Willis - Bon appétit, yall: recipes and stories from three generations of Southern cooking

Copyright 2008 by Virginia Willis
Photography 2008 by Ellen Silverman

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.tenspeed.com

Ten Speed Press and the Ten Speed Press colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file with publisher.

eISBN: 978-1-60774-134-3

Cover and text design by Betsy Stromberg
Food styling by Virginia Willis
Prop styling by Angie Mosier

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I write about Virginia Willis and her new book with pride. Not because I had a hand in the book, but because I was one of Virginias first teachers. She came to me one day while I was taping one of my cooking shows and asked to apprentice on her days off. I almost said no. But Virginia is determined, passionate about food, and gifted, and she packed every minute with learningas she has continued to do throughout the fifteen years weve been cooking together.

Since that beginning, Virginia has worked with some of the top names in the food world, from Anne Willan to Martha Stewart. She has had the great gift of allowing herself to be influenced by many brilliant cooks, both French and American. And she has done what every teacher wants of a studentshe exceeded my capabilities. (Im afraid she wont brag on herself, so I must.)

This book reflects Virginias quintessential Southernness. In the South, the first thing one is asked is, Who are your people? She has always claimed her people, her mother and grandmother among them, through her food. You are going to share those people through this bookthey will become your own. You will find a cake recipe here, a cheese straw there, that will make you sigh and say, Oh, if I could only eat that right now, propelling you to the kitchen. In these pages you will receive only the very best, to read, to savor, and to cook.

Nathalie Dupree

Memes recipe book

Rich in folklore and history, the cooking of the American South embodies all the glamour, grit, and heartbreak of Southern culture: the sad cruelty of slaverys influence; the joie de vivre of wealthy, well-bred, landed aristocracy; the romance of moonlight and magnolia; the sun-washed wholesomeness of family memories; a note or two of twisted Southern Gothic; fierce attachment to the land; and recently, a prideful sense of place, with chefs boldly championing local, artisanal, and heirloom products and vegetables.

My part in the old and complex story of Southern food began in my grandmothers country kitchen, with its walls made of heart-of-Georgia pine. My maternal grandmother, Emily Louise Wingate Baston, whom I called Meme, was the daughter of a farmer, a true Southern lady, and a wonderful cook. Born in 1907, she grew up near Hephzibah, Georgia. From the time I was in a high chair to when I was a grown woman pulling up a chair to her kitchen table, I loved to hear her stories of milking cows and making butter and cheese, filling a root cellar, killing hogs in the fall, and curing hams in the smokehouse.

Meme graduated from Young Harris College in 1927, a somewhat unusual feat for a woman of her time in the rural South. Her diploma, a real ; fried chicken; light, buttery yeast rolls; old-fashioned butter beans; turnip and mustard greens with salty, smoky pot liquor; and homemade jams and jellies. Many of these recipes are still scribbled in her handwriting directly on the wooden interior of her kitchen cupboarda sight that can leave me breathless and even move me to tears.

My mother, Virginia, and her siblings grew up being fed from that same heart-of-pine kitchen that came to mean so much to me. The family raised chickens and cows, though they stopped milking the cows when one surly beast kicked my grandmother (they packed the freezer with beef instead!). Meme served grits every morning for breakfast and Mama said she filled the plates to the rim. The school bus would pull up at the end of the long driveway and my grandmother would make it wait until all the plates were clean. No one, including the Columbia County Board of Education, argued with Meme.

In the 1960s, Mama and Meme both watched Julia Childs first television series and religiously tried the recipes the following week. Years later, I was the grade school child who took leftover crpes aux champignons and roulade au poulet to school for lunch. I hated it then, but now see in my mothers explorations the roots of my own passion for food. When I was three years old, my family moved to Louisiana and Mama discovered Cajun recipes, often preparing .

A love of fresh, home-cooked food and a tradition of unconditional hospitality have always been guiding values in my familyI see them as a testimony to our Southern heritage. I spent much of my childhood in the kitchen with Meme and Mama, absorbing those values and acquiring skills I would later develop into a profession. There are photos of me as young as four in Memes kitchen, standing on a chair making biscuits, or sitting on the counter with my feet in the cool steel sink, shelling butter beans. From the age of ten I used to sell birthday cakes to the neighborhood moms for their children.

My career began in earnest in Atlanta, where I worked as an unpaid apprentice for Nathalie Dupree, and has since taken me all over the world. I have cooked for President Clinton, chef Roger Verg, Aretha Franklin, and Jane Fondaand made lapin Normandie with the grande dame, Julia herself. My television work has taken me from the steep cliffs of Amalfi, where I picked plump yellow lemons, to the coast of Connecticut, where I tasted a briny oyster straight from the frigid waters of the Atlantic.

As a Southerner and a graduate of both LAcademie de Cuisine and cole de Cuisine La Varenne, my own style of cooking combines my Southern heritage with classical French training. The result is a mlange of new Southern and new American cooking with a heavy dose of classic French technique. As a food writer and cooking teacher, I try to be sensitive to busy lives, hectic schedules, and health concerns. Thus, many of the recipes in this book are adaptations of, and use less fat than, traditional Southern and classic French dishes, while a few are old-timey dishes flavored with hog jowl and bacon, and some are just simple country food that would be equally at home both here and in France. I take French technique into the Southern kitchenyoull find recipes for .