Allison Vines-Rushing - Southern Comfort: A New Take on the Recipes We Grew Up With

Copyright 2012 by Allison Vines-Rushing and Slade Rushing
Photographs copyright 2012 by Ed Anderson

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
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vines-Rushing, Allison.
Southern comfort : a new take on the recipes we grew up with /
Allison Vines-Rushing, Slade Rushing.
p. cm.
Summary: The much-anticipated debut cookbook from two of the most admired and innovative young chefs in the South, with 100 recipes featuring their refined, classically-inspired takes on the traditional Southern food they grew up with Provided by publisher.
1. Cooking, AmericanSouthern style. I. Rushing, Slade. II. Title.
TX715.2.S68V557 2012
641.5975dc23

2012012084

eISBN: 978-1-60774-263-0

Prop Styling by Angie Mosier

v3.1

T HIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO I DA L OU V INES -R USHING ,
THE SWEETEST LITTLE DISH WE HAVE EVER CREATED .

W E MET IN THE KITCHEN OF A RESTAURANT called Gerards Downtown in New Orleans. It was the fall of 2000, we were both cooks and we fell in love. Six months later, we purchased two one-way tickets to New York City on the City of New Orleans train and away we went. We each landed jobs and rented a tiny one-room basement apartment in Brooklyn complete with a patch of dirt in the back. We planted a garden and felt like the two luckiest people on Earth.

Working in New York was more mentally and physically exhausting than we had imagined, but our Southern stubbornness prevented us from giving up. We also had our little Brooklyn refuge, where on late nights after work (Slade was at March and I was at Ducasse), wine revived our tired bodies, and we created dishes and wrote menus sprinkled with comforting memories from home. Funny how soon those ideas would come in handy. After only a few years in New York, we became head chefs of a tiny restaurant in the East Village called Jacks Luxury Oyster Bar.

Finding ourselves at Jacks was serendipitous to say the least. At the time, Slade was chef de cuisine at a little French restaurant in the Flatiron District called Fleur de Sel, and I had just left Ducasse to take a break from the stress and plan our wedding. I applied for a job as a barista at the recently opened Blue Goose Caf, armed with a ridiculous rsum that included all of my restaurant experience from the last ten yearsstarting with Kenny Rogers Roasters in Coral Springs, Florida, and ending with Alain Ducasse. Jack Lamb, the owner of the Blue Goose, checked out my rsum and said he wanted to hire me as the chef of a new restaurant he was opening. I was a bit taken aback, but saying no was never my strong suit. I said yes, but told him I was getting married in Augustto which he replied, Then we will open the restaurant in September. I immediately called Slade to tell him I had gotten a job, but as a chef. He asked me if I had lost my mind.

On the opening night of Jacks Luxury Oyster Bar (which was also my twenty-eighth birthday), Slade took the night off from Fleur de Sel to cook by my side. A few months later, on Valentines Day of 2004, he joined me as the co-chef at Jacks. There, our menus were riffs on classic New Orleans dishes, mingled with French-inspired soul food. Customers walked through the kitchen to get into the upstairs dining room, while we scrubbed our own pots and pans in a little sink after we served each table. Our tiny seven by seven-foot kitchen with a Sub-Zero fridge and four-burner stove was about as far away from a commercial restaurant kitchen as you could get. There was no walk-in cooler and no real prep space to speak of, so we packed the small fridge every day before service and emptied it out before the end of the night. The spiral staircase in the middle of the kitchen became our cooling rack. It was a job no chef in their right mind would agree to take on, but lucky for us we did and we made it work. Pretty soon the customers walking through the unconventional kitchen were chefs like David Bouley, Jeremiah Towers, Alain Ducasse, Eric Ripert, Franois Payard, and many others. Lines formed outside to wait for tables. We realized that something special was going on.

But too quickly, it all got much bigger than us. The media attention was constant and hugely flatteringand, well, tricky. All of the positive press resulted in customers increasing expectations, plus our egos grew, things became complicated with our boss, and the honeymoon was definitely over for our brand-new marriage. We decided to get the hell out of town. The article in the New York Times read Two Rising Stars Opt Out of Manhattan. What a way to go.

We unpacked our bags in Abita Springs, right outside of New Orleans, three months before the most disastrous hurricane ever hit this area. Our family had bought us an amazing, dreamy property, which would become our first restaurant, Longbranch. We had the we made it in New York, we can make it anywhere attitude. And then all hell broke loose. A week before the restaurant was set to open, we packed up our truck to evacuate before Katrina hit. We took a couple of changes of clothes, beer, foie gras and sweetbreads that we didnt want to go bad, and two dogs that werent ours. We headed to Tylertown, Mississippi, and didnt return home for over a week. Even in Mississippi we were not completely out of Katrinas path, and the power was not restored there until after we had headed back home. Luckily, Slades sister Kim had a natural spring well in her backyard, so we rigged up a shower where we could also wash dishes and clothes. To keep ourselves busy, we raided all the freezers on our street and then cooked friends, family, and neighbors three meals a day on a gas grill.

Upon returning to Abita Springs, we hadnt a clue what would be waiting for us. We had given friends in town who did not evacuate the key to the restaurant in case the worst happened. They had cleaned out the walk-in cooler of food to sustain themselves and their neighbors for the week, so thankfully we didnt have to deal with rotten, moldy food. We found that most of the trees on the property had fallen, and the cottage we were living in was in very bad shape. The restaurant building, however, looked mostly unscathed. The energy company was there to turn back on the electricity, so we began cleaning up. Longbranch quietly opened one week later.