Martha Foose – Mississippi Sideboard

July 11, 2024July 12, 2024

Favorite Cookbooks of Mississippi Chefs

Vishwash Bhatt: (Snack Bar) Bill Neal, Southern Cooking; Ben and Karen Barker: Not Afraid of Flavor: Recipes from the Magnolia Grill; Norman van Aken, New World Kitchen; Floyd Cardoz, One Spice Two Spice: American Food, Indian Flavors; John Currence, Trailgreat: How to Crush It at Tailgating; Lafcadio Hearn, The Times-Picayune Cookbook; Irma Rombauer, The Joy of Cooking. And obviously, I am a big fan of my own book! (I Am From Here: Stories and Recipes from a Southern Chef)

Dan Blumenthal: (BRAVO!) La Technique by Jacques Pepin—step by step intro to classic French cooking with many helpful photos; On Food and Cooking by Harold Magee-The Bible of food chemistry; just loaded with knowledge about food in general; The Classic Pasta Cookbook by Giuliano Hazan—Wonderful intro into the world of Italian pasta making

Marisol and Rory Doyle (Leña Pizza + Bagels) We went to Naples, Italy, in 2022 to study at the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN) and Scuola di Pizzaioli. These are the books we used for research before opening Leña Pizza + Bagels: Flour, Water, Yeast, Salt, Passion – Vera Pizza Napoletana by Carlo Petrini; Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast by Ken Forkish, and The Pizza Bible by Tony Gemignani.

Alex Eaton: (The Manship) Donal Link – Real Cajun -This is a bad ass book that is spot-on with his recipes. He really is teaching how to cook real Cajun food. From boudin to fried oysters it’s my go to when cooking rustic Cajun food. Mike Solomonov – Zahav Cookbook– In the world of Middle Eastern cooking Arab chefs are so secretive; I once tried to learn how to plate hummus and the chef would not let me come back in the kitchen and watch. This book is useful and extremely helpful with his techniques in the secretive cooking of Middle Eastern food. Hot and Hot Fish Club Cookbook, Chris and Idie Hastings; I love this book not only because it goes season by season… but I actually worked here and was impressed that the cooks and prep cooks used the book for their work; often times chefs seem to just guess at these recipes, and they never come out right.

Hunter Evans: (Elvie’s) Two of my favorite and formative cookbooks while learning to cook were Afield, by Jesse Griffiths and Southern Comfort by Slade Rushing.

Martha Foose: (the Bottle Tree Bakery, author of Screen Doors and Sweet Tea) The Inverness Cookbook, The Time-Life Picture Cookbook, and The Better Homes & Gardens Look and Cook Book.

Jeff Good (BRAVO!, Broad Street Baking Company, Sal & Mookies) In the early years of BRAVO!, our twins were toddlers, and my wife was the chair of the Junior League of Jackson Cookbook Committee. She would spend afternoons with the girls buckled in their car seats and the back of the white station wagon filled with cases of the wildly successful Come On In! cookbook – the second effort by the Junior League at providing households with an abundance of time-tested and tasty recipes great for family meals or fancy parties. She would deliver these books to bookstores, retailers and whoever wanted to carry the cookbook everyone was talking about.

As a part of her work, a lot of these recipes came alive in our kitchen. I would return home past midnight most nights, and raid the refrigerator for leftovers, often something savory from the pages of Come On In!. For this reason, when asked what cookbook has been most influential to me, this one wins hands down.

Dixie Grimes: (Sweet Mama’s) These are in no particular order, as I adore all three equally. White Trash Cooking– Ernest Matthew Mickler. This book speaks to my very soul as a southerner from rural Mississippi. One has to understand that this is not a book mocking a poor class of people but a shout out to the most real and righteous cooking of the south. Recipes for Potato chip sandwich, Cooter Stew, 1-2-3-4 cake as well as or most importantly Fried Squirrel, Butt`s Gator Tail and Aunt Donnah`s roast possum.

It is all about necessity, using what you have, not what you want and making it taste good. Betty Crocker`s Picture Cookbook circa 1950. This book was geared towards the 1950`s housewife, an era of three martini lunches, church socials, afternoon bridge games and cocktail parties and the perfect Ozzie and Harriet housewife/mother who flawlessly executed them without so much as a wrinkle in her skirt: simple, yet elegant. The recipes consist of all things souffléd, scalloped, congealed and supremed. Canapes and sparkling punch with sherbet is what’s up. As a chef I adore the nostalgia this book holds, and the old school feel of classic recipes no longer in use like Pompano En Papillote and Seafood a la Newberg.

