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Authors: Jean Anderson,Jean Anderson

A Love Affair with Southern Cooking

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A Love Affair with Southern Cooking

Recipes and Recollections

Jean Anderson

For the Southerners,

past and present,

who have enriched my life

I
should like to thank, first and foremost, my good friend and colleague Joanne Lamb Hayes not only for telling me about the foods of her Maryland childhood but also for lending a hand with the recipe testing and development. Few food people are more professional, more creative, or more dedicated.

In addition, I’d like to thank my two nieces, Linda and Kim Anderson, for sharing recipes from the “southern side of their family.” My gratitude, too, to Betsy Thomas and Georgia Downard, who double-checked a number of the recipes; also to Debbie Moose and Clyde Satterwhite, who assisted with sidebar research.

Down the years as I’ve traveled the South on article assignment, friends, acquaintances, colleagues—even strangers—have taught me about the dishes popular in their particular corners of the South and served them forth with hearty helpings of history plus snippets of gossip, legend, and lore. Many of them have graciously put treasured family recipes into my hands, many of them printed here for the first time.

I am indebted to one and all: Bea Armstrong; Anne Lewis Anderson; Janet L. Appel, Director, Shirley Plantation; Dorothy Bailey; Marcelle Bienvenue; Donna Brazile; Jennifer S. Broadwater, Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky; Rose Ellwood Bryan; Mrs. Pegram A. Bryant; Ruth Current; Chuck Dedman, Beaumont Inn, Harrodsburg, Kentucky; “Miz Nannie Grace” Dishman; Nancy Blackard Dobbins; Judith London Evans; Damon Lee Fowler; Mrs. Franklin (I wish I could remember the first name of this early Raleigh neighbor who taught me so much).

Deepest thanks, too, to Dr. and Mrs. William C. Friday; Jean Todd Freeman; Laura Frost; Pauline Gordon; “Miss Tootie” Guirard; Mr. and Mrs. James G. Harrison; Lisa Ruffin Harrison, Evelynton Plantation; Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm Jamieson, Berkeley Plantation; Sally Belk King; Elizabeth C. Kremer; Jane Kronsberg; Lorna Langley; Linn Lesesne; Meri Major, Belle Air Plantation; Betsy Marsh; Eleanor Haywood Mason; Garnet McCollum; Dr. and Mrs. Allen W. Mead; Amy Moore; Helen Moore; Mrs. Carey Mumford, Sr.; Nancy Ijames Myers; Virginia
Mumford Nance; Moreton Neal; Madeline Nevill; Chan Patterson; Nancy Mumford Pencsak; David Perry; Fleming Pfann; Annie Pool; “Miz Suzie” Rankin; Maria Harrison Reuge; Rick Robinson; Tom Robinson; Mary Frances Schinhan; Mary Sheppard; Mary Seymour; Florence Gray Soltys; Elizabeth Hedgecock Sparks; Kim Sunée; Pauline Thompson; Payne Tyler, Sherwood Forest Plantation, Virginia; Janet Trent; Kathy Underhill; Jeanne Appleton Voltz; Cile Freeman Waite; Lillian Waldron; Lois Watkins; Virginia Wilson; Lenora Yates; and not least, those gifted North Carolina Home Demonstration Club cooks from Manteo to Murphy.

Further, I’d like to thank these singular southern chefs for ongoing inspiration: Ben and Karen Barker of Magnolia Grill, Durham, North Carolina, Robert Carter, Peninsula Grill, Charleston; Mildred Council, Mama Dip’s Country Kitchen, Chapel Hill; Marcel Desaulniers, The Trellis, Williamsburg, Virginia; John Fleer, Blackberry Farm, Walland, Tennessee; Scott Howell, Nana’s and Q Shack, Durham, North Carolina; Patrick O’Connell, The Inn at Little Washington, Washington, Virginia; Louis Osteen, Louis’s at Pawley’s, Pawley’s Island, South Carolina; Paul Prudhomme, K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, New Orleans; Walter Royal, Angus Barn, Raleigh; Bill Smith, Crook’s Corner, Chapel Hill; Brian Stapleton, The Carolina Inn, Chapel Hill; Robert Stehling, Hominy Grill, Charleston; Frank Stitt, Highlands Bar and Grill, Birmingham; Elizabeth Terry and Kelly Yambour, Elizabeth on 37
th
, Savannah; plus two who left us too soon: Bill Neal, Crook’s Corner, Chapel Hill, and Jamie Shannon, Commander’s Palace, New Orleans.

