Recipes To Reflect The Modern South
A new cookbook looks at a variety of dishes beyond the expected
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A New Way of Looking At Southern Cuisine
Even before I lived in New Orleans, I was a fan of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, aka SoFAB. The museum was founded in 2004 after a “let’s put on a show” type conversation around a kitchen table. At the time, culinary museums were few and far between. There were museums celebrating individual brands, but not many that looked at cuisine across a region.
That is the purpose of SoFAB, whose territory ranges from the District of Columbia over to Texas. I highly recommend that you explore the SoFAB website and drop in when you are in New Orleans. You can meander through the displays, take a cooking class, enjoy an event and shop in its well-curated boutique.
This summer, in conjunction with SoFAB’s 20th anniversary, Louisiana State University Press published The Southern Food and Beverage Museum Cookbook: Recipes From the Modern South.
If you ask people to describe Southern food, you might get answers like fried chicken, shrimp and grits, barbecue and peach cobbler. But what about catfish dip, tri-color slaw and a Cuban sandwich?
Black cooks have made enormous contributions to Southern cuisine, which was not always acknowledged by cookbook authors. So have immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
I talked to Elizabeth Williams, known as Liz, one of the book’s co-authors about the project and what readers will learn.
The roots: “We first decided we weren’t going to rehash all the things people think of as Southern food. There are so many Southern food cookbooks that have those recipes in them. Southern food is alive, it’s relevant. So many changes have happened in the South” especially immigration and the evolution of different ways of eating, especially those beyond meat-based recipes.
“It's a dynamic process. The food continues to develop and change even though it’s rooted in a place.”
Getting off the ground: ‘It was one of those things that started before the pandemic (in 2018).” Liz and co-author Maddie Hayes submitted their own ideas, and invited chefs, home cooks and others to contribute, only to have the effort run into Covid.
“During the pandemic you’d think people would have time to sit down and give us a recipes. We had to beat people up to get the recipes. It was really hard, and then finally, we got what we thought we needed and got the response we needed.”
The process: “We started out with about 150 recipes and 105 are in the cookbook.” The recipes are arranged by the states representated in the museum. “Sometimes recipes were so similar that we didn’t want to use both of them.You don’t need 15 corn pudding recipes.” They had to keep regional differences in mind, too. “We have an abundance of tomatoes (in Louisiana), but not everybody does.”
The challenge: “Stupidly, for me, I thought it would be so much easier than writing my own books because you would have the recipes. (But) everybody writes them in a different style and you want the recipes to read consistently throughout the book. They have to be really thoroughly re-written to be in the same style.”
Then there was the testing period. “You know your own recipe and you’ve made it 20 times, but (the authors) have to make all these things. Sometimes the recipes didn’t work. They forget to put in the step because it’s so obvious.”
Cocktails throughout: “We are not only the Southern Food and Beverage Museum but the Museum of the American Cocktail. So, we have cocktails and spirits and alcoholic beverages in there. People in the South do drink.” Many recipes can be made with non-alcoholic ingredients, though.
Her favorite dish: “I have a recipe for a tri-colored coleslaw: green cabbage, purple cabbage, yellow bell pepper. Mardi Gras colors. I happen to love coleslaw. I make this recipe by using a mandolin and cutting long long strips. I’m not a fan of coleslaw that’s little pieces that have gone through the food processor. This is so much better than Popeyes’ cole slaw.”
You can order the SoFAB Cookbook here.
A Sad Farewell In Portland, Oregon
The West Coast food world is mourning the untimely death of a much-admired Portland chef. Naomi Pomeroy, a James Beard Award winner, and advocate for independent restaurants, drowned in the Willamette River last weekend. She was only 49.
Naomi was best-known for her farm-to-table restaurant, Beast, which featured an open kitchen, and received numerous accolades. She was a familiar face on Top Chef, as a competitor and a guest judge.
Beast closed in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, and Naomi became one of the drivers behind the Independent Restaurant Coalition, which called on Congress to pass a $120 billion assistance fund for restaurants.
More recently, she and her husband operated Expatriate, a pub with food, and they were working on plans for a new restaurant.
“Our country’s restaurant industry is so much stronger, wiser, gentler because of her,” Top Chef judge Gail Simmons wrote on Instagram. “Thank you Naomi for giving so much of yourself to us.”
Pete Wells Passes The Baton
Long-time New York Times restaurant critic aannounced last week that he’s giving up his position, although he’ll remain with the paper.
In an essay, Pete wrote that health concerns were prompting him to step aside from the critic’s job. He took over from Sam Sifton in 2012. Before that, Pete had been the Dining editor. I worked with him on several stories and I’ll always be grateful for the chance to hone my restaurant world expertise.
The Times said that Melissa Clark and Priya Krishna will step in as interim critics in New York, alternating as they file both restaurant reviews and critic’s notebooks. Tejal Rao remains the Times’ California food critic.
I’d love to see the Times split up the critic’s job, the way the Chicago Tribune has done. New York is such a big market, so diverse, and the Times wields so much power that one person simply can’t be a figurehead any more.
And who knows: with so many places to get opinions on restaurants, maybe it’s time to move away from pure criticism and more toward reportage, the way so many publications have done.
Mary Berry Is Planning A New Show
Dame Mary Berry, the beloved British cooking icon, is planning a new series. The 89-year-old chef will host Mary’s Foolproof Dinners for the BBC, which will undountedly end up on a streaming channel or your local PBS station.
The program pairs Dame Mary with a variety of British celebrities, including broadcaster Sue Perkins, who was a co-host of The Great British Bake Off when Mary was a judge alongside Paul Hollywood.
Other guests will include Will Kirk, one of the craftsmen on The Repair Shop, and Alan Carr, a cheeky British comedian.
“Dinner is often the meal where we need most inspiration at the end of a long day or to step out of the same old recipes that we can get stuck in a rut cooking,” Dame Mary said in a statement.
Last year, she hosted Mary Makes It Easy, another series in which she teamed up with celebrity visitors. One of her guests was Mel Giedroyc, who was Sue’s fellow co-host on GBBO.
“We had so much fun with the series last year, I’m delighted we’re returning with six more fabulous friends to change their thoughts about cooking with new foolproof recipes,” Dame Mary said.
There will be a companion cookbook, naturally.
Dropping Off Food Scraps In Tucson
Here in Ann Arbor, we can place food scraps and peelings in our regular compost bins. But around the country, there’s been a wave of cities that host drop-off locations for food waste.
Tucson is the latest place to initate such a program. According to KJZZ, residents who complete a 30-minute introductory session and additional training can get a free home compost pail for food scraps and access to a number of drop-off sites set up around the city.
The move is a bid to improve air quality and reduce food waste. Last month, Pima County’s environmental quality department issued a ground-level action day for the Tucson metro amid high pollution levels.
Chicago launched a similar program last year with 17 drop-off sites across the Windy City. The food scraps get turned into compost, which is then used around town.
Keeping Up With CulinaryWoman
Our International Summer Vacation continues at the Lions, Towers & Shields classic film podcast. In our latest episode, we reviewed La Dolce Vita, the 1960 film by Federico Fellini.
We had a spirited conversation about the film, including some ideas where Fellini could have shortened things up (it runs for more than three hours).
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Tomorrow, I’ll be back with Red Beans & Advice, a feature for our paid subscribers. I’m going to tell you about a Trader Joe’s discovery that has become a staple in my pantry, years after my mother first introduced us to this type of food.
Have a great Sunday and I’ll see free subscribers next week.
"People in the South do drink." Why, yes, yes they do.