A potluck table with meatballs, dinner rolls, salad, spaghetti and a jar of Blue Plate mayonnaise

Dressed

A new cookbook celebrating 100 years of Blue Plate Mayo and the Gulf South foodways.

The Dressed cookbook on a wooden table

It’s a defining part of Southern cooking and a staple that anchors everyday meals, celebratory gatherings, and generations of family traditions. Across the Gulf South, dishes are “dressed” with Blue Plate – the ingredient that ties everything together, bringing richness, depth, and the unmistakable flavor that signals it’s done right.

Dressed: 100 Years of Blue Plate Mayo and the Foodways of the Gulf South shares more than 100 recipes that captures the many, and sometimes surprising, ways cooks rely on Blue Plate Mayonnaise to turn even the simplest dishes into something worth celebrating.

Where to buy

Cornbread in a cast-iron skillet, with butter on the side

What’s inside

Recipes to make your mouth water

With over 200 recipes based on Gulf South classics as well as new twists and modern takes on Cajun and Creole traditions, you are sure to find a recipe to make your mouth water. You will also find special guest recipes from some of our favorite local chef friends.

A sample of some favorites

A fried oyster sandwich with bacon, tomato and mayonnaise on toasted bread

In the Gulf South, feeding people well is not a gesture. It’s a way of life.

A smiling woman in a Parkway paper hat at a crowded festival table
A couple dancing to a brass band on a crowded French Quarter street

The story of Gulf South cooking

Vivid storytelling and evocative food and lifestyle photography captured by the Gulf South’s own Denny Culbert with support from Ryan Hodgson-Rigsbee accompany the recipes, offering a captivating portrait of Southern kitchens and the moments that happen around them, while tracing Blue Plate’s 100-year New Orleans legacy and influence across the Southeast.

Dressed is a celebration of heritage, the food that brings us together, and what it means to pass a good time – one well-dressed bite at a time.

Grilled shrimp skewers on a blue and white platter
Hands holding a tomato sandwich over a kitchen sink

Meet the cooks

We asked Gulf South favorites to share their favorite recipes.

Gloved hands shucking a pile of oysters
Cypress trees draped in moss, reflected in still water at sunrise

About Blue Plate

Blue Plate started in a little warehouse in Gretna in 1927, then moved into its Art Deco home in Mid-City New Orleans. For a hundred years since, it has been on the po-boy, in the potato salad and at every table worth pulling a chair up to. Dressed is our way of saying thank you. You brought the party. We brought the mayo.

More about Blue Plate (opens in a new tab)

A vintage half-pint jar of Blue Plate Mayonnaise
The Blue Plate Fine Foods building in New Orleans at night, its neon sign lit

Get dressed

at your favorite book seller

The cookbook open to the Two-Napkin Sandwiches chapter