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Photographs copyright © 2009 by Ben Fink

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

www.clarksonpotter.com

CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

eISBN: 978-0-307-88562-3

v3.1

Simple Fresh Southern

is dedicated to

E.V. DAY

and to

GIA PAPINI LEE

WELCOME

cocktails and coolers

snacks and appetizers

soups

salads and cold sides

hot sides

main dishes

desserts

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

welcome Welcome to Simple Fresh Southern—southern cooking that celebrates fresh ingredients used in creative ways, and that features quick-and-easy preparations with every bit as much southern soul as the long-simmered, the slow-smoked, and the deep-fried. Our style of cooking brooks no compromise on flavor or lusciousness: get ready for Pimento-Cheese Potato Gratin, Pork Tenderloins with Madeira and Fig Gravy, and Buttermilk Pudding Cakes with Sugared Raspberries.

We believe simple and fresh is the direction all southern home cooking is headed—for today’s bounty of ingredients, for contemporary palates, and for the diverse modern diet. But we’re inspired by southern traditions and ingredients, and often by our library of southern cookbooks. Many of these books were published in the mid-twentieth century and are beginning to show their age: the comb-bind on Southern Sideboards is brittle and cracking, a rubber band holds the pages of Charleston Receipts together, and Natchez Recipes (The Altar Guild of Trinity Episcopal Church, Natchez, MS, undated) is so delicate and frayed that we keep it in a plastic sleeve. Even so, these books are sources for many great simple, fresh, southern ideas. But the truth is, we rarely, if ever, cook directly from them.

So how does the inspiration come about?

Take, for example, Shrimp and Deviled-Egg Salad Rolls. We were reading through The New Fairyland Cooking Magic, published by the Fairyland School PTA in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, in 1964 (Fairyland is pronounced FAIR-uh-lind, according to our dear friend Mary Calhoun, who grew up there), when we came across a recipe for “Shrimp–Deviled Egg Casserole.” The recipe was, as you might imagine from the title, pretty far-out: it calls for making a batch of deviled eggs, and alternating layers of them in a casserole pan, topped up with a milky, roux-thickened cheese sauce studded with whole shrimp and spiked with ketchup, sherry, and Worcestershire sauce. You cover all that with a carpet of butter-soaked bread crumbs, bake it for half an hour, and then serve it over “canned Chinese noodles that have been heated in a slow oven.”

Wild, right?! But we’ve learned that whenever you find a puzzling recipe in an old southern cookbook, you can bet your cookie press there’s a core of molten genius within. In this casserole, it’s simply the marriage of shrimp and deviled eggs, a pairing made in some southern seaside idyll, and one that drove us into the kitchen to experiment.

What we developed was a simple egg salad with farm-fresh eggs, but one in which the binder had the depth of flavor and spice of our best deviled-egg filling. And then we folded in perfectly cooked, peeled local shrimp (chopped chunkily). We loved the shrimpy egg salad, which hit all the right comfort notes but wasn’t over-the-top rich. A finishing flavor or two to round it out—a tonic squeeze of lemon (Ted’s idea) and a crumble of smoky bacon and scallion (Matt’s)—was all that was required. And the more we tasted the dish, the more it seemed to be the Lowcountry cousin to the lobster salad that gets tucked into toasted hot-dog buns and served as “lobster rolls” in roadside joints along the New England coast in summer. And there we had it: Shrimp and Deviled-Egg Salad Rolls, a recipe that’s become a favorite of ours for casual