A Love Affair With Southern Cooking_ Recipes and Recollections - Jean Anderson [1]
No acknowledgments would be complete without thanking food writer Jim Villas and his mother, Martha Pearl Villas, for so many good southern “reads” and recipes; also cookbook author Damon Lee Fowler of Savannah and Suzanne Williamson of Beaufort, South Carolina, who taught me to make quail jambalaya one brisk December evening and also introduced me to my “dream” southern writer, Pat Conroy (Suzanne developed the recipes for The Pat Conroy Cookbook).
Other cookbook authors and writers about southern food must also be named because they have inspired and educated me over the years: Brett Anderson (no relation); the late R. W. “Johnny” Apple (southerner by marriage); Roy Blount; Jr.; Rick Bragg; Marion Brown; Joseph E. Dabney; John Egerton; John T. Edge; Marcie Cohen Ferris; Donna Florio; Bob Garner; Karen Hess; Sally Belk King; Ronni Lundy; Debbie Moose; Bill Neal; Frances Gray Patton (whose short stories so often featured food); Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings; Julia Reed; Dori Sanders; Elizabeth Hedgecock Sparks; John Martin Taylor; and Fred Thompson.
I’m indebted to Elizabeth Sims of the Biltmore Estate in Asheville for introducing me to the prize-winning Biltmore wines; to Dave Tomsky, formerly of the Grove Park Inn, his wife, Nan, and Tex Harrison, all of Asheville, for providing an insider’s view of their city; and to Sue Johnson-Langdon, executive director of the North Carolina SweetPotato Commission, for a mountain of information of the state’s top crop. I would also be remiss if I didn’t holler “thanks” to John M. Williams, who kept fresh Georgia pecans coming for recipe testing, and Belinda Ellis, of White Lily Flour, who sent me not only a detailed history of this Tennessee miller but also bags of flour to ensure that the cakes and biscuits coming out of my test kitchen oven were as light as they should be.
Thanks go, too, to Sara Moulton, best friend and colleague for more than twenty-five years, who agreed to write the foreword to this book. I take credit for introducing Sara to my home state of North Carolina and she’s returned many times.
Penultimate thanks to David Black, my agent and anchor, who found a home for this book; and two Harper editors: first Susan Friedland, who liked my different take on southern cooking enough to buy the book, and second, Hugh Van Dusen, for his editorial wisdom and guidance throughout.
Finally, I must thank Bon Appétit, Gourmet, and More magazines for granting permission for me to reprint the southern recipes that first appeared there in feature articles I’d written.
Foreword
by Sara Moulton
I hardly knew a thing about southern cuisine until I started working with Jean Anderson—although I’d known Jean herself for years. In fact, getting to know her was a New York thing. She had an apartment in the same building as my parents, the building overlooking Gramercy Park in which I grew up. She also had a bunch of New York jobs—freelancing for all the major food and travel magazines.
But it wasn’t until I was out of cooking school myself, with half a dozen years of restaurant experience under my belt, that I began to get an idea of just how much culinary range Jean possessed. Between the time I stopped working in restaurants and began working at Gourmet, I apprenticed myself to Jean. I traveled with her to Portugal, Brazil, and Holland, helping to shlep her camera equipment (Jean’s a great photographer, too) and tasting and discussing a new world’s worth of food.
Jean’s southern roots remained fuzzy to me until about ten years ago, when she left New York after forty-one years and returned to the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area where she grew up. I’ve visited her there four times, and every time I go it becomes the Full Immersion North Carolina Food Orgy. All three of the Best Triangle Restaurants