At book festival, cookbook authors will serve up food for thought to go with tasty treats

With cooler weather, shorter days and holidays around the corner (literally, in the form of Christmas trees and stockings, if you're pushing a shopping cart at Walmart), fall is prime cookbook time.

People are settling into their winter routines and thinking about the meals they'll prepare in coming months. Every year, the Texas Book Festival captures this renewed culinary spirit by inviting the country's top food writers, from chefs and TV hosts to culinary scholars and bloggers-turned-authors, to appear at the annual event taking place at the Capitol this weekend.

Inside today's paper, you'll find a special section dedicated to the book festival, which includes a roundup of most of the sessions dedicated to food. You could spend all day Saturday and Sunday listening to and watching these authors talk about and cook food from their latest books, but we chatted with several of them before the event to find out more about their books, thoughts on coming to Austin and the blistering hot culinary climate.

Pork chops and pork fat

Southern food seems to be the theme of this year's book festival. Paula Deen will be preaching to the choir at the Paramount Theatre on Sunday morning, but fellow Georgia native Virginia Willis will be giving what will surely be a more understated yet equally charming presentation from her new book, "Basic to Brilliant, Y'all: 150 Refined Southern Recipes and Ways to Dress Them Up for Company" (Ten Speed Press, $35) at 2:30 p.m. Saturday in the cooking tent.

For 20 years, Willis worked behind the scenes, including creating recipes, for television icons Martha Stewart and Bobby Flay. It was, in many ways, thankless work, but it was where she met and befriended Southern food doyenne Nathalie Dupree, who taught her the Pork Chop Theory.

"The Pork Chop Theory is based on the premise that if you put one pork chop in the pan and turn the heat on high, the pork chop will burn," she wrote in a blog post last year explaining it to readers. "If you put two pork chops in the pan, however, and turn the heat on high they will feed off the fat of one another. It's the ultimate in giving, sharing and developing mutually beneficial partnerships and relationships. It's not about competition, it's about sharing the fat, sharing the love."

You can watch the Pork Chop Theory in action at this year's book festival. With half a dozen authors with ties to the South, it might seem like ham hock overload, but everyone brings something different to the table.

"Paula would be at one end of the spectrum; Hugh (Acheson) would be at the other," Willis says. "I feel like my place is somewhere in between. The basic might be closer to Paula, but the brilliant is similar to Hugh."

All of them have something distinct to say about the regional cuisine that in recent years has been embraced across the country.

"Part of my mission is to share with people that Southern food is more than fried chicken and overcooked greens," she says. "It doesn't have to be trapped in the past." She also tries to show that you can cook Southern food without an entire stick of butter in every dish. "Traditionally, we had a history of pork fat, not butter."

You'll find a judicious use of pork fat and, in some cases, butter, in "Basic to Brilliant, Y'all," a follow-up to her 2008 breakout book, "Bon Appetit, Y'all," that is as simple and elegant as the recipes themselves.

With each of the 150 dishes, Willis tells you how to "dress them up for company" without much additional expense. "It's like a little lagniappe at the end of the recipe," she says, and the slightly more advanced steps mean that the book can grow with cooks as they gain skill and ambition in the kitchen.

To keep the high-brow-low-brow balance in check, Willis says she also intentionally used a range of proteins — pork loin and blade steak, chicken breast and thigh, prime rib and Salisbury steak — to make sure people on any budget could get something out of the book.

Beyond 'Top Chef Masters'

Hugh Acheson knows you might only remember him as that "Top Chef Masters" contestant with the unibrow, but that's OK. He makes fun of it, too.