No acknowledgments would be complete without thanking food writer Jim Villas and his mother, Martha Pearl Villas, for so many good southern “reads” and recipes; also cookbook author Damon Lee Fowler of Savannah and Suzanne Williamson of Beaufort, South Carolina, who taught me to make quail jambalaya one brisk December evening and also introduced me to my “dream” southern writer, Pat Conroy (Suzanne developed the recipes for
The Pat Conroy Cookbook
).

Other cookbook authors and writers about southern food must also be named because they have inspired and educated me over the years: Brett Anderson (no relation); the late R. W. “Johnny” Apple (southerner by marriage); Roy Blount; Jr.; Rick Bragg; Marion Brown; Joseph E. Dabney; John Egerton; John T. Edge; Marcie Cohen Ferris; Donna Florio; Bob Garner; Karen Hess; Sally Belk King; Ronni Lundy; Debbie Moose; Bill Neal; Frances Gray Patton (whose short stories so often featured food); Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings; Julia Reed; Dori Sanders; Elizabeth Hedgecock Sparks; John Martin Taylor; and Fred Thompson.

I’m indebted to Elizabeth Sims of the Biltmore Estate in Asheville for introducing me to the prize-winning Biltmore wines; to Dave Tomsky, formerly of the Grove Park Inn, his wife, Nan, and Tex Harrison, all of Asheville, for providing an insider’s view of their city; and to Sue Johnson-Langdon, executive director of the North Carolina SweetPotato Commission, for a mountain of information of the state’s top crop. I would also be remiss if I didn’t holler “thanks” to John M. Williams, who kept fresh Georgia pecans coming for recipe testing, and Belinda Ellis, of White Lily Flour, who sent me not only a detailed history of this Tennessee miller but also bags of flour to ensure that the cakes and biscuits com
ing out of my test kitchen oven were as light as they should be.

Thanks go, too, to Sara Moulton, best friend and colleague for more than twenty-five years, who agreed to write the foreword to this book. I take credit for introducing Sara to my home state of North Carolina and she’s returned many times.

Penultimate thanks to David Black, my agent and anchor, who found a home for this book; and two Harper editors: first Susan Friedland, who liked my different take on southern cooking enough to buy the book, and second, Hugh Van Dusen, for his editorial wisdom and guidance throughout.

Finally, I must thank
Bon Appétit, Gourmet,
and
More
magazines for granting permission for me to reprint the southern recipes that first appeared there in feature articles I’d written.

Foreword

by Sara Moulton

I
hardly knew a thing about southern cuisine until I started working with Jean Anderson—although I’d known Jean herself for years. In fact, getting to know her was a New York thing. She had an apartment in the same building as my parents, the building overlooking Gramercy Park in which I grew up. She also had a bunch of New York jobs—freelancing for all the major food and travel magazines.

But it wasn’t until I was out of cooking school myself, with half a dozen years of restaurant experience under my belt, that I began to get an idea of just how much culinary range Jean possessed. Between the time I stopped working in restaurants and began working at
Gourmet
, I apprenticed myself to Jean. I traveled with her to Portugal, Brazil, and Holland, helping to
shlep
her camera equipment (Jean’s a great photographer, too) and tasting and discussing a new world’s worth of food.

