Damon Lee Fowler's New Southern Kitchen; Traditional Flavors for Contemporary Cooks

by Damon Lee Fowler; Ann Stratton

• ISBN13: 9780684871691
• ISBN10: 0684871696
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-04-30
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

WHAT'S SO NEW ABOUT THE NEW SOUTHERN KITCHEN?

It's the way Damon Lee Fowler, author of Classical Southern Cooking, coaxes the timeless flavors of yesterday from the markets and kitchens of today. Rather than simply reproduce traditional So

Author Biography

Damon Lee Fowler is the author of several cookbooks, including Classical Southern Cooking, which was nominated for both an IACP/Julia Child Cookbook Award and the James Beard Award. He is the feature food columnist for the Savannah Morning News, and his work has appeared in several publications, including Food & Wine and The Charlotte Observer. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.

Table of Contents

A Preface and Explanation---of Sorts	13	(6)
Introduction	19	(38)
To Begin With
Appetizers and Snacks for Before and Between	57	(26)
Eggs
For Breakfast and Everything Else	83	(14)
Grits and Rice
The Great Southern Grains	97	(14)
The Southern Soup Kettle
Soups, Stews, and Gumbos	111	(30)
Fish and Shellfish
From Sea and Stream	141	(30)
Meats
From Field and Farmyard	171	(42)
Chicken and Other Poultry
The South's Golden Icon	213	(38)
Vegetables
The Staple of the Southern Table	251	(70)
Salads
Of Leaves and Leftovers	321	(22)
New Southern Baking
Breads, Cakes, and Pastries	343	(32)
The Southern Dessert Table
Puddings, Ices, and Other Composed Sweets	375	(36)
Gathering Around the New Southern Table	411	(4)
Resources	415	(4)
Index	419

Excerpts

A Preface and Explanation -- of Sorts Marcella Hazan began her first book,The Classic Italian Cook Book,with the startling pronouncement, "The first useful thing to know about Italian cooking is that, as such, it actually doesn't exist."In my years of thinking and writing and teaching about cooking, I have learned that the truth of Signora Hazan's pronouncement is not limited to the cooking of her own country. It applies equally -- perhaps even more peculiarly -- to ours, for the one thing that can be said with any certainty of American cooking in general and Southern cooking in particular is that "as such, it actually doesn't exist." There is no single such thing as Southern fried chicken, corn bread, gumbo, pecan pie, greens, or Hoppin' John. All of those things are merely ideas that can exist only in the individual interpretation of each cook. Many of those interpretations resemble one another closely enough to be loosely codified into a kind of formula, but what that formula captures is only one aspect of a very complicated idea. The actual cuisine always has -- and probably always will -- defy codification.This goes well beyond what the Chinese call "wok presence" -- that individual, almost intangible something that each cook brings to the pot. One can trace many dishes back into history -- sometimes even to a single source, but the thread that connects that single source to modern kitchens is seldom straight or solitary. To begin to explain this collection of cuisines that we so loosely call "Southern cooking" would be much more complicated than saying it is the cooking of the regions within the South. It is more complicated even than saying it is the melding of the cooking of the many other countries from which modern Southerners have come. A researcher of social patterns once pronounced that he had found four regional styles of barbecues in South Carolina, and could definitively put boundaries around something he called a "grits region." Brave man: I grew up in South Carolina, and would not have been able to stop at four types of barbecue. Never mind about the grits.That is why this is, of necessity, a very personal book. I call it "my" Southern kitchen because what follows on these pages are the patterns of only one Southern cook: me. Every cook's patterns are informed by the kitchens of childhood, by the dozens of teachers who have shared their kitchen wisdom, by the hundreds of cooks past and present who have shaped the cuisine, even by the people who will be eating what that cook produces. Yet, when we step into our kitchens, we are mostly alone: only we are present to taste, to smell, to see the flame under the skillet or hear the sizzle of the butter that is inside it.I call it a "new" Southern kitchen not because it reinterprets the cooking of my childhood or because there is anything in here that would seem foreign to my grandmother -- or, for that matter, my great-great grandmother -- but because it is a new way of looking at something that is very old. Most of us have known the revelation of looking at the photograph of a familiar place or face that has been printed backward. We recognize what we see, but often notice details that we have never seen before because we are looking at them in an entirely new way. That is what I have tried to do with this book.Instead of dwelling on the history and traditions of a recipe, on the rights and wrongs of interpretation, on details and facts, and such elusive things as true points of origin or authenticity of execution, what I have tried to focus on here is the one thing we can all grasp and understand: flavor -- in this case, Southern flavor -- what it is, and how one achieves it. There is, for example, a recipe here for Southern fried chicken. Nothing in that recipe is new. The way it is fried in the recipe is colored by both my grandmothers, my own mother, and by the many cooks who have fried chicken for me. Hist