In her sunlit Peachtree City kitchen, Tami Morris is stirring up a tea punch, circa 1928.

The 48-year-old freelance writer and mother of two glances at the vintage cookbook on her granite island, improvising as she goes, adjusting ingredients here and there to suit her and her family's contemporary tastes and taking advantage of her stainless steel microwave to soften lemons so they'll be easier to juice.

Photos by W.A. BRIDGES JR./Staff (ENLARGE)

Tami Morris of Peachtree City prepares corn pudding au gratin, one of the recipes she's discovered in a vintage Southern cookbook by Henrietta Stanley Dull, first published in 1928. Recipes for dishes such as possum, however, bring squirms today.

(ENLARGE)

Corn pudding au gratin from Mrs. Dull's 'Southern Cooking' is one of the recipes that remain valid today.

RELATED LINK: • Blog: Remembering Mrs. Dull DUELING DULLS Two versions of Mrs. S.R. Dull's classic cookbook, "Southern Cooking," are currently in print — one published by Cherokee Publishing of Marietta in 1989 (right) and a brand-new edition (below) by the University of Georgia Press. Both sell for $24.95 and contain similar jacket notes. Yet both publishers agree that they are distinct. The 1989 version is a reprint of Mrs. Dull's original self-published 1928 version. The University of Georgia Press decided to print the out-of-print 1941 edition, which was originally published by Grosset & Dunlap and in which 150 recipes were added to the original book. (A handful of illustrations that could be considered racially offensive were removed.) When the University of Georgia Press decided to print the 1941 edition, it believed Cherokee no longer published the cookbook, says marketing director John McLeod. But Ken Boyd of Cherokee Publishing says that while "Southern Cooking" may have been out of stock occasionally, it was never out of print. The family's copyright to the book lapsed some time ago, and "Southern Cooking" is in the public domain, which means anyone can print a version. But Boyd adds: "I can still claim I've got the original, and claim some separation there."

Maraschino cherry juice, orange drink, tea and lemon halves go into a blue glass pitcher. After a sip, Morris pours a generous dollop of freshly made simple syrup from a pan on the stove. Another taste.

"This is good," she says. "I like this."

The tea punch is one of dozens of recipes from "Southern Cooking" she has tried since discovering the book five years ago in a Tyrone antique store.

Score another one for Mrs. Dull.

Former Atlanta Journal food editor Henrietta Stanley Dull's classic "Southern Cooking" is still inspiring cooks like Morris who, nearly 80 years after its first publication, see Mrs. Dull's life work as much more than a dust-covered curiosity.

Two publishing houses have tapped into the hunger for Mrs. Dull's recipes, one as recently as this fall. The University of Georgia Press just released a reprint of the 1941 edition of "Southern Cooking" with a foreword by Savannah cookbook author and culinary historian Damon Lee Fowler. Still in print is Cherokee Publishing of Marietta's 1989 reproduction of the 1928 version, which has sold about 12,000 copies.

Why so much attention to a book that starts a Brunswick stew recipe by calling for a pig's head, feet, heart and liver, and that promises if cooking instructions are followed carefully, "Even the most inexperienced housewife will be rewarded with success"?

"There are people around who still remember her," says 66-year-old Retta Morales, named for her great-grandmother Henrietta Dull, who helped raise her and inspired countless backyard games of "cooking school" with her childhood friends. "That cookbook is passed on from generation to generation."

Hundreds of cookbooks are published each year in the United States. Many go out of print after a few years, crowded out by the next culinary wave or the new Food Network star. Some endure, like the collection of more than 1,000 recipes that Mrs. S.R. Dull — she used her husband's name on the book — dedicated in 1928 to her friends, the women of Atlanta, Georgia and the South.

"I think she was very solid, very solid," says Southern cooking expert Nathalie Dupree and author of "New Southern Cooking" (University of Georgia Press, $19.95). "I think a lot of brides cooked from her."

Even today, when frying chickens weigh twice what they did in Mrs. Dull's time and a number of ingredients — like huckleberries and possum — are no longer relevant, Dupree uses it as a reference.

"Anyone who wanted to know how to do something that their grandmother did would go back to it and find it, probably," she says.

Except for a few years in the 1980s, "Southern Cooking" has been in print since Mrs. Dull assured cookbook buyers that, "I have been careful, in my selection of recipes, to publish only those which I know to be good and can recommend."

Cooks of the day took her promise seriously. Mrs. Dull turned to the kitchen to support her family after her husband suffered health problems. She worked as a caterer, demonstrated gas stoves for Atlanta Gas Light and, in 1920, started writing a weekly food column for The Atlanta Journal's Sunday magazine, Mrs. Dull's Cooking Lessons, that would continue for 25 years.She died in 1964 at the age of 100.

Fowler, a culinary historian who wrote the new edition's foreword, credits Mrs. Dull for influencing several generations of cooks and preserving Southern food as it was prepared at home, before canned soups and processed foods started wiping out regional specialties.

In short, simply written recipes, she told women how to make syllabub, a frothy dessert rich with sherry, and how to prepare possum ("Cut off ears, remove eyes and head if desired.")

Some cooks continue to turn to Mrs. Dull for classics like spoon bread, poundcake and squash souffle. Mary Frances Broach Woodside, 85, of Buckhead remembers going to a bridal lunch in recent years where guests received a copy of her grandmother's tomato aspic recipe.

"I still make her tomato aspic and I still make her squash casserole," Woodside says, laughing. "You know, you go back to that. There's a fudge in there named for me, Mary Frances' Chocolate Fudge. She used to name recipes for family members and friends."

After moving to Peachtree City from California, Morris wanted to learn more about Southern cooking. Mrs. Dull showed the way, from sweet potatoes to drop biscuits and corn pudding, which Morris served for the family's first Thanksgiving in Georgia. It's a holiday staple now.

"One of the reasons I like these old cookbooks is they really give you a sense of the history and tradition of the area," she says.

Still, tradition only goes so far when you have to eat it. Morris wants to try Brunswick stew but balks at the everything-but-the-squeal recipe.

Morris, who recently picked up her second copy of "Southern Cooking" at a garage sale, likes flipping through the pages and seeing the yellowed recipe clippings and other memorabilia from a previous owner. She might give it to a friend, but it could join her growing collection of old cookbooks.

"I got all excited when I saw it," she says. "I figured it was a good cookbook, you can never have too many copies of it."