The Joy Of Cooking: The title says it all, cooking can be fun and easy it does not have to be a chore or dreaded task. This is the book that I give to all young couples starting out and to anyone who says, “Hey, I would love to learn to make some basic dishes but just do not know where to start.” I consider this book a staple in my own kitchen. It pretty much has a recipe for ANYTHING one might want to cook as well as covering all basic techniques of baking and cooking, i.e. roasting, boiling, braising, sautéing etc. It explains why things work the way that they do, like why butter needs to be cold for biscuits and pie crust or softened for cakes and frostings. Also included is a fantastic conversion chart for measurements which believe it or not I still use regularly, because like most chefs math is not my strong point.

Jesse Houston: (formerly Saltine) Three cookbooks that had a large influence on my career are Momofuku by Peter Meehan and David Chang, The Lee Brothers Southern Cookbook, and Under Pressure by American chefs Thomas Keller and Michael Ruhlman. I read them all cover to cover and absorbed as much of their knowledge as possible. I’ve cooked more recipes out of Momofuku than almost all of my many cookbooks combined.

I was a kid right out of culinary school when it came out and picked it up because I heard it was a fresh way of looking at food. In the opening pages they were dropping f bombs, and I knew this would be unlike anything I had read before. Being a Dallas native, Southern food wasn’t really easy to come by and I didn’t know much about it, but I was about to relocate to the South to open a revolutionary Southern restaurant, Parlor Market. I read every word in the Lee brothers’ book, and I was able to get comfortable with ingredients I had never used before in my life. It should be considered a Southern cook’s bible.

Under Pressure is a book all about advanced cooking techniques used in a modern kitchen, most noticeably sous vide. Although I don’t use sous vide much anymore, it taught me so much about modern cuisine. Currently I’m influenced by books from Noma and Rene Redzepi for their beautiful simplicity and natural approach. They use a lot of modern techniques as well, but hide them in ways that will surprise you, but also seem incredibly natural, as if it were found in nature that way.

Lou LaRose: (Lou’s Full-Serv) I can tell you that Larousse Gastronomique was the first book I ever got. My dad gave it to me back in the early 90’s. From there I was intrigued by lots of the recipes. Old school French was definitely a favorite of mine. I was also very fond of the early “great chefs” shows. I collected all of the books from San Francisco, New Orleans. Chicago etc. James Beard’s Beard on Bread was a hand me down from my grandmother, and I cooked many things from that as well.

April McGreger: (author, The Complete Guide to Canning and Preserving (Centennial Books), and Sweet Potatoes (UNC-Press) By the time I was 12 years old, I was proficient enough in the kitchen that I could follow my mother’s index card recipes for easy weeknight meals, mostly either casserole-style bakes like chicken and rice or smothered cabbage. I was a young teenager when I decided I wanted to learn how to make chicken spaghetti. I had it at a church supper and came home to ask and my mama why she’d never made it. “You make it!” she responded. I think there’s a recipe in Pick of the Crop.”

The Pick of the Crop was the cookbook most important to my development as a cook and,

particularly, as a Southern cook, is. It was published the year after I was born in 1978 by the North Sunflower PTA of Drew, Mississippi. I do not know the details of the book’s journey out of the Delta and 100 miles east to the red clay hills of Mississippi in which I was raised, but it was hands down the most constant source of recipes that sustained my family.

My mother’s copy was littered with her left-handed checks and notes like “try this!,” “soo good!,” or “easy!”. Mark’s Chicken, Cabbage Casserole, and Sausage-Rice Casserole were all in regular rotation on the McGreger supper table, but the first dish that I personally ever became known for was Mrs. Archie (Olivia) Manning’s Chicken Spaghetti I. I was 12 years old from a

family of Mississippi State fans. I didn’t even know who Archie Manning was. Nobody yet knew Peyton or Eli.

But from that recipe I learned the value of stock when I was instructed to cook the spaghetti in the broth in which I cooked the chicken. Years later when I was taught the classic French bechamel and Mornay sauces, I realized I’d been making them since 1989 when Chicken Spaghetti became my signature dish.

Alex Perry (Vestige) Three books stand out: The first two are books that when I finished them, it made me realize how little I knew about food and cooking, which is somehow both innervating and inspiring.

The French Laundry Cookbook (original pressing). During culinary school, a then girlfriend gifted me this book for my birthday. Now attending Le Cordon Bleu, I was very self-assured that I was getting the summation of what French cuisine was…until I parted that iconic cover…here was food that was complex, multi-staged, but so modern, fresh, and clean. Immaculate presentation, but nothing ever seemed ornate or garish…no movement was wasted, no ingredient superfluous. And all rooted in French traditions. I knew then I hadn’t even hit mark twain on what food could be.

