Secrets of the Southern Table: A Food Lover's Tour of the Global South

From the rolling hills and hollows in Appalachia to the flat salt marshes of South Carolina to an urban farm in metro-Atlanta, the South has a strong tradition of good food and generous hospitality. The region is well known for fried chicken, grits, and biscuits (and there are irresistible recipes for those inside this book), but there are some Southern foodways that many may find surprising: There have been Chinese Americans living in the Mississippi Delta since the 1800s; at one time more Italians lived in New Orleans than New York City; and an Atlanta suburb is known as the Seoul of the South. The South is rich in cultural diversity and the food of the modern global South reflects this.

Here, with her signature charm and wit, chef and award-winning cookbook author Virginia Willis shares a one-of-a-kind collection of classic and new recipes: Pimento Cheese Tomato-Herb Pie, Chicken and Butterbean Paella, West African Chicken Stew, Greek Okra and Tomatoes, Mississippi-Style Char Siu Pork Tenderloin, Brown Butter and Thyme Whole-Grain Cornbread, Catfish Tacos with Avocado Crema, and much more. Along the way, she introduces you to the Southern farmers, purveyors, chefs, and small-business owners who are growing and making this extraordinary food.

Stunning documentary photography by renowned Southern photographer Angie Mosier transports you across the South and the seasons to Florida’s gulf coast, the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, and the farms and fields of Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, the Carolinas, Texas, and Tennessee. Together, these stories and the recipes that accompany them celebrate the delicious diversity and ever-evolving heritage of Southern cooking.

Copyright © 2018 by Virginia Willis

Photography © 2018 by Angie Mosier

All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Willis, Virginia, 1966– author. | Mosier, Angie, photographer.

Title: Secrets of the southern table a food lover’s tour of the global South / Virginia Willis ; photography by Angie Mosier ; foreword by Sean Brock.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017059031 (print) | LCCN 2017051914 (ebook) | ISBN

9780544931831 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544932548 (paper over board)

Subjects: LCSH: Cooking, American—Southern style. | Cooking—Southern

States. | LCGFT: Cookbooks. Classification: LCC TX715.2.S68 (print) | LCC TX715.2.S68 W5564 2018 (ebook) | DDC 641.5975—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059031

Book design by Rachel Newborn

v1.0418

In hope of a nation where, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., people will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

1 From the Garden

2 Grains, Grits, and Other Starchy Goodness

3 Seafood

4 Beef, Pork, and Lamb

5 Gospel Birds and Game Birds

6 Soups and Stews

7 Biscuits, Breads, and Hoecakes

8 Desserts

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

Foreword

In 2011, I sat trembling with fear on a panel in Tokyo with some of the world’s best chefs. We were all there to experience Japan and create a meal inspired by our experiences at the week’s end. As I stood in front of the sea of Japanese journalists during a press conference, one reporter asked me why I had been chosen to participate since Southern food was merely ketchup on smoked meats and fried chicken. Her question was an earnest one and I sensed no condescension in her voice. KFC and the Colonel are often synonymous with Southern food, both outside the United States and within it as well. Regardless of her intention, it felt like I had been punched in the heart. There is a misconception around the world that Southern food is a singular cuisine. In my opinion, it’s one of the globe’s most misunderstood cuisines. In reality, the South makes up nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population and covers nearly 1 million square miles. If you were to break off the South from the rest of the United States and cut and paste it next to Europe, you would see in relation its size. Then think about how many cuisines make up Europe. People don’t use the term European cuisine, for instance. Europe is known for its multitude of distinct and delicious cuisines. I believe the American South isn’t far behind.

Virginia and I both grew up uniquely Southern. We both got our start knee-high to a grasshopper in the kitchen, schooled in the art of biscuit-making by our grandmothers. We also both experienced vastly different cuisines and cultures within the South: Virginia moved from Georgia to the Bayou as a young girl, and I moved from the Appalachian Mountains to the Low Country as a teen. Experiencing micro-regions and micro-cuisines from an early age led to an understanding of the role and value of immigrants in the culinary and cultural diversity of the South. The food that I smelled and tasted in Charleston on my first trip was worlds apart from my gran’s table in Appalachia. I was dumbfounded and not much has changed since then—I hope to spend my life experiencing these kinds of discoveries.

