Triangle cook is the belle of the industry

Jean Anderson is the highly regarded author of more than 20 cookbooks, and she's right here in the Triangle's kitchen, but most wouldn't recognize her if she walked down Raleigh's Fayetteville Street carrying a dish of flaming cherries jubilee.

Anderson isn't as well known as the cleavage-baring stove bunnies and profanity-slinging chefs who appear on television. Early on, she realized her future would not be in TV. Years ago, she did two segments on a Greensboro station: one on canning peaches (she canned the peach pits by mistake) and the other about roasting turkeys (she basted the camera lens).

"I'm not someone who can talk and cook at the same time," she said.

But Anderson, a Raleigh native who lives in Chapel Hill, may finally get some local love. After decades of writing on a range of styles including Portuguese and German cooking, she returned to her roots and wrote about cooking down home. Her book, "A Love Affair with Southern Cooking," just won an award from the James Beard Foundation -- the Academy Awards of the food world.

"Her book is a masterpiece. It deserved the award," said James Villas, a Charlotte native whose cookbook "The Glory of Southern Cooking" lost out to Anderson's book.

Adds Sandra Gutierrez, a Cary cooking instructor who counts Anderson as a mentor: "Her body of work is gargantuan. But this book is a labor of love. ... That's why I think it will be a classic."

"A Love Affair" is not just a collection of recipes, but, as Anderson says, the story of "a little girl born in the South to Yankee parents who fell in love with Southern food."

Anderson's Midwestern mother did not cook Southern. So Anderson's food epiphany occurred in, of all places, a school cafeteria; specifically, the one at Fred A. Olds Elementary in West Raleigh. The fried chicken, greens and "ambrosial brown sugar pie" sparked Anderson's lifelong devotion to Southern cuisine.

Fans for life

Anderson is beloved by experienced and amateur cooks who depend on her cookbooks, including "The American Century Cookbook," "The Doubleday Cookbook," and a definitive volume called "The Food of Portugal." She earned a spot in the James Beard Foundation's Cookbook Hall of Fame, which places her among the likes of Julia Child and Jacques Pepin.

"Once a cook discovers her, they become a fan for life," said Georgia Downard, a former editor at Gourmet magazine and former producer at The Food Network.

Anderson, who never married, said her career came first. The cookbook author, who is at least in her sixties, declines to reveal her age for fear of discrimination in the publishing world. She spent several decades in Manhattan before moving to Chapel Hill 10 years ago. Her home in a leafy neighborhood near the UNC campus has a bright, airy kitchen with more than a dozen battered pots and pans hanging above her six-burner gas stove.

What Anderson offers her fans are beautifully written stories and reliable recipes. That reliability sets her apart in today's cookbook publishing world. Many cookbooks, particularly those by food celebrities, are ghostwritten, and the recipes are often developed by someone else and untested.

When it comes to a cookbook, the success of the recipes is key. If a recipe fails, the author has shown she or he can't be trusted to help you impress your dinner guests, let alone your family.

Meanwhile, Anderson, who has a degree in food and nutrition from Cornell University, is one of the few cookbook authors who not only does her own research and writing but also develops and tests her own recipes. She even takes her own photographs. "Jean does it all herself," said Sara Moulton, star of "Sara's Secrets" on The Food Network.