In "Smoke and Pickles: Recipes and Stories from a New Southern Kitchen," Edward Lee shows us what Southern cooking can include. Chef and owner of 610 Magnolia in Louisville, Kentucky, for the past decade, he melds personal influences and professional experiences with local resources.
Lee grew up in a Korean-American household in Brooklyn during the 1970s and '80s. He watched his grandmother prepare old-school Korean dishes, he says. At his friend Marcus's apartment, he had Puerto Rican plantains over rice. He hung out with Jewish neighbors, too, when his parents were at work, learning from them as well.
After college Lee opened a Korean barbecue joint on Mott Street in New York City, attracting hipsters, "entertaining celebrities and fashionistas and selling lychee martinis by the dozens." It eventually closed: "Three years of the restaurant had gone by in a blink."
Somehow he found himself in Kentucky in 2003 on the weekend of the Derby. He has lived there since, getting the chance to reinvent himself "through the lens of tobacco and bourbon and sorghum and horse racing and country ham."
Lee took instantly to the South and it in turn took to him. The foods around him, he realized, were similar in many regards to those he ate as a child with his grandmother. "Soft grits remind me of congee; jerky of cuttlefish; chowchow of kimchi. My Korean forefathers' love of pickling is rivaled only by Southerners' love of pickling. BBQ, with its intricate techniques of marinades and rubs, is the backbone of both cuisines."
In the cookbook, Lee combines familiar ingredients in previously unfamiliar ways. For a beef rice bowl, for example, he marries Asian-style barbecue – think bulgogi – with sautéed collard greens. He tops them with fried eggs and spoonfuls of corn chili remoulade, giving the dish further spice. He re-conceptualizes bibimbap.
For pulled pork, he eschews sweet Southern barbecue sauce for a saltier version made with items such as soy sauce, black bean paste and sesame oil. He serves the meat with cornbread and pickles, or tucked into hot dog buns with spicy Napa cabbage kimchi. Savory and sour notes contrast well.
Chapters on bourbon and bar snacks, and desserts also prove innovative. In the former, Lee focuses on the distilled spirit most associated with Kentucky. "I have sipped and I have slugged," he writes. "I have rollicked in the simple joys of a Rebel Yell and pontificated on the complexities of a Col. E. H. Taylor..."
In the latter, he gets creative with buttermilk affogato, for instance, chess pie with blackened pineapple salsa, and a whiskey-ginger cake garnished elegantly with pear cut the size of matchsticks. These presentations further exemplify his novel approach to Southern flavors.
The chef arrived in the South and discovered its pleasures later in his life. On the other hand, award-winning cookbook authors Matt Lee and Ted Lee were raised in the South and have long been schooled in the area's rich culinary heritage.
In "The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen," they celebrate all their hometown has to offer. They extol its virtues, showing us "not only what it's like to grow up here and learn to cook here," they say, "but also how we are continually inspired by this place." They describe the cuisine as well as the people – farmers, fishermen, chefs and bartenders – who help to make their community whole.
As they did in "The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook" and "The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern: Knockout Dishes with Down-Home Flavor," they concentrate on popular traditional items, including shrimp, okra, pecans, and boiled peanuts, around which they have built a mail-order specialty food business, too.
More notably, however, the brothers choose to feature several ingredients with which the region might not be immediately associated. They call attention to kumquats, for example, which grow throughout downtown Charleston. They use them to infuse gin for cocktails, highlighting their sweet-tart flavor – a mix of orange, grapefruit and lemon – in a kumquat sparkler with sparkling white wine, a kumquatini, kumquat margarita and kumquat-chile Bloody Mary.
They talk about loquats, a tad smaller than golf balls and native to China. The fruits "emerge on trees throughout the Lowcountry in April (March, if it's been a warm winter), with furry skin enveloping a shallow layer of yellow-orange flesh." They use them for a vodka infusion to concoct loquat Manhattans.
