Comfort foods: Carolina writers on food and cooking

Sometimes we forget that a region is defined as much by its food as by its accent, terrain and weather.

For many of us, of course, the food we eat nowadays is often generic. The MacDonald’s hamburger in Des Moines will taste like the MacDonald’s hamburger in Sylva. Scrambled eggs in New Hampshire are scrambled eggs in Dillsboro.

Moreover, we have branched out in our eating habits in the last 70 years. Until the 1960s, most Americans living outside of the major cities took their meals in Mom ‘n Pop diners, if they ate out at all. Now we think nothing of eating Chinese, Thai, Tex-Mex or Italian. Our tastes have gone international.

And yet there remain those foods we associate specifically with the Old North State, dishes and ingredients we love as our own. Shrimp and grits. Pecan pie. Fried chicken and biscuits. Moravian pot pie. Green beans and buttermilk. Barbecue. Coconut cream pie.

That these Carolina favorites still exert their magical pull on our appetites was driven home to me during a recent browsing session at a local bookstore. It had set up a table of books touting mountain authors. The large display contained a good number of works, both fiction and nonfiction, and I decided to stand nearby for a few minutes to see what books attracted the attention of customers.

The cookbooks won hands-down.

Let’s look at some of these books here.

In The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food (Eno Publishers, 2016, 187 pages, $17.95), 32 authors take their literary talents into the kitchen and dining room, and lay out a feast of descriptions designed to remind readers that certain foods and beverages mark us as North Carolinians as plainly as the license plates on our cars.

Here, for example, Moreton Neal, a culinary critic for Chapel Hill Magazine, writes of her humorous encounter at Asheville’s Tupelo Honey with a Florida tourist who had never tasted grits. As Neal points out, the woman’s unfamiliarity with grits is just one more indication that Florida is not really a part of the South. Neal, whose late husband reinvented shrimp and grits and authored a book on cooking with grits, gave that tourist an education in grits and their history, and provides the reader with a Baked Cheese Grits recipe that sounds delicious.

In a chapter titled “The Mesopotamia of Pork,” Daniel H. Wallace takes hungry readers to Lexington, long claimant to the title “The Barbecue Capital of North Carolina.” With Wallace as our guide, we visit the nationally renowned Bar-B-Q Center, where you “experience barbecue straight from the pit cooked by a pro — it’s like tasting spring, though it’s still great when it goes to the table.”

Michael McFee’s piece, “Mountain Cooking,” offers a long review of Mountain Cooking by the fabled Smokies writer and wanderer John Parris who collected recipes first-hand from old-timers. It’s now out of print but his article reminded me I had once owned this book with its simple, authentic recipes.

In gathering together this collection of fine writers and culinary experts, editor Randall Kenan has done himself proud.

If The Carolina Table leaves your stomach grumbling and your mouth watering, you might take a look at other cookbooks that snagged the attention of those bookstore shoppers.

There is the lavishly illustrated and well-written 12 Bones Smokehouse: A Mountain BBQ Cookbook (Quarto Publishing Group, 2016, 2016, 224 pages, $24.99). Written by Angela King, Shane Heavner, and Mackensy Lunsford, 12 Bones Smokehouse gives recipes and cooking advice from this landmark Asheville restaurant, which counts among its customers President Obama and his wife. Here the owners and chefs share the secrets of their barbecue sauces, slaws, sausages, smoked shrimp, and much more.

Tupelo Honey Café: New Southern Flavors From The Blue Ridge Mountains (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2014, 226 pages, $29.99) offers dishes ranging from pimento cheese sandwiches to Native American fare. Elizabeth Sim teams up with Tupelo Honey chef Brian Sonoskus to bring these tasty dishes from the café directly to your kitchen.

Biscuit Head owners Carolyn and Jason Roy roll out a Southern smorgasbord in Biscuit Head: New Southern Biscuits, Breakfasts, and Brunch (Quarto Publishing Group, 2016, 208 pages, $25). The restaurant is named, as the owners tell us, after Southern-style cat’s head biscuits, so called because these are “biscuits as big as a cat’s head!”

Here you’ll find chapters on infused honeys, homemade butter blends, and of course, biscuit sandwiches with all sorts of fillings. Included, too, are recipes for fried catfish and fried chicken, chow-chow, oven-baked eggs, and many more of those dishes that draw hungry patrons to this West Asheville cafe.

And if all this food leaves you thirsty? Turn to Quench: Handcrafted Beverages To Satisfy Every Taste & Occasion (Roost Books, 2014, 202 pages, $19.95). Here Asheville writer Ashley English and photographer Jen Altman — regular contributors in Smoky Mountain Living — have put together beverage recipes for home use. Though not all of these are native to North Carolina, readers will discover over 100 recipes for both soft and hard drinks, all using natural ingredients.

Bon appetit!