Lee Smith's foreword convinced me that if I'm ever in parts of North Carolina where Sara Foster's resturants operate I'll visit one and eat there. Smith touts them as cutting edge and sophisticated. And declares Foster is coming out of the closet as a Southerner who was raised in Jackson, Tennessee. The recipes herein are old southern, not new southern; because, there is a difference.
Sara Foster's Southern Kitchen is one of those heavy, over-sized cookbooks lushly illustrated with color photography that you don't really want to use in the kitchen. Besides the recipes themselves, she offers practical kitchen wisdom that many cooks may not have learned if they somehow escaped growing up in a kitchen. I mean, gosh, I feel sad for those kinds of people who must learn how to cut up a chicken from a sidebar because they didn't learn it from their mama or their mamaw.
Poor lost lambs.
Foster doesn't depart from the typical organization of most cookbooks: hors h'oeurves & cocktails; soups, stews & gumbos; biscuits, cornbread & rolls; breakfast; fish; birds; pig; steaks, burgers & roasts; grits & rice; farm-stand vegetables, casseroles & salads; dressings, pickles & condiments; and sweets. The end-matter includes her list of essential equipment, pantry must-haves, sources, acknowledgments, and an index.
Foster inform readers that southern cooking is a state of mind. And so I wonder,can non-natives enter a southern state of mind? Can it be acquired? The memories are rooted in experiences, and so you can read about church picnics on the ground, but without having bitten into Aunt Myra's fried chicken leg and Aunt Jewel's macaroni salad, well, where are you?
Foster talks about the fried side of southern food, but she plays up the other side that escapes attention, the farm-fresh side. And that's a side I know quite well. Roadside stands were a large part of my childhood and we stopped frequently for tomatoes, string beans, potatoes, and okra, rather than go to the grocery store for these items.
Her recipes are a lovely mix of new and old. Or, old that are refreshed. The new include Carmelized fig crostini with country ham and goat cheese. Yum. An old is pimiento cheese with cornbread toasts. And although she grew up in Tennessee, her recipes are not strictly based in the state. The cookbook is southern and includes dishes covering various southern regions.
She emphisizes the role of bread at the southern meal. No southern meal was without a biscuit or a roll and Foster includes recipes for buttermilk biscuits, angel biscuits, cornbread, cornbread dressing, refrigerator rolls, dinner rolls, and squash puppies--whatever they are.
Chicken, turkey, quail, duck and guinea hen recipes abound in the chapter on birds. Foster includes instructions for cooking chicken in a brown bag, as opposed to a plastic bag. The technique steams the chicken leaving the meat moist and tender. And her barbecued turkey makes a great alternative to traditional Thanksgiving fare.
Her deep-fried turkey recipe is standard, but she uses far fewer ingredients for her rub than I do, and I think her cooking times are longer than ours as well. However, it is nice to find a recipe for dee-fried turkey in a cookbook. When Ian and I started this practice several years ago we putzed around online and gathered data from several websites to cobbled together a working rub, temperature, and amount of time before perfecting it.
Interspersed within the book are resturant profiles. In the pork section Foster features Bozo's Hot Pit Bar-B-Q's of Mason, Tn. This was her father's favorite destination for barbecue which has been in business since 1923. It's outside Memphis.
The meat sections are mouth-watering, the pimento cheeseburgers are particularly tempting. I've never liked pimento cheese except for the homemade type my mother makes. The pre-fab kind out of a container turns my stomach. Pickled jalapeno meatloaf is sure to please, too. If you're unsure how to serve the meat dishes, Foster helps cooks out by suggesting pairing. For her Friday night steak sandwiches she suggests the crispy fried vidalia onion rings and mixed bean salad with herb vinaigrette or if you want to bypass the kitchen's heat, make the farm-stand grilled vegetable skewers with pesto vinaigrette.
The section on vegetables, casseroles and salads is substantial. And that suits me fine. Eating lots of veggies in the summer is perfect and brings back memories of thick-sliced tomatoes beside our plates at every meal. So there's baked butter beans, candied sweet potatoes, greens, braised cabbage, beet salad, potato salad. The list goes on and on.
Peter Frank Edwards photographed food for the book. And they do the food justice, for sure. Each dish is inviting. You'll want to make and eat each dish. Heck, if you don't lick each page, there's something wrong with you.
Chapter twelve is desserts. It's terrible how we save the best for last. Two pound cakes, mud cake, jam cake, coconut layer cake, hummingbird cake, pineapple upside down cake. You name it, it's in here. And something I had not seen, but heartily approve of, is the black bottom coconut cream pie. No doubt, you could make it with any kind of black crust, Oreo or whatnot. Carolina rice pudding brulee? Cornmeal thumbprint cookies? Pecan shortbread?
No doubt, I have a new favorite. But, I don't want to bring this one into my kitchen. My cookbooks get messy and stained. I have one of those plastic cookbook guards, but Southern Kitchen is a big book and will not fit behind my guard. What to do? Wait until it comes out in paper? Make photocopies of recipes to work with? Such a quandry.
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