Championing vegetables they realized not long ago had been harvested in South Carolina since the 18th century, the brothers also introduce things like salsify, a scraggly carrot-like root. They peel, cook and mash it as we might potatoes to create fried salsify "oysters" reminiscent of hushpuppies or falafel. They get us excited to return to the kitchen.
The Lees break every so often with profiles of women and men in the local food industry. They spotlight folks like Celeste Albers, a poultry and dairy farmer on Wadmalaw Island 18 miles south of Charleston, and Sidi Limehouse, "a prominent character, as much for his salty opinions and spicy backstory... as his fine produce."
They give them their fair due. The brothers know Southern cooking is only as good as the ingredients to which people have access. They understand Charleston's appeal, taking great civic pride in both its thriving food scene and the hard work required to sustain it.
Like Edward Lee, and brothers Matt Lee and Ted Lee, Susan Puckett pays tribute to the South. A Jackson, Mississippi, native and former food editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she, too, has long been schooled in the make-up of the region. She knows its colorful and complicated history. ("It birthed King Cotton, the blues, and the civil rights movement.") She studies its fascinating foodways.
Her volume "Eat Drink Delta: A Hungry Traveler's Journey Through the Soul of the South," equal parts visitors guide, handy cookbook and photo essay, takes a broad look across a couple of states. Puckett begins in Memphis, Tennessee, and works her way down Mississippi toward Vicksburg. She covers cities both big and small, spotlighting a few fancy eateries but focusing mostly on mom-and-pops. These businesses keep it real.
"Travelers expecting to indulge in home-style fried chicken and fresh, pond-raised catfish are rarely disappointed," she says. "Fine examples of those Delta stalwarts – with their requisite accompaniments of slow-cooked greens and cornbread – turn up in every small town, and even in country cafes in the middle of nowhere."
Unusual items appear often as well. "From one end of the Delta to the other, old-time tamale makers wrap cornmeal cylinders filled with spicy beef or pork... to sell from roadside stands or café lunch counters. Pit masters mix barbecue into spaghetti. Convenience stores sell giant dill pickles marinated in Kool-Aid as snacks to go."
In search of popular everyday foods, Puckett explores what folks at the Southern Foodways Alliance dubbed the Mississippi Delta Hot Tamale Trail. She tries tamales at Blues City Café in Memphis, for example, and at Doe's Eat Place in Greenville, Mississippi, and Pea-Soup's Lott-A-Freeze in Indianola, Mississippi. She has her share.
Unlike tamales we get "in Mexican and southwestern-style restaurants, which can be dry and fairly tasteless," she contends, the ones found in the Delta are "savory cigar-shaped packages... dripping in oily, spicy juices." They are made in corn husks or parchment paper. And though they are sold all over the state, they are rarely seen outside of it.
Puckett also encounters Kool-Aid pickles – whole dill pickles soaked in powdered drink mix, sugar and pickle juice – in large plastic jugs. For decades, she tells us, children in poor black neighborhoods had been pouring Kool-Aid packets directly into pickle jars; they liked the tanginess. Grocers "refined the technique a bit, and started selling them along with other pickled soul-food standbys like eggs and pigs' feet."
When she can, she shares recipes from residents and restaurants as well, giving us opportunities to mimic flavors or try new dishes in the comfort of our own kitchens. In conjunction with snapshots taken around the region by photographer Langdon Clay, they help to reveal a strong sense of community.
For those of us born and raised on the West Coast, areas south of the Mason-Dixon Line can sometimes unfortunately be but a blur. (Areas east of the Rockies aren't always clear to us either.) The geography we learned in fifth grade fails us. We are simply not as familiar as we should be with that stretch of the country.
The authors, each in his or her own way, enlighten us further about the South – its food, land and people – giving visual representation to all we have imagined. They teach us about Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi.
Whether bringing multicultural influences to Southern food, offering ideas on handling unique ingredients, or collecting observations traveling from one town to another, they imbue their discussions with nostalgia. They entice us with their cooking. Through stories and recipes, they document their love for the place they call home, celebrating its generosity and hospitality.
(A version of this review appeared originally at www.culinate.com.)
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