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3 slices hickory-smoked bacon, cut crosswise into strips ½ inch wide

2½ pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and diced

1 medium Granny Smith apple, peeled, cored, and coarsely chopped

1 medium yellow onion, coarsely chopped

1 large carrot, peeled and coarsely chopped

1 medium celery rib, trimmed and coarsely chopped (include a few leaves)

1 large shallot, finely chopped

1 large garlic clove, finely chopped

½ teaspoon dried leaf basil, crumbled

½ teaspoon dried leaf oregano, crumbled

¼ teaspoon dried leaf thyme, crumbled

1/3 cup unsifted all-purpose flour

8 cups (2 quarts) rich chicken stock or broth

1½ teaspoons salt, or to taste

½ teaspoon black pepper, or to taste

¼ teaspoon hot red pepper sauce, or to taste

1 cup heavy cream

Garnishes

Sour cream or crème fraîche

Reserved cooked bacon

6 sprigs of fresh lemon thyme

1. Fry the bacon in a large, heavy soup kettle over moderate heat for 10 to 12 minutes or until the drippings cook out and only crisp brown bits remain. Scoop the bacon to paper toweling and reserve.

2. Add the sweet potatoes, apple, onion, carrot, celery, shallot, and garlic to the kettle and sauté in the drippings for 8 to 10 minutes over moderate heat or until golden. Blend in the basil, oregano, thyme, and flour and cook and stir for 2 to 3 minutes.

3. Add the chicken stock slowly, stirring all the while, then mix in the salt, pepper, and hot pepper sauce. Continue stirring until the mixture boils, turn the heat to low, and simmer uncovered, stirring now and then, for about 20 minutes or until the vegetables are soft. Set off the heat and cool for 20 minutes, stirring often.

4. Purée the soup mixture in batches in the food processor, then return to the kettle. Add the cream and bring slowly to serving temperature. Taste for salt, pepper, and hot pepper sauce and adjust as needed.

5. To serve, ladle into heated soup plates, and garnish each portion with a dollop of sour cream, a scattering of the reserved bacon, and a sprig of lemon thyme. Or, if you prefer, chill well and serve cold, thinning the soup, if needed, with a little cold milk or broth.

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TIME LINE: the people and events that shaped Southern Cuisine

1793

Louisiana Governor Francisco Luis Carondelet begins closing bars and taverns.

1796

Because of meager harvests, Louisiana bans the export of corn, flour, and rice.

The Newsom family develops a recipe for smoke-curing hams on their Virginia farm. The family later moves to Kentucky and today Colonel Bill Newsom’s Aged Kentucky Country Hams are cured according to that 1796 recipe. (See Sources, backmatter.)

1797

George Washington builds a distillery beside his prosperous grist mill at Mount Vernon and in the first year makes $7,500 on 11,000 gallons of whiskey—a fortune in those days.

1798

To improve city lighting, New Orleans butchers and bakers agree to pay a “chimney tax.” At the same time, local bakers manipulate the price of flour.

1799

French botanist François André Michaux plants tea in the South Carolina Lowcountry near Charleston on what is now Middleton Place Plantation.

* * *

If anything could be called the national dish of the South, perhaps barbecue, even more so than fried chicken, would be it.

Damon Lee Fowler, Classical Southern Cooking

Main Dishes: Meat, Fish, Fowl, and More

Leaf through almost any early southern cookbook and you’ll discover an extraordinary variety of meat, fish, and fowl as well as some unexpectedly sophisticated recipes.

In Mary Randolph’s Virginia House-wife (1824), I find sweetbreads, saddle of mutton, black sausage, and goose. Game bird, rabbit, and venison recipes abound in Lettice Bryan’s Kentucky Housewife (1839); she even offers a few ways to prepare beef cheeks. A glance, moreover, at Sarah Rutledge’s Carolina Housewife (1847) turns up turtle, terrapin, and mullet roes in addition to more familiar fare. Not even Mrs. Dull’s Southern Cooking (1928) neglects calf’s brains, sweetbreads,