On my very first day as a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — I am legally obliged to say “Go Heels!” at this juncture — I headed to Lenoir Hall for my first meal south of Mason-Dixon line. (Noshing on pastrami at a South Florida deli with my grandparents doesn’t count.)
Soon a buzz went down the long line: “Barbecue! They’re serving barbecue!” As a Yankee from a culinary backwater, that meant one thing to me. Well, actually two: Hot dogs and hamburgers. But when I got to the front of the line, a steam tray full of stringy gray matter confronted me.
“Um, where’s the barbecue?” I asked the woman holding a serving spoon heaped with this mystery meat.
“Honey, you’re lookin’ at it.”
Carolina barbecue, I quickly learned, was pulled pork in a vinegar sauce. And my education was just beginning.
GASTRONOMICAL JOURNEY
I spent nearly 15 years in the South, quickly converting my standard breakfast of a hard roll with butter into a devotion to flaky biscuits and crusty cornbread. I devoured fried pickles and fried green tomatoes and fried chicken livers. (Do you sense a theme?) I discovered macaroni and cheese that — are you sitting down? — doesn’t come from a box. I know!
The rest of the food world is catching on. Pimento cheese, that oft-mocked staple of Dixie lunch boxes, has popped up on Bobby Flay’s Bar Americain menu (topping a burger) and on the cover of Bon Appetit (a macaroni and cheese version). Food Network stars Pat and Gina Neely will bring their Memphis-style barbecue to New York City this spring. The American cookbook category of the James Beard Awards has been consistently dominated by Southern writers, and this spring, a slew of new cookbooks celebrating the diversity of Southern cuisine will hit the shelves.
There are common threads between, say, Low Country cuisine of South Carolina and Appalachian cooking and the fare of the Mississippi Delta, says Martha Hall Foose, whose new book “A Southerly Course: Recipes & Stories from Close to Home” (Clarkson Potter, $32.50) has just been released.
“We’ve been locavores since way back because we had to be,” says Foose, who lives in Tchula, Miss., in the center of the state. “We’re such an agriculture-based economy, and people’s lives and the year flows about what’s happening out in the field.”
TABLE TALK
There’s also the great Southern storytelling tradition that rises up from the dinner table, often from sheer necessity. In big cities, Foose explains, there’s so much to do. “Down here, we just have each other to entertain ourselves — by cooking, or talking about what we’re going to cook next, or what someone else has cooked. It’s part of our entertainment as much as it is just the necessity of having to cook and eat.”
Things move more slowly in the South, and that’s a boon to the cuisine, says Jesse Jones, who grew up in tiny Snow Hill, N.C., and now runs a “New Carolina” catering business in Essex County. That patience, he says, allows cooks to develop a great depth of flavor — and the traditional building blocks of Southern cooking — butter, buttermilk, salt pork, bacon — don’t hurt, either. (Well, a cardiologist may differ on that point.)
French-trained chef Virginia Willis applies Gallic techniques to Southern staples in the recent “Bon Appetit Y’all” (Ten Speed Press, $32.50), and two North Carolina restaurateurs offer updated takes on classic comfort food: “Sara Foster’s Southern Kitchen” (Random House, $35), and “Tupelo Honey Cafe: Spirited Recipes from Asheville’s New South Kitchen” by Elizabeth Sims with Chef Brian Sonoskus (Andrews McMeel, $29.99).
TEAM DEEN
Paula Deen and her sons continue to churn out cookbooks — honestly, we wouldn’t be surprised if Deen’s plumber gets a book contract next — and two upcoming books will explore the influence of immigrants on the Southern food scene.
Foose’s new book is more idiosyncratic than her first, the James Beard award-winning “Sweet Tea and Screen Doors,” which tackled the canon of Southern cooking. In “A Southerly Course,” she offers skillet-fried corn and Lebanese kibbeh, deviled tomatoes and escabèche, creamed onions and crispy wontons. After all, the Delta is so rural, she says, “If you live in Indianola and you want Chinese food, you cook Chinese food.”
Foose’s recipe for simple, supple custard pie is dedicated to Jackson’s own Eudora Welty. “I would have also thanked her for a gift that I have begun to appreciate,” Foose writes, “now that I am — for lack of a better term — grown up: the idea that you don’t have to leave the place you love and know, that it is not a prerequisite that to understand home you must exile yourself to gain perspective.”
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