Vivian Howard - Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South

I grew up with these dishes, and theyll always taste like home to me.

T HIS BOOK IS THE STORY OF MY LIFE so far, told through the ingredients that fill the plates and pantries of my home: Deep Run, North Carolina. A tiny farming community about halfway between Raleigh and the Atlantic Ocean, Deep Run is a nondescript dot on Eastern North Carolinas flat coastal plain. No stoplights, no strip mallsDeep Run is not a town; its a fire district.

I used to dream about living somewhere more exciting, and for a while I did. But after Id worked in restaurant kitchens and dining rooms in New York City, my roots called me back.

Eastern North Carolina is my Tuscany, my Szechuan, my Provence. This is a Southern cookbook, but not one that treats the South like one big region where everybody eats the same fried chicken, ribs, shrimp and grits, collard greens, and gumbo. Instead, I interpret Southern cooking the way we understand French, Italian, and Chinese food: as a complex cuisine with abundant variations shaped by terrain, climate, and people.

This is a storybook as much as it is a cookbook, where the ingredients are characters who shape my life. Crafting a narrative wasnt my initial plan. Rather, I set out to write an informative essay about each ingredient and found that I could not, for the life of me, teach anything before I explained why turnips, figs, and corn rose above all the lettuces and berries of the world to claim a place in these pages. Those stories are how the book unfolds; not seasonal or alphabetical, but personal.

After purging myself of each story, I was able to share some information. Instead of basic tips you can find anywhere, I offer advice gleaned from my relationships with farmers and seasoned home cooks and my experience in a professional kitchen. I call this wisdom, in the hope it teaches things you cant pick up from Google.

There are recipes too. A lot of themone for every skill and interest level in each chapter. The first preparation documents how the people of North Carolinas coastal plain treat the ingredient. These dishes set the tables of our past, and today they connect us to a culture of resourceful cooks who prepared year-round to feed their families. Many of these recipes were considered too mundane to merit writing down. Now they risk being forgotten.

From those traditions, the recipes grow from simple things you might make on a weeknight to more elaborate dishes I serve in our restaurant. In some cases I extract the core idea from a traditional dish and dress it in modern sensibilities, such as acid, texture, and colorthings my forefathers didnt always contemplateand thats it. In others I showcase the ingredient in a way my forefathers would never have dreamed of. These recipes are familiar, rooted in the regions larder, but novel in a way that calls out to the rest of the world. They take an ingredient out and do an acid-induced, multitextured dance with it. These dishes best represent my personal style as a cook.

Theres something for everyone here. I hope you find the dishes that best suit your kitchen.