A few months back, a conversation here with Carrie about Hugh Acheson's amusing appearances as a judge on Top Chef made me wonder who that snarky guy was. I really had no idea where he came from or what his expertise was, so I googled and discovered that he was a Canadian from Ottawa who now calls Athens, Georgia home, and that his food is distinctly Southern. As he put it, "I had a lot of classic technique in my repertoire and had ultra-credible experience in great restaurants. And while my Southern friends and family had their mothers' recipes to preserve and pass down, I had a relatively blank slate to interpret Southern food my way: to take a fresh approach and turn the traditions on their heads a little bit."
This is the kind of thing I love best in the world whether it's modern art, jazz or food: take something classic, make it look new. So I ordered his book, A New Turn in the South, but by the time it came I was pretty busy and it went into the bookcase unopened.
Then Bob and I took trips to Kansas City (I know, the midwest, not the south, but close), Atlanta and, a week later, Los Angeles where coincidentally my friend Annabelle had newly acquired someone else's book on Southern cooking and wanted us to cook from it while there. I came home from all that travelling inspired, and hungrily opened Hugh's book.
For those of you who can, like me, sit down and read a cookbook like a novel, this is a very good read and it's distinctly Hugh. Readers of his blog will recognize his wit, both in the way he tells his own story and the instructions in his recipes. As he admits, the recipes are geared toward the home cook but to my eye that's in the recipes chosen and not an absence of flavor complexity or sophistication in the dishes themselves. Acquiring some southern comfort hasn't left his French training behind, but his food capitalizes on Georia's great fresh ingredients with a strong emphasis on acidity and fresh herbs.
The book so captivated me that I invited an all-Canadian guest list down for a five-course "Tour of the South" and included three of the recipes in this book on my menu. The rest of the menu were dishes of my own design, but the immersion process into thinking Southern for a non-Southerner provided by this book was invaluable. For instance, he mentioned ham and somewhere else a browned butter vinaigrette which intrigued me enough to decide on that for a salad course. And since that nutty browned butter is what makes a slice of fried ham so good for breakfast, it made me want to put ham on the plate too so voila a play on the French classic ham and parsley terrine using mustard greens came into existence and I paired a slice with the salad. (The vinaigrette was outSTANDing, even if not cardiologist-approved.) And his mentioning a tomato aspic caused me to make my own version of a tomato aspic from the pink tomato water that leaks out of ripe tomatoes infused with lemon rind and white wine to dice into jewels to garnish the plate with. His recipe for fried okra inspired me to fry whole pods as fritters and use them as a garnish for the roast prime rib cap. And so on.
The spell hasn't worn off yet. This Sunday, in fact, I have five couples coming over with spouses for a Commodore's Ball planning session and dinner. Because the ball this year is going to be Cowboy-themed and held in a renovated chicken coop, what better than to serve them an all-Southern menu with a few more of Hugh's recipes? I'll be serving his maple-baked beans, apple brown betty and bread-and-butter pickles plus collard greens, fried okra, smoked chicken, a non-dairy cabbage slaw, and an olive-and sweet pickle macaroni salad in lieu of the south's ubituitous mac and cheese BBQ side.
It has been a long time since a cookbook dominated my thought processes the way this one has, and I highly reccomend it.
way.