Kaiseki: The Exquisite Cuisine of Kyoto’s Kikunoi Restaurant. One Christmas, Kumi (wife and Vestige co-owner) got me this book to introduce me to the world of high-end Japanese cuisine. Now this book was one where the recipes were tucked away in the back, so when viewing the dishes, you really didn’t know much about what went in to them. To say these plates of food were jaw dropping in their beauty would be underselling it. Every dish would be right at home adorning the walls of the world’s best galleries. How did they do it?? Surely dishes like this would require massive ingredient lists with days or even weeks of preparation, right? Get to the end…. some dishes would only feature 4 our 5 ingredients total! What?? How??? It became very obvious rather quickly that Chef Murata was operating on a seemingly different plane of existence. The ability to capture the majesty of nature and the seasons with so few ingredients was transformational.

The Art of Living According to Joe Beef: A Cookbook of Sorts. A book about true love for food and those that inhabit a restaurant’s walls. With all the chefs’ witticisms and anecdotes, you learn to just let go and not take yourself too seriously. Food at the end of the day should be fun…enjoy the process, be gracious in all things, and never let self-doubt limit your ability to create.

Taylor Bowen Ricketts: (Fan and Johnny’s) The River Cottage Cookbook by Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall because I love him and the way he cooks, my great-grandmother’s well-documented, preserved and used notebooks that somehow I was lucky enough to inherit, and the St. Stephens’ Episcopal chicks of Indianola, Ms. cookbook, Bayou Cuisine. Delta women are by far and away the best cooks and hostesses, more particular, demanding, and expecting of any women on earth, and rightly so; almost every one of us bitches can cook.

Robert St. John: (Crescent City Grill, Mahogany Bar, Loblolly Bakery, columnist, author) Culinary Artistry by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page— My copy is so dogeared and worn. This book probably gets more use than any other in my collection. The recipes and restaurants are dated at this point, but the flavor profiles and dynamics are spot-on and useful. It’s the first book I bought my son when he told me of his desire to go into the restaurant biz. “The Flavor Thesaurus” by Niki Segnit is a newer, more comprehensive, book. I just bought my son a copy of this one, too.

Randy Yates: (formerly Ajax, now at large) The Joy of Cooking and the Jackson Junior League cookbook, Southern Sideboards, were always in our kitchen, as was River Road Recipes. I learned how to read from a book version of “On Top of Spaghetti”

Malcolm White (formerly Hal & Mal’s, host of “Deep South Dining” on Mississippi Public Broadcasting) Jesse’s Book of Creole and Deep South Recipes, 1954; The New Orleans Cookbook by Rina and Richard Collin, 1975; Southern Food by John Egerton, 1987; A Cook’s Tour, by Angela Myers & Susan Puckett (forward by Willie Morris), 1980

June 22, 2024June 23, 2024

A Survey of Food and Cooking in the Mississippi Delta

The food and cooking of the Mississippi Delta is not as distinct and certainly not as famous as its music, but is an important portal to its history and character.

The foods are for the most part typical of that elsewhere in Mississippi and throughout the Mid-South, but the Delta is distinguished by way of the cultural influence of New Orleans. One of the most authoritative books on Delta cooking, Bayou Cuisine, has a gumbo recipe on the third page. You’ll find barbecue recipes there too, but you can find recipes for barbecue from San Antonio to Savannah and as far north as Louisville.

Creole was the blanket term for the distinctive foods of New Orleans and neighboring parts of Louisiana until the late 20^th century until Cajun chef Paul Prudhomme drew a distinction. Prudhomme, like every other New Orleans food writer, stands on the shoulders of Lafcadio Hearn.

Hearn moved to New Orleans in 1877, and lived there for nearly a decade. In his time there, Hearn was little known, and even now he is little known for his writing about New Orleans, but he is credited with “inventing” New Orleans as an exotic and mysterious place.

La Cuisine Creole: A Collection of Culinary Recipes, From Leading Chefs and Noted Creole Housewives, Who Have Made New Orleans Famous for its Cuisine (New Orleans: F.F. Hansell & Bro., Ltd., c. 1885) is one of the great classics of Southern cuisine. It was anonymously printed in 1885 but its authorship by Hearn is generally accepted. In his brief but intriguing introduction, Hearn tells us that Creole cookery partakes of the nature of its birthplace – New Orleans – blending the characteristics of the American, French, Spanish, Italian, West Indian and Mexican, Native Americans, African Americans and others in the melting pot near the mouth of the Mississippi.

