This one’s a little long, but I haven’t done one in a while and I figured it was worth it for any foodie friends who care to read it…
My mother got me a book on the history of Southern cooking,
An Irresistible History of Southern Food. The book is a fascinating read and reveals how the South got all the food that we consider Southern. Like nearly all cuisines, most dishes stem from the influences of immigrants, invaders, and the necessity of using what is available. In the case of the United States South, as I’m sure you could guess, most of the ingredients and recipes came from the Old World and many of them were reproduced and developed by slaves in the New World.
It’s also interesting to note the timing of things because our country is so comparably young. For an obvious example, tea’s popularity can be traced to 6th century China, and the quintessential drink of the South—sweet tea—wasn’t popular here until the late 1800s, though inaccurate myths claim that iced black tea wasn’t “invented" until the 1904 World’s Fair. Meanwhile, green tea had been consumed in America since colonial days.
Fried chicken was likely developed by slaves but had been done for centuries before by Italians and Vietnamese, the Georgia peach is a native Chinese fruit brought here by Spaniards, and whisky-making was introduced by Scots as the French and Germans were arriving in the Mississippi Delta and North Carolina, respectively. African slaves brought us Southern staples from their home countries like eggplant, okra (gumbo as the Bantu called it), black-eyed peas, benne (sesame) seeds, and even watermelon. That’s not to say that Native Americans had nothing to offer; they taught the Scot-Irish how to smoke trout and make jerky from venison; and of course you have “the three sisters”—corn, beans, and squash, a genius Native American agricultural technique which resulted in cornbread, butter beans (dating back to 5,000 BCE in Peru), and everything squash (an Algonquian Indian term meaning “eaten green”).
So you get the history lesson. The recipes in this book are stripped down to the very original basics as they were probably first made here in America. That means they’re kinda boring—shrimp and grits is basically, "put some shrimp on some grits with some butter." So…
Shrimp and Grits (Momofuku Style)
Grits are actually uniquely Southern, have been called “the first truly American food,” Gulf shrimp have a flavor you can’t get elsewhere, and Kara and I love shrimp and grits, so I had to do that. But in keeping with the fascinatingly muddled history of Southern cuisine, I turned to a recipe in
Momofuku that I’d been wanting to make for a long time. What better than a traditionally Southern dish designed by a Korean using Japanese staples? These grits were cooked in
dashi which is a broth essential to Japanese cuisine, made by steeping seaweed and fermented tuna flakes in boiling water. This particular dashi is flavored with bacon and the grits got a hearty dose of butter and soy sauce as well.
Umami explosion. The grits are topped with Gulf shrimp, scallions, bacon, and a slow-poached egg (if you’re half-interested, ask me how to do a slow-poached egg, the technique is perfect, and is intentionally broken in the picture).
Fresh Peach Cobbler (Late 19th Century Style)
Kara’s all-time favorite dessert, made simply and directly from the book using a recipe tested for over a century. The reason it’s called “cobbler” by the way, is because the traditional method of dropping what is essentially biscuit dough over the peaches results in something that resembles a cobblestone street. The only change I made to this classic approach was Kara’s request for cinnamon.
We enjoyed the meal with sweet tea (more sweetened than I intended, but not as sweet as a real Southerner would prefer) and a peach bellini brought by our guest, Nora. (There might have been a Sunday morning peach bellini mimosa the next day, which sounds pretty in keeping with Southern traditions to this author.)
