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Is there guidance anywhere on how to assign the U.S. regional categories to recipes?  In particular, is 'Central Southern States' a group of particular states, or does it depend on the character of the recipe? 

I ask because many Virginia recipes aren't categorized as 'Central Southern States' but just 'North Amercan', despite that they seem to me very characteristically southern. The latest example to bring this to mind is in the newly indexed book The Mad Feast, which is a collection of essays built around one recipe from each state. I scrolled through the recipes trying to guess which one was Virginia's, and was led to conclude that it's the very last recipe in the book -- Mount Vernon colonial peanut and chestnut soup. Which is categorized as 'North American'.

IMO if your growing season is long enough to harvest peanuts, and they're any significant part of your cooking, you're in the south. I'm over in the non-peanut-capable mountainous part of the state, but our Appalachian cuisine is also regarded by most of the country as southern; we're claimed by chroniclers of southern cooking. 

I realize the impossiblity of tidy line-drawing for this kind of thing, but 'Central Southern States' is a category that's always mystified me, particularly because of the 'central' part.  I can sort of see it as a way to exclude Texas, which has equally strong influences from very different culinary traditions, and *maybe* Florida, and maybe purely Appalachian states like Kentucky and West Virginia; but Virginia in cooking terms is southern. Our non-central physical location among the southern states doesn't change that: all the characteristics of unambiguously 'central southern states' like the Carolinas and Georgia apply to us: early British colonization, slavery and consequent African influences (those peanuts being a major one), distinct coastal-piedmont-upland foodways, and a general reverence for the past, and therefore for foods that go back a long ways.

The 'Central Southern States' category may, like the way eggs are treated in ingredient indexing, be something that EYB management would do differently if starting off today.  But, like eggs, it's probably here to stay in its present form, so I'm just seeking clarification on how to understand and apply it.

Actually Central Southern States is something we can and intend to change. That category came in like that when we imported book data from Nielsen. We are going to change it to American South and it will then encompass the states that are generally considered as southern - Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, N. Carolina, S. Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Texas. I realize thare are some other states that are considered by some as southern but this would seem to be safest.

I have changed the cuisine on that recipe to Central Southern States (which will become American South). Any recipe that has the tag Central Southern States, Cajun & Creole, Eskimo, Canadian, Hawaiian, Native American, African American will also come up if you filter by North American as they are all included within the group North American. In the same way if you search by Asian you will see every recipe from every Asian country or if you search by Caribbean you will see every cuisine located there.

Thanks, Jane. That's very helpful.