Then we have Delta Wedding. Welty didn’t include a lot of food in most of her fiction; you have the green tomato pickles in Why I Live at the P.O., for instance, but she wrote introductions for four cookbooks: The Country Gourmet, by the Mississippi Animal Rescue League in 1960; The Jackson Cookbook, published by the Jackson Symphony League in 1971; The Southern Hospitality Cookbook, written by her friend and neighbor Winifred Green Cheney in 1976; and Allison’s Wells: The Last Mississippi Spa, written by Hosford Fontaine in 1981. Welty also knew the importance of food as a significant element of human character, and in Delta Wedding, people are eating all the time. It is after all a wedding.

The foods mentioned include: “Coconut cake, sugared almonds, cold biscuits with ham, sugar cane, homemade fudge, wedding cake (made in Memphis), chicken salad, stuffed green peppers, hoe cakes and ash cakes, chicken broth, Coca-Cola, barbecue (most likely pork), Mary Denis demanded a cold lobster aspic involving moving the world . . . of course we moved it, the patty cake gift for George Fairchild to eat with white dove blood, dove heart, snake blood and other things; he’s to eat it alone at midnight, go to bed and his love will have no rest till she comes back to him, licorice sticks, crusted-over wine balls, pink-covered ginger stage planks, bananas and cheeses, pickles, a mousse (probably chocolate), chicken and ham, dressing and gravy, black snap beans, greens, butter beans, okra, corn on the cob, “all kinds of relish”:, watermelon rind preserves, “that good bread” (yeast bread), mint leaves “blackened” (bruised) in the tea, whole peaches in syrup, cornucopias (horns of pastry filled with cream or fruit), guinea hen, roast turkey and ham, beaten biscuits, homemade green and white mints, fruit punch, batter bread and shad roe, ice cream, chicken and turkey sandwiches, caramel and coconut cakes, lemon chiffon pie, watermelon and greens.”

Delta Review (1963–(Nov./Dec. 1969); the self-titled “Magazine of the Mid-South”, and Delta Scene (Nov. 1973- 1986?) for the most part published articles about literature, history, and such; food was not a big topic for them, and it really wasn’t for most magazines and periodicals back then, with one exception, which I’ll discuss shortly. But in Delta Magazine (2003—present), not only is food a predominant theme, but they published a cookbook.

Then there’s Progressive Farmer and Southern Living, both of which have a long history of readership in the Mississippi Delta.

Progressive Farmer was founded in Winston, North Carolina in 1886 and by the 1960s had a circulation high of 1.3 million. From the lifestyle and home life pages of Progressive Farmer rose the largest and most successful regional publication in history, Southern Living, in which Southern food was, is and always will be a predominant theme. The number of recipes the magazine has published from readers in the Mississippi Delta is likely quite vast.

There are many weekly newspapers in the Delta, The Deer Creek Pilot being foremost among them, of course, and three predominant dailies, the Delta Democrat-Times, founded in 1938, and the metro dailies of The Times-Picayune ( founded 1837) of New Orleans and The Appeal/Commercial Appeal (founded 1841). Food and food writing was very much an incidental subject in most newspapers in the Delta, indeed across the country, until a boy from Sunflower County, Mississippi changed everybody’s mind.

It’s not such a stretch for me to include The New York Times Cookbook in this survey of the literature of Delta food and cooking. If I were to have left Craig Claiborne out of this talk, I’m sure some of you might have pulled a skillet out of your purse and come at me, and I’d be getting ugly emails until New Year’s.

Craig Claiborne is a towering culinary figure; he set the tone of American culinary culture for two decades and beyond. He became America’s unquestioned authority (his columns went directly to print; no editor) on the full culinary spectrum of foods and restaurants, chefs and cookbooks. He wrote and co-wrote many best-sellers, first and foremost The New York Times Cookbook. You just can’t find exact figures on copies sold of any work, and I’m not sure why. Claiborne got all the copyrights to the work, which was pretty much the basis of a very large fortune.

By far the most important resource for the foods of the Mississippi Delta are community cookbooks published by various organizations, the earliest dating from 1912. These cookbooks are the best historical record of foods and cooking in the region; not only that, but many if not most of them contain far more than just recipes: you’ll also find historical information about churches, or schools or social organizations (ladies clubs, Rotary, etc.) that were very much a part of the town or city of their time.