Those who sought a new life in the American South brought with them the agricultural practices, flavors, seeds and seasonings, ingredients, and the soul of their homelands. Each region in the South is home to a distinct mix of immigrants, and therefore cultural influences. If you break down each micro-region like we do at Husk, you’ll quickly realize that there are micro-cuisines within micro-cuisines. Despite its short history, the South had one of the first recognizable cuisines in America, and it changed as the country changed—spurred by pivotal events like the abolition of slavery and the great depression. Fast forward to 2018, and it’s fascinating to take the same look at the micro-regions and who is living where now. The settlers gave way to the thriving Vietnamese community in Houston and the Kurdish influence in Nashville, while the Creole of Louisiana and the Gullah Geechee traditions in Charleston continue to shine. As immigrants began to combine their flavors with the ingredients of their newfound home, a new multicultural South was born.

I often ask myself what the future of Southern food is. The answer to that question begins in these pages. Virginia examines the individual relationships in each region, and then steps back to showcase the cultural and culinary diversity of the South as a whole. The future of the South is as multicultural as anywhere in the country. Secrets of the Southern Table examines the possibilities of a fully realized welcome table where everyone adds some wisdom to the skillet. Food unites us and sparks the dialogues that need to happen, even the difficult ones. The future of Southern foodways is exhilarating, intriguing, and insanely delicious. A hot wedge of cornbread with kimchi sounds good to me. I can’t wait for you to dig in to this book and start exploring.

SEAN BROCK

Executive chef and partner, Husk, McCrady’s, and Minero

Nashville and Charleston

Introduction

My full name is Virginia Louise Willis. My mother’s name is Virginia and my grandmother’s name was Louise. From the moment of my birth, my given name bound me inextricably to two strong Southern women who would shape me into the person I am today.

I was born in Augusta, Georgia and spent the first few years of my life in nearby Evans. My grandmother had a double-sided steel sink and, during my early years, she would settle me in one compartment of the sink while she shelled peas or snapped beans in the other side. Her plain, simple kitchen is at the heart of some of my earliest recollections. It was a small, tightly packed room with Georgia pine walls and a window dressed with starched blue-and-white gingham curtains. A table for two—three with my stool—sat at the center with a cast-iron paper napkin holder, the kind that might be picked up at a touristy mountain store, that read, Bless this House Oh Lord We Pray, Make It Safe By Night and Day.

Even after the home was air-conditioned, an oscillating fan constantly hummed on the linoleum countertop, providing a soothing background noise that was enhanced by the sizzling sound of chicken frying, the tinny rattle of steam escaping a pot of simmering butterbeans, or the whir of an electric mixer beating batter for buttery pound cake. There are photos of me as a towheaded youngster standing on the kitchen chair making biscuits with my grandmother. She would punch out the biscuits, then we’d roll out the scraps of dough and she’d let me make a handprint. It was my form of modeling clay or Play-Doh. Mama taught me to poke a hole with the stem of a wooden spoon in the steaming hot, tender biscuit and fill it with butter and homemade scuppernong jelly. The warmth of the biscuit would transform the two into a molten concoction that would deliciously seep into the crooks and crannies of the tender crumb. Being in the kitchen with my grandmother and mother comprise some of my favorite childhood memories.

At age three, my father’s work took us to Louisiana, where I spent my elementary school years. It was here, on steamy spring weekends at the water’s edge of the dark bayou, where I learned to tie a chicken neck to the cotton nets used to catch crawfish and fished with my mother for bass, bream, and catfish in the rivers and lakes. Summer vacations brought fishing off the jetty and crabbing off the dock on the Redneck Riviera of Alabama and Florida. In the fall, my father hunted for game in the sportsman’s paradise and brought home wild boar, deer, duck, quail, dove, and wild turkey. Much of our outdoor activity and family fun eventually wound up on a plate. Louisiana is where I learned to love rich, smoky savory gumbo; salty, spicy jambalaya; and the sweet, succulent taste of Gulf seafood.

During the summers and on holidays we returned to Georgia to visit my grandparents. My grandfather grew much of the food that found its way to my grandmother’s kitchen. He had a rusty old tractor and he’d hitch a plow to the back that he would guide as my grandmother drove the tractor. It was quite the sight, she in her floppy-brimmed hat with him tagging along, the metal blade cutting furrows in the soil and the dark earth cleanly spilling to either side of the metal blade. To this day, I can’t keep a houseplant alive, but I love to dig in the dirt. It’s a family tradition. In Louisiana, Mama always had a little patch for growing squash, okra, and tomatoes in the backyard and my grandfather’s garden was tremendous. He grew up in the Depression and like many Southerners of that generation, was accustomed to living off the land. He had a cornfield planted in the dark rich soil down by the river. Closer to home, he cultivated a plot nearly the size of a football field! Every few years he’d seed clover and move his garden to let the soil regenerate. He was an amazing gardener; he could put a stick in the ground and it would grow. Growing, harvesting, and preserving from our garden or locally grown food was simply part of life. With nearly a twelve-month growing season in the South—there’s something coming out of the ground or off a tree almost every month of the year.

