Inside Martha Earnhardt's kitchen is a cast-iron frying pan seasoned to perfection and cured from the many cakes of cornbread.

More than 60 years old, the pan has been used so many times that at one point Martha wore the handle clean off the iron.

"My husband had to weld it back on," laughed Martha, widow of Ralph Earnhardt, mother of Dale Earnhardt and grandmother of Dale Earnhardt Jr. "That had to be more than 35 years ago, but I still use it today. That pan was one of the first cooking utensils Ralph and I got as a married couple; I was only 17 years old."

The single pan holds a tremendous amount of memories for Martha and symbolizes a time where home-cooked, family meals took precedent over dining out. Her family enjoyed a simple meat-and-potato style menu, no frills, until Dale began traveling the country, race track to race track.

"Dale introduced me to a few things I had never eaten before once he started racing," she recalled. "Artichokes, I still don't know how to cook them and I wouldn't know what they look like at the grocery to start with."

Nevertheless, Martha has learned to cook some of the finest Southern delicacies known to the region including her Sun Drop cake. She is sharing some of her most cherished family recipes in a book the Earnhardt matriarch co-authored with another well-known NASCAR mom: Carol Gordon Bickford, Jeff Gordon's mother.

The cookbook, Pit Stop in a Southern Kitchen: Two Moms of Racing Legends Serve Up Stories & Recipes, is a collaboration of California and Carolina cookery spread over 200 pages mixed with a heap of anecdotes from the kitchens of these two culinary goddesses.

Both women learned to cook from their respective mothers but over the years developed their own equally delicious styles. Martha swears by fatback while Carol calls for extra virgin olive oil.

"Before we moved from California to Indiana salad bars were a big deal and healthy living was becoming more popular. I used to cook fried chicken and four-course meals a lot, but people just don't eat like that anymore. And when you're racing you barely have time to sit down to a home-cooked meal, anyway."

When time did allow, Jeff always demanded lasagna, Carol's marquee recipe in the cookbook.

"I put sour cream in the sauce," she said. "It certainly adds to the calorie intake in the dish but it does something to the sausage and I use a lot of mushrooms."

When Gordon moved from Indiana to North Carolina, the only way his mother could come visit was if Carol brought a pan of lasagna with her.

"He was always a good eater," she said. "Oh, this is funny. Whenever we would go out to eat he would always order the most expensive thing on the menu thinking it meant he would get the most food. He was about 10 or 12 years old."

Gordon was often disappointed when the dollar amount didn't match the portion size.

Stories like this are sprinkled throughout the cookbook at the top of many of the recipes that are either marked C for Carol or M for Martha. Although I'm not sure Martha shared the wedding night story about her raw chicken.

"The day we got married we stayed at my sister's house that night," Martha recalled. "My mother gave me some prime pieces of chicken to fry for my husband. Well, my sister had a gas stove, I had never used one."

Martha had learned to cook on a wood stove and proceeded to fry the chicken breasts.

"They were real pretty and brown. But it wasn't done on the inside," she laughed. "That was sort of an embarrassment."

Martha said in the 1930s and 1940s women didn't always have cookbooks handy to guide them.

"You cooked and learned by taste," she said.

And as one of 12 children, Martha said she learned her way around a kitchen rather quickly, but she never imagined she would compile decades of recipe cards scattered amongst her friends and family for a cookbook.

Neither did Carol, but the experience was one that rekindled special childhood memories for her. Carol didn't have a lot of her mother's recipes committed to memory, but when she told her brother and sister-in-law she was doing a cookbook they told her they had some of the old recipe cards in the attic.

"My mom died in 1974 so it was neat to see her handwriting again," Carol said. "One of the things I learned doing this cookbook is that you never have time to stop and reflect on what you have done in your life. This cookbook gave me an opportunity to go back and see those traditions that I grew up with are still with me today."

In the cookbook, both Earnhardt Jr. and Gordon write forewords but Gordon captured the essence of the book best: "As a driver I know all about life racing by at a crazy pace, and I can promise you that the foods you'll find in the cookbook are worth slowing down to taste."