Dora Charles

Dora Charles is the Savannah cook whose hands shaped one of the most famous Southern restaurants in America for two decades, with almost none of the credit. Her 2015 cookbook, A Real Southern Cook in Her Savannah Kitchen, is the corrective — a clear-eyed, technically precise record of the Lowcountry-inflected Black Southern cooking she had been doing all along.

Her story is central to this project's mission. The framework exists because too many cooks of her caliber have fed America without being named. Charles is the named one; she stands for the unnamed ones too.