Bill Smith - Seasoned in the South: Recipes from Crooks Corner and from Home

You wouldnt necessarily expect a cookbook to tell a good story, but Bill Smiths does, with disarming directness. Notable among his clever-yet-approachable Southern recipes are an ingenious spicy green Tabasco chicken and crisp and refreshing green-peach salad.

Food & Wine, Must-Have Books of 2005

This is the kind of cookbook that makes you want to get up, right now, and cook something.

The Charlotte Observer, The 10 Best New Southern Cookbooks

Crooks Corner in Chapel Hill, N.C., a restaurant growing in national renown, is credited with blending southern traditions with the modern bistro, and author Bill Smith is the man in the kitchen. Seasoned in the South brings innovation to Southern cooking.

The Miami Herald

Call it Southern with a French twist.

The Denver Post

Peppered with humorous anecdotes and nostalgic recollections of family, friends, food, travel the book is an entertaining read as well as an excellent culinary resource.

Our State magazine (NC)

Smith serves the lowly bivalves simply and Southern-style all winter long to rave reviews. In his new book, Seasoned in the South: Recipes from Crooks Corner and from Home Smith makes readers hungrywinter, spring, summer or fall.

Sky (Delta Airlines)

I dont remember another cookbook that made me cry, laugh aloud, and drool. Herein youll find the good food from Crooks, good writing, and good sense. Im proud to be a fan.

John Martin Taylor, author of Hoppin Johns Lowcountry Cooking
and The Fearless Frying Cookbook

This is a superb yet simple work, a tribute to Smiths talent and dedication.

Pages magazine

Smith champions a new version of southern cooking that owes a great deal to classic French cuisine.

Booklist

[Bill Smiths] recipes cover everything from appetizers and entres to side dishes and desserts and provide nouvelle flair to familiar Southern favorites.

Library Journal

His storytelling makes a lovely garnish.

Greensboro (NC) News & Record

Bill Smiths recipes are marvelously uncomplicated and have been called the new bistro food of the South. The recipes capture the flavors of the freshest foods and the spirit of one of the Souths liveliest and most innovative kitchens.

Virginia Living

A small gem of a cookbook.

The Contra Costa County (CA) Times

SEASONED IN THE SOUTH

Recipes from Crooks Corner and from Home

by BILL SMITH

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2006

Published by
A LGONQUIN B OOKS OF C HAPEL H ILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
W ORKMAN P UBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

2005, 2006 by Bill Smith. All rights reserved.
First published in hardcover by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2005. Expanded paperback edition, October 2006.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.
Design by Maxine Mills and Anne Winslow.

Grateful acknowledgment for the use of photographs is made to the following: title page: Kinsley Dey; page : Michael Traister.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

eISBN 978-1-56512-827-9

To all my cooks. Love and kisses from the land of blood, meat, and fire. A todos mis cocineros. Amor y besos desde la tierra de sangre, carne, y fuego.

Pepsi with Peanuts

Coffee

W HEN I WAS ASKED by Algonquin to consider an expanded second edition of Seasoned in the South, I happened to be in New Bern at the home of my parents. Naturally, as I began to consider things to include, lots of scenes from childhood sprang to mind. Writing the book had caused me to do this anyway to some degree, and I now realize that the process had led me to reappreciate some of the things that I had considered ordinary growing up. Ive gone back and tried to re-create some of the things that we did in 1950s eastern North Carolina as middle-class families who were benefiting from all that postwar America had to offer. We were small-town South, but that was different from our rural neighbors. New Bern was as old and as urban as it got in that part of the world. It had its own gentility that governed a lot of what we did, especially socially and at the table. This new edition contains both holiday specialties from those days as well as some more modern recipes to plump up this offering.

I ought to take this opportunity to thank everyone Ive ever known in my whole life for the reception that the first edition of this book received. People were kind and generous beyond anything I ever imaginedespecially here around Chapel Hill, where it honestly seemed to me that the whole community put its collective shoulder to the wheel in my behalf and shoved me on toward success. I need to also thank my mother, sisters, and aunts, who instantly became research assistants when I needed help fast.

Bill Smith
Chapel Hill, January 2006

T HE FIRST TIME I ever saw Bill Smith he was dancing on top of a table to a song named Cakewalk to Kansas City in a show named Diamond Studs, a strictly local product created by an outfit known as the Southern States Fidelity Choir. It was summer 1973. Bill wore blue jeans and a red T-shirt and a diamond earring. He was dancing like crazy, and the whole shebang was headed straight to New York.

Looking back, I find this image emblematic of both Bill Smith and Chapel Hill, not only in those wild years when we were all young but today as well. A sleepy little Southern town transformed by a great university, Chapel Hill has always been a haven for artists, writers, and musicians, original thinkers and mavericks of all kinds. Exuberance and innovation flourish. (Back when the North Carolina legislature was discussing whether or not to fund a state zoo, Jesse Helms suggested, Just put a fence around Chapel Hill.)

No wonder musicians theater originated here or the new Southern cuisine was invented at Crooks Corner by Bill Neal and Bill Smith.

Today Bill Smith and Crooks Corner are an institution. Youll find them smack at the center of things, both literally and symbolically.

Theres Bill, threading his bike through the traffic on Rosemary Street as he rides to work, greeting everybody along the way, or at the farmers market every Saturday morning with his basket, choosing kumquats.

And theres the restaurant, right on the corner, in the same building that used to be Miss Rowena Crooks fish market. There it is with its famous Bob Gaston pig sculpture on the roof, along with a lot of Clyde Joness chain-saw critters and a glittery collection of hubcaps on the wall, and big spiky plants and weird flowers growing all over the sidewalk; there it is, looking like a piece of funky folk art itself. It sits right at the intersection of the New South and the Old South. Though Franklin Street has gone corporate a little farther east, Als Garage is still catty-corner across the street, and gospel music still swells out of the historic St. Paul A.M.E. Church next door.

Inside, Crooks is a combination of a city bistro (black and white tiles on the floor, good art on the walls) and your grandmothers kitchen, with a little bit of New Orleans thrown in. Its almost a party atmosphere.