When I entered junior high we returned to Georgia, to a sleepy little town in the Southwest corner of the state tucked alongside the Flint River. The landscape transforms on the drive south from Atlanta as the land flattens out. There, the hardwoods are outnumbered by loblolly pines and the colors become more muted under the blue-gray sky. Off the busy interstate corridor, miles and miles of two-lane blacktop connect sleepy, small towns and communities with names like Unadilla, Musella, Oscilla, and Montezuma—where I grew up. Often lining those highways are peanut fields, cotton fields, and pecan groves as far as the eye can see.

It was there Mama built her dream kitchen in her new home with its large bay window and kitchen island. It was there that fragrant, sweet peaches from local orchards were peeled and transformed into golden, glistening jelly; earthy peanuts were boiled in bracingly salted water and canned; and sweet summer corn, creamy butterbeans, and tender field peas were frozen into quart-size packets for enjoyment and sustenance during the winter months.

Mama loved then and still loves to experiment with different recipes. The Cajun and Creole recipes from my childhood were considered quite foreign in South Georgia. While my family longed for crawfish boils, my Georgia friends only knew mudbugs as bait. She began to experiment with more exotic cuisines and would prepare Chinese eggrolls, French crepes, and Mexican tamales. And, while she enjoyed cooking more international fare, she did not ignore the Southern classics. We enjoyed Brown Butter and Thyme Whole-Grain Cornbread; Pimento Cheese Tomato-Herb Pie; Cheesy Broccoli and Rice Bake; and of course, Cathead Biscuits. I no longer needed to stand on the chair to help, and being by my mother’s side in the kitchen created different kinds of memories. Food was always at the very center of our lives and it was this exposure to many different foods that truly piqued my interest in the world of food and set me on my path.

Home to peanuts, peaches, and pecans, growing up in the Deep South was for me somewhat idyllic. Yet even as a young teen I could not ignore the economic disparity between the classes and races. The county itself was predominantly black, with whites in the minority. Where I grew up is part of the Black Belt, a crescent-shaped band that extends through the Deep South, about 300 miles, making its way from southwest Tennessee to east-central Mississippi and then east through Alabama and Georgia. The term Black Belt is twofold, referring to a rich swath of soil that arches through the South, as well as the population, a result of the descendants of the enslaved Africans who once toiled on the plantations. The poverty level has been, for as long as I can remember, even as a child, quite significant. While I had attended public school in Louisiana, in Georgia I attended an all-white private school that had been born out of the court-mandated public-school desegre-gation in the mid-1960s. Apart from African-Americans, in my particular corner of the South the only others I ever saw were the Hispanics working in the fields.

This imbalance of money and power is and has been for a long time a simmering pot seemingly ready to boil over. Once, I remember being in the car driving through town and my friend’s mom reaching over to lock the door. The road wasn’t dangerous; it was simply a predominantly black neighborhood. A young man walking on the sidewalk, hearing the click of the lock, became outraged and yelled at the car, I don’t want nothing in your damn car. It shook me. I remember feeling embarrassed and conflicted.

The South is a complicated place, especially when it comes to race, and Southern food is a complicated cuisine. Southern foodways are integral to the American culinary tradition. Southern cooking is seen as seen one of the true American cuisines, a cookery that can simmer alongside the elevated and exalted cuisine of France, the cast-iron skillet toe-to-toe against a French black steel sauté pan. Southern cooking is often compared to Italian food, humble, but fresh, flavorful, and delicious. It has always drawn upon the conflux of cultures that at once both conspired and collided to create the South we know today—Native American, European, and African. However, the questions of ownership of Southern cooking are some of the most provocative points in our ongoing struggles over race. There is a historical canon of Southern recipes that are barely, if even, credited to a brigade of nameless, faceless black women called Mammy. The Creole food of New Orleans is described as a mélange of French and Spanish influences, ignoring the fact that most of the people who cooked it through the centuries were black. And the same holds true for the something as simple as barbecue.

While it is important to acknowledge and appreciate tremendous African influences, it is also true that many Southerners did not own slaves before the Civil War—nor have had black domestic help in the 150-plus years since. There have been many nameless, faceless poor white women, as well. It is a question of both race and class. And, for that matter, the same reality still exists that in the South—as well as much of the United States—currently, the folks fixing the food in many of the kitchens are Hispanic. The lines of ownership of Southern food aren’t clearly marked on a map. There is a rich narrative that lies beneath, a tangled and compelling web of race, politics, and social history that is served up alongside our beloved biscuits and gravy.

