Old buildings have many stories to tell. On his way from his Texas home to a dairy farmers' convention in North Carolina in 1917, Paul Trowbridge passed through Florence. He liked the place so much, he returned and built Trowbridge's Creamery, where local farmers brought their milk and cream to be processed. Today, Paul's recipe for Orange-Pineapple Ice Cream is still popular, as is the homemade chili introduced by current owner Don Trowbridge's mother Martha, who ran the business when her husband went to war in 1944. Gay N. Martin heard many entertaining stories while researching Alabama's Historic Restaurants and Their Recipes for the first edition in 1998. From the mountains in the north to the beaches on the Gulf of Mexico, she dined in white-columned mansions, rustic log cabins, and former schoolhouses, banks, drugstores, and gas stations. From these, she culled a list of fifty of the state's most memorable restaurants-all places of character, where the food is as distinguished as the surroundings. In this second edition, she offers 22 new restaurants and dozens of new recipes.

Gay N. Martin holds a master's degree from the University of Alabama and is a member of the International Food, Wine, and Travel Writers Association. The recipient of more than fifty awards in regional and national writing competitions, she has published some 350 articles in such magazines and newspapers as Modern Bride, Seventeen, the Birmingham News, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Boston Herald