There are a lot of new back-to-basics cookbooks being published these days with the Slow Food movement and it’s first through third cousins roaming the aisles at bookstores.
The recipes in these books are less Emeril than Aunt Emma. From making your own preserves to butchering your own meat to homemade everything, just like great-grandma used to do, these books tell the how’s and why’s of the forgotten skills of cooking. By the way, that’s one of the new book titles out there, “The Forgotten Skills of Cooking. The Time-Honored Ways Are Best: Over 700 Recipes Show You Why.” That’s a mouthful on the cover alone. It was enough words to get a review in the New York Times.
This $40 how-to-and-why textbook from Darina Allen tells how to kill and dress a chicken or made sausage – both skills I skills I practiced during my youth in Alabama, but not from overt chef-ery; we just needed to eat.
In this month’s issue of Oxford American, John T. Edge wrote about Southern community cookbooks. He focuses on a particular tome called “When People Were Nice and Things Were Pretty – A Culinary History of Merigold, A Mississippi Delta Town.” Damn, another title that would gorge a tribe of hungry librarians.
In the Merigold book, Paula Deen calls cooking a chicken impaled on a beer can: “Beer in the rear.” Edge says the book skews a little white and doesn’t really acknowledge the contribution of African Americans and Native Americans in Southern Cuisine. And in my opinion, there would be no Southern Cuisine without those two groups.
Mr. Edge goes on to say that Africans brought us deep frying, honed the art of sweet potatoes and I’m pretty sure that greens and everything else I like to eat was not concocted by white women slaving in their kitchens, but by black women literally slaving in white people’s kitchens.
After reading about antique cooking methods, eating in the South is pretty simple: take away Soul Food and all you have left is empty cast iron skillets.
