Jean Anderson - A Love Affair With Southern Cooking: Recipes and Recollections

A Love Affair with Southern Cooking

Recipes and Recollections

Jean Anderson

For the Southerners,

past and present,

who have enriched my life

Contents

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, Id 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 Ive traveled the South on article assignment, friends, acquaintances, colleagueseven strangershave 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 Sune; 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, Id 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 Dips Country Kitchen, Chapel Hill; Marcel Desaulniers, The Trellis, Williamsburg, Virginia; John Fleer, Blackberry Farm, Walland, Tennessee; Scott Howell, Nanas and Q Shack, Durham, North Carolina; Patrick OConnell, The Inn at Little Washington, Washington, Virginia; Louis Osteen, Louiss at Pawleys, Pawleys Island, South Carolina; Paul Prudhomme, K-Pauls Louisiana Kitchen, New Orleans; Walter Royal, Angus Barn, Raleigh; Bill Smith, Crooks 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, Crooks Corner, Chapel Hill, and Jamie Shannon, Commanders 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.

Im 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 insiders view of their city; and to Sue Johnson-Langdon, executive director of the North Carolina SweetPotato Commission, for a mountain of information of the states top crop. I would also be remiss if I didnt 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 coming 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 shes 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 Apptit, Gourmet, and More magazines for granting permission for me to reprint the southern recipes that first appeared there in feature articles Id written.

by Sara Moulton

I hardly knew a thing about southern cuisine until I started working with Jean Andersonalthough Id 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 jobsfreelancing for all the major food and travel magazines.

But it wasnt 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 (Jeans a great photographer, too) and tasting and discussing a new worlds worth of food.

Jeans 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. Ive 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 Dips. The Gingerbread House Contest in Asheville. Not to mention country ham in fresh-baked biscuits for breakfast at Jeans place. I eat like an electric pig (as Jean herself likes to say), and then I take the recipes back up north with me. Ive 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 Im 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.