitney Otawka and Ben Wheatley of Farm 255 in Athens, Georgia, served up pork meatballs with a muscadine glaze and fried quail breasts on white bread with Tabasco sauce and pickles. Both of Whitney's creations were riffs on Southern classics - come on, don't tell us you've never had meatballs in grape-jelly sauce served from a crock pot. And of course, the quail breasts look like an extremely cute version of a certain pickle-capped fried chicken sandwich... So, take those two recipes, crank the ingredients up about five notches, serve them with a wink and a nod, and you might get close to imagining how yummy these amuses-bouche were. And did we mention that Whitney and Ben have yet to turn 30?
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Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. We'll be sharing dispatches live from their 15th annual Symposium "Barbecue: An Exploration of Pitmaster, Places, Smoke, and Sauce" in Oxford, Mississippi, over the nest few days. Dig in.

We're off and running! We began this morning fueled by Texas brisket-and-egg breakfast tacos, a collaboration between Tim Byres of SMOKE Restaurant in Dallas and Lolo Garcia of the fabled Plantation Barbecue truck, which roams the Houston suburb of Richmond.

First, Nathalie Jordi led a panel on food politics with rancher Will Harris, restaurateur/pork aficionado Nick Pihakis and Greg Asbed of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. To be honest, politics aren't always a huge part of our narrative here at the SFA, but if we're truly going to pay attention to the stories behind the food, we need to know the often-hidden stories about who raises our animals and who picks our produce. And we need to honor their work by compensating farm workers fairly and by treating animals with dignity. Nathalie, Greg, Nick and Will brought those issues to the table, and we're grateful that they did.
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Editor's note: The Southern Foodways Alliance delves deep in the history, tradition, heroes and plain old deliciousness of barbecue across the United States. We'll be sharing dispatches live from their 15th annual Symposium "Barbecue: An Exploration of Pitmaster, Places, Smoke, and Sauce" in Oxford, Mississippi, over the nest few days. Dig in.

The 15th Southern Foodways Symposium officially kicks off Friday at noon. But we got things started a little early with a well-balanced combination of photography, fashion, cocktails, music, literature, film and hot dogs. You know, the usual SFA ingredients. Herewith, an instruction manual on how to spend a pre-symposium Thursday evening, in case you ever find yourself in this position.
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While you're frying up some eggs and bacon, we're cooking up something else: a way to celebrate today's food holiday.

Oooh, salty! October is Eat Country Ham Month!

Country hams are terrifying. They’re dessicated, mold-ridden and possessed of a barnyard funk that could conceivably cause a soul to rethink their entire relationship with the animal kingdom.

They should not – for country ham is an American national treasure that rivals the finest porcine offerings of Italy, Spain and any other of the world’s ham-curing cultures. Here is what to do if you find one.

Read - How to confront a country ham
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