Restaurant Review - Feed your head
This holiday season, give cookbooks and food writing with a Southern accent
Food lovers are blessedly easy to buy presents for: gadgets from Cook’s Warehouse or a gift certificate to Williams-Sonoma are sure-fire holiday choices for any foodie. First-rate cookbooks, of course, are always welcome gifts. Even folks with little time to stand at the stove enjoy curling up and gazing at lovely photographs of dishes indigenous to the Piedmont region of Italy, or contemplating esoteric ingredient lists of recipes from superlative restaurants in New York or San Francisco.
A Marylander by birth, I’ve lately been gripped with a keen aspiration to shake off my Mason-Dixon heritage by contemplating and cooking the foods of the South. Here, then, are six Southern-themed cookbooks or books of food writing I’ve discovered in the last year — five recently published and one classic — that would make worthwhile and gratifying additions to the shelf of any culinary-minded soul.
Anyone who has ever made the sojourn to Social Circle, Ga., for a meal at Louis and Billie Van Dyke’s Blue Willow Inn knows what an eye-popping experience it is to walk into the Walton Room and find oneself faced with the dilemma of deciding which of dozens of Southern dishes to chow down on. Jane and Michael Stern, authors of the classic Roadfood and monthly contributors to Gourmet magazine, have collected the Van Dykes’ recipes in The Blue Willow Inn Cookbook, (Rutledge Hill Press, 2002, $19.99) so readers can compose their own Southern smorgasbord. Not an elitist cookbook by any means, you’ll find recipes calling for Campbell’s canned soups, Ritz crackers, and cups of Cool Whip on every other page. Squash casserole, anyone?
Here’s one for the bedside table. Cornbread Nation: The Best of Southern Food Writing (John Egerton, Editor Chapel Hill, 2002, $16.95) is an eclectic and absorbing collection of essays compiled for the Southern Foodways Alliance, a nonprofit organization created — in their own words — “to celebrate, teach, preserve and promote the diverse food cultures of the American South.” There are over 40 opinionated and sharp-eyed pieces on people, places and foods, ranging from amorous odes to sweet tea and sweet potatoes, to honest recollections of prominent culinary celebrity Craig Claiborne and a glimpse inside the life of a prison cook who happens to be an expert on black Southern food. Their first volume, in what SFA aspires to be an annual compilation, offers an honest and poignant glimpse into Southern culture through its diverse gastronomic heritage.
My favorite cookbook find of the year — Damon Lee Fowler’s New Southern Kitchen, by Damon Lee Fowler (Simon & Schuster, 2002, $26) — is an extensively researched and thoroughly modern guide to Southern cooking. Though a few of the ideas, like asparagus shortcake, seem a bit precious, most of the book is filled with appealing and accessible takes on time-honored classics. Nearly all of the recipes’ ingredient lists are mercifully concise, and get this: Every recipe I’ve tried has turned out beautifully. Not a flop in the bunch. When I go home this year to visit my family in Baltimore, it’ll be Fowler’s tome at my side when I’m fixin’ Christmas dinner. I’ll be whipping up creamy sweet potato bisque, tender roast pork with apples, mushrooms and sage, winter squash with sausage and goat cheese (a surprisingly simple and scrumptious dish I seem to make for every dinner party I attend these days), and gingered apple tart with shortbread crust. No Yankee victuals on our table this year!
Several of my vegetarian friends, unsatisfied with local restaurants, regularly trek all the way to Athens just to eat at The Grit, a bustling, unpretentious spot that serves homey, meat-free grub. After years of customer requests, the place has at last published a collection of recipes: The Grit Cookbook, by Jessica Greene and Ted Hafer (Hill Street Press, 2001, $16.95). Though the number of ingredients for a single dish can be lengthy (a common drawback in vegetarian cooking), the food is fun and flavorful. Greene and Hafer wisely offer a balance between hard-core veggie recipes a la ’70s Moosewood (tempeh barbecue sandwiches and tofu parmesan) and offerings with more universal appeal (voluptuous mac-n-cheese with a spicy kick and a zesty spinach and feta lasagna). A copy of this book can save Atlanta’s Grit fans many a mile on the road.
Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South, by John T. Edge (Hill Street Press, 2000, $24.95) is an enlightening, idiosyncratic spin on the culinary guidebook genre. Edge, a foremost Southern food scholar, leads the reader across the South in search of honest, authentic food. He tells you not only where to eat, but also illuminates the colorful and often culturally and historically significant people and places behind the food. Spanning Virginia to Louisiana, Edge’s prose will set you daydreaming of road trips in search of soulful, definitive renderings of barbecue, pan-fried catfish and seafood gumbo. Atlanta, hardly a bastion of down-home Southern joints, gets honorable mentions for Paschal’s, Harold’s Barbecue and, shockingly, The Varsity, among others.
“Since we are the last of the original families, with no children to remember and carry on, I decided that I wanted to write down just exactly how we did things when I was growing up in Freetown that seemed to make life so rewarding.” So begins this exquisite memoir/cookbook about the lives led and the foods prepared in a rural black town in Virginia, The Taste of Country Cooking, by Edna Lewis (Alfred A. Knopf, 1976, $24.95). Lewis, a legendary Southern chef, was one of the strongest and earliest voices emphasizing a return to local, seasonal cooking. Hers is the kind of food writing you want to lay in bed reading aloud to your beloved. And the recipes are terrific. OK, so maybe you won’t be investing the time to make plum wine or guinea fowl in casserole anytime soon. But her gingerbread is moist and sublimely spicy, and her instructions for fried chicken in cream gravy are vivid. If only all cookbooks were this well written.