Have you been living in the city so long, you’ve forgotten how cool, green grass feels between your toes? Has it been so long since you tasted granny’s down-home cookin’, you can’t quite remember all the special dishes that weighed down her dining table?

Perhaps your older kinfolk have sworn off the food of their childhood for a low-sugar, low-fat, low-salt diet. Maybe you’ve heard relatives talk about their distant “Cracker” relatives, and you don’t quite have the nerve to ask just what that means.

If any of this applies to you or your upbringing had no connection to Southern or Appalachian culture, “The Cracker Kitchen,” by Janis Owens, is a book you will enjoy. It might be an adventure that will reveal and explain some of your childhood memories of family gatherings and traditions. Readers who want to vicariously explore another American culture will also find it an interesting journey.

The author is an accomplished fiction writer, who makes no apologies for her Cracker heritage. In fact, this book is a celebration of it. Owens brings the same storytelling talent usually reserved for her Southern novels to this warm and heartfelt family story of “the Other South” via a recipe box. Chapter by chapter, she will dredge you in flour and roll you through 12 months of Cracker festivities and menus. Along the way, she fries up delectable tidbits of Cracker life, both fact and fiction. These soulful vignettes are supplemented with photos from the family shoebox.

Owens begins her book warmly welcoming readers to her kitchen. She soon gets right to it and dishes out the skinny on just what a Cracker is - and we’re not talking Saltines. You might be surprised to see glimmerings of some of your own kith and kin as you make your way through Cracker 101.

The tradition of Cracker cooking, as the author tells it, is wrapped up in family, God and Mother Earth. It began in an era when Americans lived much simpler lives and lived them closer to the land than subsequent deli and supermarket generations. However, each generation of Crackers retains the best of their cuisine, adapting the recipes to their lifestyle. Owens includes some tasty shortcuts and ingredient substitutions (including canned products) along the way.

From springtime through winter, Owens serves up recipe collections from the family collective that showcase the roots of Cracker cooking and the beloved standards that transcend time, like cornbread, biscuits and gravy. Actually, make that gravies: chicken, tomato, red eye and chocolate. The Easter menu runs the gamete from crab bisque to cracklin’ cornbread to Easter Bunny Cake. Food appropriately tantalizing enough to welcome in the season of barefootin’ when Owens said the first thing she would do as a child was, “run through the beds of green clover that covered our backyard.”

Seasons, holidays, happy family gatherings, funerals and annual events all have a collage of beloved dishes the Owens family lean on to make the celebrations complete. Even hunting season (Owens says Crackers “like the great outdoors and weaponry”) don’t get short-shrift here. Recipes for rabbit, cooter, frog legs and other varmints aren’t omitted. Even if you don’t think you will every use any of these, it is fun to ponder the thought of cooking them.

So if you would like to discover the Cracker in you, reading the Owens’ family stories and taking a good, long peek in their treasure-trove of recipes is delightful. Should you see yourself or your relatives in some of the stories, don’t fret. Owens encourages you to “embrace your Crackerness.” Those who come late to the family are still welcomed with open arms.