Jean’s southern roots remained fuzzy to me until about ten years ago, when she left New York after forty-one years and returned to the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area where she grew up. I’ve visited her there four times, and every time I go it becomes the Full Immersion North Carolina Food Orgy. All three of the Best Triangle Restaurants in Durham. Pulled pork at the A&M Grill in Mebane. Deep-fried turkey in Sanford. Stacked pies at Mama Dip’s. The Gingerbread House Contest in Asheville. Not to mention country ham in fresh-baked biscuits for breakfast at Jean’s place. I eat like an electric pig (as Jean herself likes to say), and then I take the recipes back up north with me. I’ve told the world about them on my Food Network shows, prepared them to beguile my lunch guests at
Gourmet
, and served them up to the delight of my family at home. But finally I’m just a tourist below the Mason-Dixon Line. My friend Jean, a southern girl returned to her roots, knows southern cuisine from the ground up. Like all of the rest of her twenty-odd cookbooks,
A Love Affair with Southern Cooking
is distinguished by superb scholarship and recipes that deliver deep-dish authenticity and big flavor in equal measure.

It’s also great reading, juicy with a lifetime’s worth of personal reminiscences and Southern lore, all of it smart as a fresh coat of paint and much of it very funny. Jean tells me the book is a labor of love. We’re all the richer for her willingness to share that love.

I
fell in love with southern cooking at the age of five. And a piece of brown sugar pie was all it took.

I’d just begun first grade at Fred A. Olds Elementary School in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was born, and had chosen that pie over all the other desserts in the school cafeteria. The look of it fascinated me: a barely set filling that was crackly brown on top and the color of comb honey underneath.

That day I ate dessert first, pushing aside my pork chops and collards. I had never tasted anything so luxurious. It was like toffee softened on a sunny windowsill and it salved my budding sweet tooth. From that day on, I ate brown sugar pie as often as possible, sometimes taking two pieces instead of one.

Back then, there were good African American cooks in public school kitchens preparing everything fresh every day: southern fried chicken, smothered pork chops, greens or beans simmered with side meat, banana pudding, and of course that ambrosial brown sugar pie. All of it was new to me—the start of a culinary adventure that continues to this day.

But let me back up a bit. Why, you may wonder, did it take me five years to discover southern cooking if I’d been born in Raleigh? There’s an easy answer.

Both of my parents were Yankees, Midwesterners to be exact; my mother came from Illinois, my father, Ohio. Not even my older brother could claim to be a Tar Heel; he was born in Vienna while my father was teaching there. I am the first person on either side of my family to be born south of the Mason-Dixon line—a distinction I am proud of.

To be honest, I think the fact that my parents
weren’t southern
is the very reason why I’ve been absorbed with southern food (indeed with all things southern) since the age of five. I also believe that it gives me a different approach to it: I’ve always been more student than insider.

From the very beginning, every bite of something southern—of Sally Lunn, for example, of hush puppies or hoppin’ John—was a new experience for me, something exciting, something special. I loved the funny recipe names and adored hearing the stories behind them (my mother’s pot roast and gooseberry pie were never dished up with anecdotes).

Mother was a good cook—but a
midwestern
cook. So we ate the Illinois dishes her mother had taught her, along with a few New England recipes she’d picked up while at Wellesley and a few more from her young married years in Austria. I remember roast lamb in particular, a meat none of my southern friends would touch; baked ham (a pink packing-house ham, never Smithfield or country ham); parsnips or rutabaga boiled and mashed like potatoes (she had to order these specially back then); Boston brown bread (never corn bread and rarely biscuits); roasted or fricasseed chicken (never southern fried). I also remember eating beef heart and tongue, even rabbit fricasseed like chicken.

The things my school chums’ mothers cooked always seemed much more appealing, exotic even. So I’d go home with them after school every chance I got, hoping that I’d be invited to stay for dinner; I often was. There might be crispy fried chicken or stuffed pork chops, sweet slaw, yellow squash pudding, fresh-baked biscuits, and—cross fingers—sweet potato pudding or pecan pie for dessert.

All through grade school and high school I reveled in the southern cooking I was served at the homes of friends; at parties given by Daddy’s colleagues at North Carolina State College; at the S & W Cafeteria, where we went every Christmas Eve; and, yes, in the public school cafeterias. There was no prefabbed food back then, no vending machines coughing up cookies and colas.

