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So we use local produce, fish, and meats as much as we can, and we’re attentive to seasonality. It makes us feel good when we can pull it off, but we don’t obsess too much about it if we can’t. In a perfect world, we’d eat only vegetables grown on our farm, seafood harvested from the end of our dock, and meats from animals raised on grasses grown in the pastures beyond our kitchen window. But in the real world (where we have neither farm, nor dock, nor pastures), it’s just not possible. As food writers and as cookbook authors, we spend a lot of time touring the country, shopping for ingredients to use in our cooking classes, so we’re aware that farmers markets and supermarkets vary in accessibility and quality from place to place. But we firmly believe that all Simple Fresh Southern recipes can be accomplished beautifully in towns from coast to coast.

There’s a second meaning of “fresh” in our book, and it refers to a freshness in outlook: a new and original use of a timeless ingredient, as in our Buttermilk Fresh Cheese, and our Squid with Watermelon and Basil. Sometimes that freshness manifests itself as a new direction for a familiar southern standard, such as Red Rice Salad, and Rice Pudding Pops. And other times, we’re just looking for a quick-and-easy treatment of a southern classic, as in our Easy Shrimp Creole, or our Easy Chicken and Dumplings.

If you’ve eaten in some of the better—not fancier, but better—restaurants around the South, perhaps you’ve discovered dishes with a similar spirit: Andrea Reusing’s pork belly with pumpkin preserves at Lantern in Chapel Hill; or Scott Peacock’s butterbean hummus at Watershed in Decatur; or Hugh Acheson’s river trout with boiled-peanut sauce at Five and Ten in Athens; or Robert Stehling’s creamed collards at Hominy Grill in Charleston. We get a tremendous amount of inspiration from these chefs, and we bet that their recipes might be adaptable to home cooking. But we assure you, no background in restaurant dining, or even in southern food, really, is assumed in this book, and no expertise is required to make your Simple Fresh Southern meals a success.

SOUTHERN What is southern?

After all, the way people cook in Charleston differs from the way people cook in Asheville, and in Richmond, and in Chattanooga, and in Dothan, and in Tallahassee. To complicate matters further, many of the ingredients and dishes we think of when we think “southern”—from collard greens to fried chicken to pecan pie—these days are grown and prepared throughout North America.

We know this: southern ingredients are our starting point, our palette, so to speak. And we’re guided by the spectrum of southern flavors, from the playful sweet-sour brightness of relishes and pickles to the greener taste of freshly shelled peas, butterbeans, mint, and parsley, to savory meats, from the smoky funk of good barbecued pork to the salty-sweetness of blue crabs picked straight from the shell. And we know southern techniques from reading great classic southern cookbooks, from Mary Randolph to Mrs. S. R. Dull, our cherished community books, put out by altar guilds and Junior Leagues, and those by luminaries like Edna Lewis, Bill Neal, and Jean Anderson.

Our reliance upon fresh ingredients and simplicity in Simple Fresh Southern may resemble the old ways more than anything—a time before the rise of mid-century convenience foods. But it doesn’t end there. We’ve always thought the hallmark of twentieth-century southern cooking is its spirited resourcefulness—turning thrift into indulgence with a wink. Saving leftover watermelon-rind pickle brine to make a salad dressing or a ham glaze? Very southern. But what if that pickle brine came not from a traditional rind pickle (with its four-day soak in pickling lime) but from our Watermelon and Onion Pickles, that we make in ten minutes with Scrabble-tile-size squares of red seedless watermelon and crushed red chile? Southern? What if we smoke cauliflower in a stovetop smoker and puree it with buttermilk to make a