He got it right, all right. Ever since the restaurant opened in 1994, it’s been acclaimed by critics and mobbed by Atlantans. They order the chicken–juicy, sweet and peppery, with a crackling skin–and they eat pork chops and whipped sweet potatoes. They eat fried fingerling catfish, so tender they melt off the bone, and a puree of three different pumpkins. They eat smooth, rich shrimp paste with grits. And they eat the most extraordinary biscuits, light as a whisper, with clabbered cream and fig preserves. Then maybe they eat a pile of thin crepes stuffed with applesauce, and a scoop of apple-cider ice cream, or lemon chess pie. “I’ve eaten in the best restaurants in the country,” says cookbook author Marion Cunningham. “To me, this place has the most satisfying food there is.”
Not long ago, “great Southern cooking” would have been considered an oxymoron, especially in restaurants. (Fried catfish? Pass the risotto–please.) But with American regional cooking a craze that won’t quit, the South was bound to rise again, and it has. Throughout the region, cities where a French or Italian restaurant used to be considered the best in town now proudly honor their own. Chefs aren’t embarrassed by Southern food anymore; they’re inspired by it. Ben Barker makes sweet-potato ravioli stuffed with collard greens at his Magnolia Grill in Durham, N.C. The signature dish at Washington, D.C.’s Vidalia restaurant is a whole baked, sweet Vidalia’ onion with herbs and country ham. Meanwhile new cookbooks aim to tempt home cooks into trying peanut soup, butter beans, benne-seed wafers and blackberry cobbler. “The South was once the culinary mecca of the country,” says author Danaon Lee Fowler (box). “Americans have explored every cuisine in the world, and now they’re coming home to this one.”
Southern cooking has not been a particularly easy cuisine to revive. Its greatness was derived in large part from the skill and imagination of slave cooks, and “the Civil War was the death knell,” says Fowler. “That’s when African cooks left the kitchen. Blacks came back as paid servants, but the continuity was broken. The white families were a generation or so removed from a lot of the garlic, spices and herbs the old cooks knew about.” Eventually, of course, most families stopped having cooks at all, and processed food did the rest of the damage.
Enter Edna Lewis, 79,. and Scott Peacock, 33, soulmates with a mission. Lewis grew up in Freetown, Va., picking berries, rendering lard and learning by heart what food tastes like when it’s homegrown and simply prepared. After some 60 years of farming, catering, writing and cooking in restaurants, she’s at work on her fourth cookbook–“about original Southern food,” she says. “To make it you need real lard, real butter, real milk and home-cured pork.” (“Her next book is going to come with a cow and a pig, so you can make everything in it,” says Peacock.)
Caesar salad: Before he met Lewis, Peacock spent four years cooking in the governor’s mansion in Atlanta, where he tried unsuccessfully to get black-eyed peas onto the menu. “They wanted to show everyone they were sophisticated, so they served New York restaurant food,” he says. A year ago last spring, he and Lewis, with a few like-minded colleagues, founded The Society for the Revival & Preservation of Southern Food. They dream of an archive and a cooking school, but the Horseradish Grill was a chance to put their commitment into action: local ingredients, served in season, prepared with an eye toward tradition. At first, the investors were nervous about going strictly Southern, says Peacock; there’s still a Caesar salad on the menu. “We sell horrifying amounts of it–but it’s my goal to get it off by the Olympics.”
Will the renaissance spread beyond the South? Not easily, in part because the food has such a high-fat image. True, this isn’t spa cuisine, but only bad Southern cooking is irredeemably fat-soaked. “When the recipes are done properly, they’re not heavy,” says Fowler. A few places are opening in New York and Los Angeles; but even in the South, some of the new spots take liberties that purists find appalling. ‘Tin not into making museum food, but seasonality and regionality are what count," says Peacock. “I’ll never put lobster on the menu.” And the insults heaped upon grits are almost more than true Southern cooks can bear. “Anchovy grits, pesto grits,” says Peacock with a grimace. “People should leave grits alone,” says Lewis. “I saw a place that listed grits as polenta,” groans Fowler. “Polenta! Doesn’t that make you want to lie down with a bottle of bourbon?” Well, only until dessert comes around.
Even a cityside kitchen up North can produce great Southern food, with the right books at hand. Damon Lee Fowler specializes in the Southern culinary past few know: the onion custards, the apple meringue pie. The authentic corn bread from his Classical Southern Cooking (420 pages. Crown. $30) is surprisingly rough and crusty. “I like my corn bread to fight back,” he says. Prefer a little less aggression from your baked goods? Try Edna Lewi’s first book, The Taste of Country Cooking (260 pages. Knopf. $18). Hers is a lighter, more familiar corn bread, but not gucked up with sugar of flour. Two other splendid books of hers also remain in print.
Dori Sanders’ Country Cooking (200 pages Algonquin. $18.95) is full of warm-hearted reminiscences and hearty, satisfying recipes. There are plenty of ladies’ luncheon casseroles in My Mother’s Southern Kitchen, by James Villas with his mother, Martha Pearl Villas (330 pages. Macmillan. $25). But they also offer spareribs, shrimp pie and deviled crab.