Early on I began collecting southern recipes, and my mother was happy for me to try them as long as I “left the kitchen spic and span.” Occasionally I would cook a complete southern dinner, and there were no complaints. My mother, however, remained a strictly midwestern cook except for Country Captain, her dinner party staple; watermelon rind pickles; and two or three other southern recipes friends and neighbors had given her.

Sent north for college, I hurried south after graduation and went to work for the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service, first as an assistant home agent in Iredell County about halfway between Raleigh and the Great Smokies, then nine months later as woman’s editor in the Raleigh office. That job kept me on the road covering 4-H and home demonstration club functions from one end of the state to the other—from “Manteo to Murphy” (ocean to mountains).

Talk about food! There were mountains of it always—at club meetings and picnics, at pig pickin’s and fish fries, at country fairs and cook-offs, many of which I was drafted to judge. In Iredell County, August was picnic month with a home demonstration club feast every night and sometimes two. It was here that I first tasted spectacular batter-fried chicken, pulled pork (barbecue), and biscuits so light they nearly levitated. Here, too, that I became acquainted with Jerusalem artichoke pickles, Japanese fruitcake, and wild persimmon pudding, all of which seemed to be accompanied by a colorful story.

These country women were born cooks and their club picnics were potluck affairs with everyone bringing strut-their-stuff recipes. It didn’t take me long to discover whose fried chicken was the best, whose corn pudding, whose coconut cake.

A few years later I became a New York magazine editor (first at
The Ladies’ Home Journal
,
then at
Venture: The Traveler’s World,
and finally at
Family Circle
), and I was often sent south to interview a good home cook or hot new chef and told to bring their best recipes back to be tested and published. My editors, most of them New Yorkers, considered me southern, and I must say that at the time my accent was as thick as sourwood honey.

Later, as a freelance food and travel writer contributing regularly to
Bon Appétit, Family Circle, Food & Wine,
and
Gourmet
, I spent even more time down south, researching and writing major features in nearly every state: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia. I was in hog heaven.

I interviewed cooks homespun and haute, I ate in barbecue joints and crab shacks as well as at hallowed regional restaurants. I learned to milk cows and goats, to surf-cast for rockfish and drum, to gather wild persimmons and ramps. I was threatened once by a swarm of honey bees and another time—even scarier—by hundreds of stampeding turkeys.

I toured a herring cannery, catfish and crawfish farms, I slogged through cane fields and rice paddies, and I picked-my-own at peach and pecan orchards. I even went crabbing with a Chesapeake Bay waterman and floated about the Atchafalaya Swamp in a Cajun pirogue (canoe).

There were headier tours, too: at McCormick’s spicy headquarters in Baltimore; the Maker’s Mark Distillery in Loretto, Kentucky; the 200-year-old Winkler Bakery in Old Salem, North Carolina; and the eye-tearing Tabasco plant at Avery Island, Louisiana.

Over the years, I’ve received valuable one-on-one cooking lessons and I’ll forever be grateful to the Southerners who showed me the light: the Virginia farm woman who taught me to bake a proper batter bread, the Cajun who demonstrated the right way to make a roux, the South Carolina plantation cook who revealed her secret fail-safe method of cooking rice. But there were many others who passed along their culinary expertise as well as their place-of-pride recipes. You’ll read about them in the pages that follow.

For this is as much culinary memoir, indeed culinary love letter, as cookbook. It is not—
repeat not
—“the definitive southern cookbook.” Nor was it ever intended to be.

I simply want to share the experiences—the amusing, the unique—that I’ve had in forty-something years of crisscrossing the South, specifically Alabama, the two Carolinas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia. For these eleven southern states are the ones where I’ve spent the most time.

I want to introduce you to the characters I’ve met along the way as well as to the friends I’ve made. My aim, moreover, is to pass along the South’s rich culinary history, the gossipy stories Southerners love to tell, the snippets of folklore, and not least the precious insight I’ve gained by watching Southerners cook—in the mid South and Deep South, on seashore and mountaintop.

My passion for southern cooking shows no sign of cooling, and it’s this passion that I’m eager to share along with a life’s worth of recipes and recollections.

—Jean Anderson
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

BOOK: A Love Affair with Southern Cooking
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