The Gift of Southern Cooking
Recipes and Revelations from Two Great American Cooks: A Cookbook
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
Edna Lewis—acclaimed author of the American classic, The Taste of Country Cooking—and Alabama-born chef Scott Peacock pool their unusual cooking talents to give us this unique cookbook filled with recipes and stories of two distinct styles of Southern cooking.
Miss Lewis’s specialty is Virginia country cooking and Scott Peacock focuses on inventive and sensitive blending of new tastes with the Alabama foods he grew up on, liberally seasoned with Native American, Caribbean, and African influences. Together they have taken neglected traditional recipes unearthed in their years of research together on Southern food and worked out new versions that they have made their own.
Together they share their secrets for such Southern basics as pan-fried chicken, creamy grits, and genuine Southern biscuits. Scott Peacock describes how Miss Lewis makes soup by coaxing the essence of flavor from vegetables, and he applies the same principle to his intensely flavored, scrumptious dish of Garlic Braised Shoulder Lamb Chops with Butter Beans and Tomatoes. You’ll find all these treasures and more before you even get to the superb cakes (potential “Cakewalk Winners” all), the hand-cranked ice creams, the flaky pies, and homey custards and puddings. Lewis and Peacock include twenty-two seasonal menus, from A Spring Country Breakfast for a Late Sunday Morning and A Summer Dinner of Big Flavors to An Alabama Thanksgiving and A Hearty Dinner for a Cold Winter Night, to show you how to mix and match dishes for a true Southern table.
Interwoven throughout the book are warm memories of the people and the traditions that shaped these pure-tasting, genuinely American recipes. The result is a joyful coming together of two extraordinary cooks, sharing their gifts. And they invite you to join them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lewis (In Pursuit of Flavor), grande dame of Southern cooking, has at last come out with a cookbook explicitly devoted to the traditional cooking of the American South. Authenticity is always an issue in southern cooking each state has its fiercely held opinions and sacred recipes but Lewis and her young friend and protege, Scott Peacock, have unbeatable credentials. Peacock, a restaurateur, is from Alabama, Lewis from Virginia, so their culinary reach extends from the Tidewater to the Gulf. They have decades in the kitchen between them and have been cooking together since 1988; indeed, much of the book's charm rises from their heartfelt friendship and mutual respect. Though the book is written in Peacock's voice, nearly every page offers anecdotes and instructions from "Miss Lewis." These are mouthwatering recipes, conceived with integrity (there's even a recipe for your own baking powder if, like Miss Lewis, one is habitually suspicious of industrial food) and include a panoply of classic southern favorites: Cornbread-Pecan Dressing , Old-Fashioned Creamy Grits, Country Ham Steak with Red-Eye Gravy, Hot Crusty Buttermilk Biscuits, and Southern Greens Cooked in Pork Stock. But as if to prove that the Southern kitchen does not begin and end with the pig, several more modern innovations appear: Sauteed Frogs' Legs with Brown Butter and Capers, Silken Turnip Soup, Chanterelles on Toast. The rest of the country owes its thanks to this unlikely pair for bringing Southern comfort back to everyone's table; and so, as one chapter puts it, "Praise the lard and pass the biscuits."
