GARDEN CITY, Ga. — In the kitchen of her double-wide trailer, Dora Charles sets spare ribs kissed with flour into a deep fryer and sautés yesterday’s collard greens with rice and onions. Her cooking is practiced and deliberate, learned at the hand of her father and her grandmother Hattie Smith, who showed her that seasoning something well and cooking it slowly encouraged flavors to bloom.

Ms. Charles, 61, is descended from sharecroppers and, before them, slaves. She owes her skill to the practiced hands of nimble cooks who could create pies out of whatever the children brought back from the woods, and satisfying meals from animal parts rejected by white plantation owners.

The lunch she is about to set on her table in this suburb of Savannah is a modern expression of the scarcity branch of the African-American culinary family tree. Some people simply call it make-do cooking.

“Country people in the South had to make do with what was at hand, what they could grow or trade or preserve,” she writes in her new cookbook, “A Real Southern Cook: In Her Savannah Kitchen.” “I see this food as a tribute to those who came before me, who worked so incredibly hard for so little.”