I’ve been writing as a professional for more than a decade and have traveled from Maine to California, Florida to Alaska. During this journey I have been front and center in challenging Southern stereotypes. Due to the media portrayal, people assume that all Southern food is fried and unhealthy, that all we eat is fried chicken, biscuits, and butter. (Meaning butter as a food group.) I often say to judge Southern food as only fried chicken and biscuits would be like deeming Mexican food to solely consist of burritos or for Italian food to only be spaghetti and meatballs. The South is very complex. It’s thirteen states—nearly a quarter of the continental United States. The food from Appalachia is different from Coastal Carolina is different from the food from the Gulf. We’ve got extreme geographical differences and many climates and sub-climates.

I learned years ago that my accent could trigger certain negative assumptions. My Southern drawl was equivalent to dumb, redneck, or worse. Of course, when folks discovered that I was reasonably intelligent and could speak in complete sentences, their assumptions fell away, or at least most of the time.

I don’t know what it feels like to grow up as a person of color or someone of the Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu faith in the Deep South. All I know now is that I feel I need to do what I need to do to bridge that gap, make that wrong right, and unlock the barriers that I can. I am not alone. There are many other Southerners like me uncomfortable with the status quo. Division is a truth in the South, like in much of the U.S., but it’s not the only truth and it’s not my truth.

Several years ago I participated in a book fair in Western Kentucky. A small group of authors were collected by a cheerful volunteer at the airport. As we made our way in the van to our respective hotels small talk broke out and we told one another where we were from and what our genre was. One of the fellow authors was from the Midwest and had never been to the South. She seemed mesmerized that I was from Atlanta.

She asked, Have you ever met a Jewish person?

I remember blinking slowly, not certain if I had actually heard her correctly.

Incredulously I responded, I said I was from Atlanta, not the moon.

Caught a bit off guard, she said, I didn’t mean to offend you, but I didn’t think there were any Jewish people in the South.

Believe it or not, I’ve been asked the ridiculous question about knowing a Jewish person more than once. Although I find it annoying, generally I laugh it off and tease, "Didn’t you see Driving Miss Daisy? Of course there are Jewish people in the South." The truth? Congregation Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina, was founded in 1749. It is one of the oldest Jewish congregations in the United States and the sanctuary is the second oldest synagogue building in the United States.

While the South is primarily built on a black-white narrative, it is actually not as homogenous as it seems. The largest population of Vietnamese in the United States outside of California lives in Houston, Texas. Six of the ten states with the fastest growing Latino populations are in the South. North Carolina ranks in the top five states as home to the Hmong people from Southeast Asia. And it’s not solely new immigration. The Appalachian region has long been thought of by outsiders as a predominantly white section of the United States, particularly in comparison with the rest of the country. Yet since the nation’s early origins, nonwhites always have been present in Appalachia. There have been Chinese residents in Mississippi since just after the Civil War. In the mid-1800s New Orleans hosted the largest population of Italian immigrants in the entire country. Greeks began immigrating to the South in the 1800s as well. In reality, the South has long been home to a variety of ethnicities and populations. This range of varied populations have led to a rich diversity of cuisine and multiple influences on Southern foodways, recipes that I showcase in this book.

Several years ago en route to Texas, I texted my dear friend Amy C. Evans, artist and former oral historian for the Southern Foodways Alliance; Amy now lives in Houston. I wanted for us to get together and eat some crawfish. She pinged me back, Asian or Cajun? What? I pondered. I soon found out. We paid a visit to a cavernous Vietnamese restaurant packed with all different sorts of people. It was a Sunday afternoon and the crowd included African American church ladies in their Sunday finery, frat boys (possibly still inebriated from the night before), Mexican families, Vietnamese teenagers, cowboys in town for a rodeo, and a table of roughnecks in from the oil rig. As we sat at the table eating delicious spicy, garlicky shrimp, butter coating our messy fingers, I smiled deep in my soul and realized, This is my South, too.

Memory shapes the story of our lives and allows us to interact with the world. It is my sincere hope that Secrets of the Southern Table: A Food Lover’s Tour of the Global South will expand people’s culinary landscape. This assorted collection of recipes and stories features the familiar—as well as the unexpected, looking beyond the stereotypes and misinterpretations of Southern food and cooking. I strongly believe Southern cuisine is a living, breathing, growing thing and have included recipes that reflect the rich diversity. From white linen formal to farm table to well-worn Formica—and with influences from