Photo: Amazon.com

'Lee Bailey's Southern Food & Plantation Houses'
Recipes by Lee Bailey and the Pilgrimage Garden Club
Photographs by Tom Eckerle
Clarkson Potter -- 1989
Buy it at Amazon

Lee Bailey is a Louisiana native, home-furnishings store owner and the author of several books on food and entertaining. So he comes to this, his seventh book, quite naturally: both a compendium of Southern recipes and tour of the plantations in and around Natchez, Miss., it's part "Antiques Roadshow," part Southern Foodways Alliance, part National Lawn & Garden Show.

It's elegant, faintly -- and winningly -- eccentric, and imbued with unaggressive charm. Reading it is like taking a courtly stroll through a vast garden, bottomless mint julep in hand. You can almost smell the clematis -- and the gumbo.

Takeaway Tips: This is as much a celebration of Natchez as its food: the book begins with a self-explanatory section entitled "Natchez Bouquets" (remember, the tome was co-written by the town's Garden Pilgrimage Club) and recipes are organized into menus that are paired with particular plantations. "Informal Dinner at Stanton Hall," for example, provides readers with a brief history of the towering antebellum estate.

See what we tested and whether it's worth buying after the jump.


The accompanying menu complements its particular character -- in addition to dishes of tomato aspic and pecan rice, the "Baked Custard with Adelina Patti Grape Dessert Sauce," is named "in honor of the lady in a pink dress whose portrait hangs over one of the sideboards in the large dining room of the main house."

Quality of pictures: The photos of the food are adequate, but the real focus is on the plantations and plantation grounds. While shots of dishes like bourbon-mint ice cream look appetizing enough, they tend to come across as more of an afterthought next to lavish portraits of everything from antique baby dolls to painstakingly stylized mantelpiece displays.

We tested: Pan-Sautéed Catfish with Parsley-Pecan Sauce

Catfish is long-established member of the Southern food canon, and this recipe showcases the attributes that have helped it stand the test of time. The fish is dredged in a mix of flour and cayenne before it's fried in a diet-be-damned combination of olive oil and butter.

The thoroughly fried result is, naturally, delicious, and crispy without being too greasy. The accompanying parsley-pecan sauce (which is another way of saying "pesto") is a perfect complement to the fish's sweet, mild flavor and a textural foil to its crunchy coating. The high-low combination yields a dish that both decadent and nourishing. It gets extra points for being easy to prepare, though the splatter-happy nature of skillet frying means an added investment in clean-up time.

Worth the investment: For anyone interested in an elegant, old-school Southern food, yes. For anyone interested in Natchez, Southern plantations and the extensive grounds of Southern plantations, yes again.