Graubart Cynthia Stevens - Mastering the art of Southern cooking

Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking

Nathalie Dupree & Cynthia Graubart

Photographs by Rick McKee

With a foreword by Pat Conroy

Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking

Digital Edition 1.0

Text 2012 Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart

Photographs 2012 Rick McKee

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except brief portions quoted for purpose of review.

Gibbs Smith

P.O. Box 667

Layton, Utah 84041

Orders: 1.800.835.4993

www.gibbs-smith.com

ISBN: 978-1-4236-2316-8

To Jack, who has gone from a two for his palate to an eight in just eighteen short years. Nathalie

To Cliff, who never met a cornbread he liked until mine. Cynthia

It is with humility and gratitude to those who have gone ahead that we thank them for their legacy. From the nameless slaves and cooks who tended crops and stoked fires, to those who wrote down what they cooked and what they ate, we thank you. Recipe collections begun by Martha Washington (1749), Thomas Jefferson (1780), Mary Randolph (1824), Sarah Rutledge (1864), Mrs. A. P. Hill (1867), and Mrs. S. R. Dull (1928) eventually found their way into print, providing hundreds of receipts of inspiration. Community cookbooks published throughout the South are a source of pride here, and for good reason. Honest food is found between their pages.

We look to our contemporaries in the field and thank them for keeping the South on the minds of cooks across the United States: John Egerton, John Folse, Damon Lee Fowler, Rebecca Lang, Dorie Sanders, David Shields, Virginia Willis, and others. We miss the nearness of Edna Lewis but know this collection would make her smile, just knowing more people will learn the true techniques of Southern cooking.

Our primary debt, however, is to those who have helped so generously along the way, starting with Kate Almand and Grace Reeves at Nathalies Restaurant; those from Richs cooking school, starting with Charles Gandy and Elise Griffin and ending ten years later with Carol Smaglinski and Margaret-Anne Surber; those of the first television crew, starting with Forsythia Chang, Anne Galbraith, and Gena Berry, then Ray Overton, and ending fifteen years later with Virginia Willis and Mary Moore; and those who worked so assiduously on this book, starting with Deidre Schipani for her wisdom and ending with intern Mary Katherine Wyeth, who, too, quickly became a diligent cook and recipe tester. We have credited many of their recipes here. Beth Price was our ballast when we felt we were sinking, always there to read another round of edited recipes, as well as devise and coordinate our recipe testing by outside testers. Our loyal friends and fans have helped us write a better book, especially our battery of a dozen proofreaders, including Carol Kay, Sarah Gaede, Sally Young, and Pat Royalty. We wish we could name you all.

We are grateful as well for our patient families and friends, who during the last few weeks of our editing, got nothing to eat without fixing it themselves and put up with our bleary eyes and short tempers. That said, for five years they reaped the benefits of eating well.

We could not have done this book without those at Gibbs Smith publishing: Christopher Robbins, for pushing us to do it, and most importantly, our hard-working and loyal editor, Madge Baird, and production editor/designer, Melissa Dymock. And right up to the bitter end, our talented and supremely dedicated photographer, Rick McKee, who was there to shoot a dish or ingredient on a moments notice.

It is difficult to close the acknowledgements, fearing we have omitted someone who should appear between these covers. Whoever you may be, please accept our appreciation for your contribution to this tome, and our sincere apology for our oversight.

In the summer of 1988, I served as best man in the wedding of Cliff and Cynthia Graubart in a civil ceremony of restrained elegance. It took place in a museum at the Campidoglio on a hill overlooking the city of Rome, Italy. The famous Southern cookbook writer Nathalie Dupree was the matron of honor.

Later that evening, I hosted a party on my rooftop terrace overlooking the Tiber River. Nathalie cooked the meal that night with me serving as errand boy and her sous chef. Nathalie prepared a wedding dinner that was one of the finest meals I ever ate under the Roman stars in my three years of magical eating in Italy. What the Italians did not know that night was that Nathalie Dupree had managed to fix a Southern feast in a kitchen with a view of St. Peters Cathedral and the Vatican in the windows behind her. Everything that Nathalie Dupree touches turns to gold. Now she has teamed up with the bride of that oft-celebrated wedding in Rome and they have produced this definitive and seminal work.

Ive carried a lifetime passion for the reading pleasure I can get from Southern cookbooks and consider Southern cooking to be one of the great cuisines of the world. When they come out, I try to read them all and buy them all. Ive met the Lee Brothers, and the great Frank Stitt, and Jean Anderson and Joe Dabney. I wrote an introduction to the superb novelist Janice Owens hilarious and moving cookbook Cracker Kitchen, wrote one for Southern Livings Comfort Food , and another for my former student on Daufuskie, Sallie Ann Robinson, who published her delightful cookbook Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way in 2003. For many years now Ive known my way around Southern letters and Southern cuisine.

Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking is the most exhaustive and well researched volume on Southern cooking ever published. It is massive in its sheer size and the audacity of its ambition. The book certainly looks like a candidate to replace Mrs. H. R. Dulls classic 1928 cookbook, Southern Cooking . Its range is large and its scope is encyclopedic. I had no idea there were this many recipes for Southern food popping out from ovens in kitchens below the Mason-Dixon line. But the true beauty of this book is the clarity and ease that will lend confidence to the beginning cook and expertise and knowledge to the gifted one. My piecrusts have always been mysterious messes, but not after I read Nathalie and Cynthias cogent explanation of the art. My fried chicken has never been as good as my mothers or as bad as my grandmothers, but these two writers unlock the secrets for an impatient, itchy cook like me. They make baking cakes and pies seem simple and joyous and wella piece of cake to me. Their recipes for vegetables are mouthwatering, and the ones for fish make me happy to be alive and living beside salt water and having access to pristine, clear water rivers flowing through the Lowcountry of South Carolina.

In a long-ago place, Nathalie Dupree was my first cooking teacher in downtown Atlantas mythical Richs Department Store. She was a wonderful, eccentric teacher who made cooking seem like it was one of the most wonderful ways to spend a human life. Nathalie began to invite me to her sumptuous dinner parties and her guests were always the most interesting people in Atlanta at any given time. The talk was high spirited and animated and good natured. Famous chefs and cookbook writers made their way to Nathalies table in the eighties, and Cynthia Graubart met her future husband, Cliff, at one of Nathalies soires. Although I always thought Cliff was set up and that Nathalie was playing matchmaker for Cynthia, the producer of Nathalies cooking show at that time. Cliff was a Jewish boy from Brooklyn, and the most Southern food hed eaten when I met him was a bagel. Cynthia is a splendid cook in her own right, and the marriage has prospered as Cliff sits down to magnificent Southern meals every day of his life, though Ive caught him backsliding when I find him in a deli slathering cream cheese and lox on a poppy seed bagel.