This is the earliest cookbook I could locate from the Delta, the Twentieth Century Cookbook/Tried and True Recipes by the Young Women’s Guild of St. James’ Episcopal Church in Greenville, January, 1902. The introduction refers to “A number of these (recipes) which accomplished cooks will find new and pleasing are contributed by well-wishers in New Orleans, justly famed for its cuisine Creole (note Hearn’s title here). We believe these Creole dainties will be found unique and as useful as the more common ones used to make this Greenville cook book a thoroughly complete and valuable aid to its friends and purchasers.” The book sold for fifty cents, which was a lot in those days.

In Jackson, people make a big deal of the white fruitcake that Eudora Welty wrote about in her introduction to The Jackson Cookbook, first issued by Symphony League of Jackson in 1971 and followed by a well-deserved 30^th anniversary issue. In a pamphlet issued many years later, Eudora greatly expanded on the original recipe. On page 9 of The Delta Cookbook, you’ll find recipes for a white and a black fruitcake. Only the black fruitcake has whiskey in the recipe, but the white fruitcake recipe in The Jackson Cookbook includes bourbon.

Undoubtedly the best-known cookbook to come from the Mississippi Delta is Bayou Cuisine (1970). Sales figures on books are hard to come by; usually only the publishing house will have them, and when I called St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Indianola asking about sales on this book, they were appropriately ambiguous. A figure of “over 100,000 copies sold” is mentioned in the 1997 sequel, Best of Bayou Cuisine, but I consider that figure very low indeed.

Another Delta cookbook stands out as a significant work for a higher reckoning of merit. The Sharecropper, put out by the Central Delta Academy Parent-Teacher organization in 1987, elevates the community cookbook to the realm of art. In her later years, Ethel Wright Mohamed was known internationally as the Grandma Moses of stitchery. But this native of Fame, Mississippi, spent most of her life raising a family and tending to customers at the store she ran with her husband, Hassan Mohamed, in the Delta town of Belzoni.

When Hassan passed away in 1965, Ethel picked up a needle and embroidery floss and began documenting her life: Hassan telling folktales to the children; their housekeeper, Mittie, tending to the stove; the ledger she kept at H. Mohamed General Merchandise.

She called her embroideries “memory pictures”. In 1974 one of Ethel’s memory pictures was featured at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, DC. Ethel passed away in 1992.

(You can find a bibliography for this article here.

November 13, 2015December 1, 2021

The Southerner’s Cookbook: A Review

Transitions in regional media are often difficult to discern, but when it comes to the South, which has an arguably more identifiable character than any other region of the country, watersheds can be mapped with a bit more precision.

Such is the case with Garden & Guns newest release, The Southerner’s Cookbook, which is the third installment in three years (each October) under the G&G label. The first two imprimaturs, The Southerner’s Handbook: A Guide to Living the Good Life (Oct., 2013) and Good Dog (Oct., 2014), set the tone of the magazine’s brand, which is clearly targeted, in the words of G&G president and CEO Rebecca Darwin, “to people like me or to people who were very sophisticated, very worldly, but in love with where they’re from, which is this beautiful place called the South.” The label has a pronounced literary bent as is evidenced by its contributors, and given its added emphasis on sophistication and worldliness, one might well gather that Darwin and her team have set their collective caps to filling a decidedly upscale niche somewhere between brashness of The Oxford American and the comfort of that grand dame of regional periodicals, Southern Living. What with the progression of G&G’s publications so far, it’s a safe bet to expect the release of a book on Southern gardening next year.

The Southerner’s Cookbook is indeed market-generated, and I really shouldn’t be surprised that only one restaurant from the entire state of Mississippi carries a recipe. John Currence has a passage about his latest project, whole roast hog, which is somewhat of a departure for a native of the Big Easy operating in the Little Easy, but this is an era of diversity. Martha Foose inexplicably given the context is mentioned in a recipe for bacon crackers. The one recipe that shocks and dismays me is the one for “Comeback Sauce (sic)”, which is not only compared with McDonald’s “Secret Sauce”, but also provided by a chef from Alabama with a restaurant in Atlanta. The nod to Jackson in the first few words simply does not make up for such a slight. The cookbook is also far off the mark by consigning Jesse Houston’s restaurant Saltine, which specializes in oysters and seafood, to a sauce (Black Pepper Ranch Dressing) rather than an entrée. Both Mississippi and Jesse deserve far, far better than this.

If you need more evidence that Mississippi is nothing more than “that land mass between Louisiana and Alabama”, you need turn no further than The Southerner’s Cookbook. Yupster cookbooks have come of age, and Julia Reed is the bellwether for Mississippi. God help us all.