The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern_ Knockout Dishes With Down-Home Flavor - Matt Lee [3]
Our answer to all these questions is, “Hell, yes!” But truly, an individual litmus test of southernness wouldn’t matter. Southern soul doesn’t come from any one thing, whether it’s a mayonnaise jar, a deep-fryer, or even a quail trap; it’s a far more complex and wondrous cocktail of traditions, techniques, ingredients, and flavors. Still, we enjoy asking that question of our cooking, because in doing so, we seem to open the door to new possibilities. It’s how we move the discussion forward, and make better southern food. In the Simple Fresh Southern kitchen, we firmly believe southern cooking is a living art, one that is ever on the increase, with the potential to cast a spell on the wide world.
Since the landings of Spanish settlers in North America, the story of southern food has been one of great cataclysm and change. The subsequent arrivals of English, Irish, Scots, Portuguese, French Huguenots, Germans, and enslaved Africans introduced new ingredients and new methods. The rise of electric refrigeration and convenience foods in the early twentieth century brought about changes in the way southerners cooked that their ancestors would’ve found inconceivable. In the 1980s, jet-set southerners doctoring their grits with the Danish blue cheese and Italian sun-dried tomatoes they’d grown to love in their travels ushered in new traditions in southern cooking. It’s natural for people like us who love southern food to feel nostalgic for the style of southern cooking that we hold most dear, the one that seems most “authentic,” and to defend it with a passion. But there’s no reason to fear where southern food is headed, particularly when it means that new markets open up for artisanal southern ingredients that once were headed for extinction. Witness the resurgence in just the last decade of country-cured ham, stone-ground grits, and cornmeal—and the connoisseurship of regional southern barbecue. As long as we support organizations like the Southern Foodways Alliance, doing the painstaking work of documenting the history and breadth of southern foodways, we’ll have reason to applaud a future filled with great southern vittles.
TO THE KITCHEN! We’ve organized Simple Fresh Southern by chapters that proceed the way a meal typically would. We begin with drinks and move on to snacks and appetizers, then to soups, salads and cold sides, hot sides, main dishes, and dessert. The structure at times challenged us because our Smoked Shrimp with 3 Dipping Sauces, which we typically present on a large cutting board for cocktail hour, also makes an outstanding main dish when it’s served with fresh corn on the cob and a leafy green salad for a weekend dinner with family. Another example: We always keep a stock of Green Tomato and Onion Pickles, in the fridge because they round out a cocktail-hour snack plate of paper-thin slices of country ham and Lee Bros. Shrimp Pâté, or Radish Butter. But some nights, those pickles might appear as a cold side dish for a bucket of store-bought fried chicken, and on others, as just a condiment for grilled cheeseburgers. Another night, they might get battered and pan-fried with oysters, and served in butcher-paper cones in julep cups as an elegant cocktail-hour snack before supper.
As a result of the chapter-crossing tendencies of certain recipes, we’ve larded our headnotes with serving ideas and variations, so be sure to read them deeply. You’ll also find notes on technique that may answer questions that arise as you cook, and a story or two that might amuse you.
In the course of our lives as reporters, we’ve stepped into countless kitchens—of restaurants, hotels, schools, and homes—and we’ve ventured behind the scenes with food stylists at print shoots and television shows. We’ve sat down with farmers, cooking-school teachers, wedding-cake