"southernfood" news and stories

Ted Lee and Matt Lee Photo: The Lee Bros.

So you think you're out playing hooky from work on the promise of a lovely Southern lunch stewed up by your favorite cookbook authors and then all of a sudden, in strides Bobby Flay.

Yup -- "Throwdown."

Matt Lee and Ted Lee and the rest of the assembled had been lured to a barge on the Hudson River -- Matt's preferred canoeing channel -- on the premise that the brothers would be filming a segment for a Food Network special called "Lowcountry Lowdown." They'd filmed the first half in Charleston, S.C., and reportedly, the duel would have gone down on their home turf, had Chef Flay not fallen prey to the vagaries of air travel.

Read more about throwing down with the Country Captain after the jump.

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.

'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.

As eaters who've had the opportunity to stuff themselves silly at a dinner on the ground know, Southern churches can be fine places to dine. Church potlucks, socials and family night suppers are sometimes the most reliable bets for knee-weakeningly good deviled eggs, pimento cheese, tomato salad, ham casserole and caramel cake.

But a recent trend means folks no longer have to monitor bulletins for edible events: Baptist churches throughout the region have lately formalized their role in upholding Southern food traditions by opening full-service cafés on their now sizable campuses. While chefs across Dixie are succumbing to the allure of molecular gastronomy and global cooking techniques, some churches have become important outposts of culinary preservation.

"Our clientele here would rather have a piece of fried chicken than a piece of beef tenderloin any time," says Chris Harwell, a professionally trained chef who helms the kitchen at Immanuel Baptist Church's Solid Roc Café in Lexington, Ky. "It's not the most sophisticated of palates."

The best thing about embarking on a mission to perfect one's biscuit making? You end up with an awful lot of delicious biscuits to eat. The worst thing? Holy heck, that's a lot of biscuits. I'm lucky enough to be married to an enthusiastic biscuit eater, but I don't want to try his patience too badly this early on, 'cause there are dozens more batches to be rolled out before the year is up.

Solution -- adapt one of his most dearly beloved dishes, his grandmother and mother's Memama and Mimiwag's Chicken & Dumplings a bit to accommodate extra biscuits as ersatz dumplings. The original recipe employs long, rolled strips of dough (which some have argued render it as a much more regionally specific Chicken & Pastry formation, but that's a whole 'nother post), but in lieu of that, I halved the biscuits (from the best batch thus far -- #6 White Lily All Purpose with 50/50 Lard/Butter) and stewed them into the sumptuous broth of a whole, cooked-down chicken until they were softened, but not soggy. That night, with a side of sauteed, vinegar-dashed Swiss chard, it was heaven. Two days later, plated with tangy collards -- otherworldy.

Have a favored use for extra biscuits? I beg of you, share it in the comments below.

Recipes is after the jump.