'Craig Claiborne's Southern Cooking' - Cookbook Spotlight

'Craig Claiborne's Southern Cooking'
Craig Claiborne with foreword by John T. Edge and Georgeanna Milam
University of Georgia Press -- 2007 (originally published in 1987 by Clamshell Productions, Ltd.)
Buy it on Amazon

"It is not a question of chauvinism, but I have always averred that Southern cooking is by far the vastest and most varied of all traditional regional cooking in this country," wrote Craig Claiborne in the foreword to this pan-Southern paean to the cuisine of his childhood.

While Claiborne fled the physical South -- and his legendarily smothering mother, Miss Kathleen -- in favor of a stint in the Navy, hotel school in Switzerland and a multi-decade tenure as food editor of the New York Times, his palate remained staunchly attuned to the servant-cooked colloquial fare he'd enjoyed at his mother's boardinghouse.

What we tested and whether the book's worth buying after the jump.

While Claiborne is credited with the invention of the now-standard format of the starred restaurant review and earned tremendous notoriety and a papal condemnation for a $4,000 Parisian meal he shared with his frequent co-author Chef Pierre Franey, he held humble cooking in equal esteem.

He used his position as a national taste arbiter to allot one star each to Lutece and Chock Full O' Nuts, and while his numerous East Hampton soirees were endlessly a-glitz with multi-starred chefs, he devoted a good number of column inches to Miss Kathleen's Chicken Spaghetti recipe and the celebration of non-Northern chefs like Edna Lewis and Crook's Corner's Bill Neal. In this book, Claiborne achieved a culinary reconciliation with his roots.

Takeaway tips: "Grits" is singular, e.g. "I like grits. It is good. I eat it (not them) whenever possible." The level of rigor applied to analysis of Southern vernacular extends to Claiborne's exploration of the foodways of the region. No chicken is left un-smothered, no shrimp un-peeled, no term -- red-eye-gravy, Hoppin' John, hominy -- left un-etymologized.

Quality of pictures: There are none, but the book doesn't suffer for it. Claiborne's vivid prose more than suffices on the tantalization front and well, Headcheese Vinaigrette and Kentucky Burgoo inevitably taste a heck of a lot better that they look.

We tested: Pimento Cheese and Biscuits

There's only one right way to make either of these Southern staples and that's the way your mother, her mother, her mother's mother, ad infinitum did. That said, these'll definitely do in a pinch. For those sans Mississippi ancestry, your new Uncle Craig's renditions of this pepper-kicked cheese spread and deeply savory, lard-rich biscuits is all you'll need. Instructions are thorough, simple and forgiving of variances.

Worth the investment: Oh goodness, yes. Even if you're already in possession of a taped-up, lard-smeared copy of the original edition, the new foreword by Southern Foodways Alliance director John T. Edge and then-masters's candidate in Southern Studies Georgeanna Milam -- who wrote her thesis on Claiborne -- is worth a serious read. For those in search of a down-home, cross-Southern cookbook, backed by a solid amount of cultural context, this is a goldmine.

The duo, along with panelists including current New York Times dining editor Pete Wells, author David Kamp and chef Jacques Pepin presented a sold-out celebration of Claiborne's life and times at the Astor Center in New York City on June 12. The previous night, a panel convened at the New School, discussing Claiborne's contributions to the invention of modern food journalism. Report to follow.