This reviewer’s challenge? To assemble a meal using recipes from the season’s top cookbooks with Southern accents. This reviewer’s first course? A drink, naturally.
For that we’ll turn to Bourbon and Rye Cocktails: The History of American Whiskey in 73 Recipes, by Robert Simonson (Ten Speed Press; $26). Simonson’s byline in The New York Times, where he mans the cocktail beat, always signals pleasures ahead: a mix of history, taste, and contagious thirst. In Bourbon and Rye Cocktails, he stirs these into a bosky primer on the nation’s whiskey with recipes old and new. I tilt toward the Dilemma, in which Washington, D.C., bartender Kapri Robinson harmonizes bourbon and bitters with coffee-coconut syrup. It’s richly bitter, tropically consoled.
Let’s have one more drink before we fire up the stove: Tiffanie Barriere’s Key & Coach, an audaciously green cocktail in which gin and aloe liqueur get shaken with…collard green juice. In Good Spirits: The Joy of Cocktails and the Stories Behind Them (Voracious; $36), a vibrant bar guide doubling as a paean to the undersung Black contributions to cocktail history, the Atlanta-based Barriere calls collards “more than soul food.” They’re “sustenance, memory, and medicine.” They’re also a boon companion to gin: Potlikker, meet liquor.
“Food, remedies, and principles” lie at the heart of Toya Boudy’s Cooking from Scratch: A Careful Selection of Useful Recipes (Countryman Press; $33). Following life upheavals, the New Orleans native found purpose in A Domestic Cookbook (1866) by Malinda Russell, the first free Black woman to publish a cookbook. You’ll therefore see tinctures and tonics here, along with hard-won wisdom and down-home deliciousness. Case in point: Boudy’s oyster dip, in which chopped smoked oysters get folded into cream cheese and sour cream and spiked with Worcestershire, hot sauce, and green onions. “You need discipline when making this,” Boudy warns, “or you need to make double.” She ain’t wrong.
We’re going to linger in New Orleans for our next appetizer. More precisely, in the Bayou Bar, where chef Brian Landry expands on South Louisiana cuisine. The riff we’re cooking—from Rhythm and Roux: The Simmer and Swing of New Orleans (Susan Schadt Press; $50), cowritten with Bayou’s music director, Peter Harris—is Landry’s Gulf blue crab with cornflakes, a dish inspired by Indian street food. Imagine a sweet corn, cucumber, red onion, and tomato salad. Add fresh herbs, South Asian spices, citrus. Next add jumbo lump crabmeat and a crispy shower of unsweetened breakfast cereal. Now try not to smile.
Cornflakes also make a cameo, crushed into applesauce meatballs, in Floridian Bobby Hicks’s Retro Recipes: Vintage Dishes with a Modern Twist (Countryman Press; $35). A food influencer and erstwhile cooking show competitor, Hicks casts his eye to the oft-maligned fare of mid-century America: “the good, the bad, and the gelatin,” as he writes. Our entree, then, is chicken à la Maryland, and if the marriages of bourbon and coconut, gin and collards, and crab and cereal haven’t whetted your appetite, how about fried chicken topped with sliced fried bananas and bacon batons? (Add peanut butter, and Elvis rises from the grave.) Quash that side-eye; the dish once charmed Auguste Escoffier and made Titanic’s first-class menu.
Patrick O’Connell’s Main, Middle & Gay (Celadon Books; $30) is not a cookbook but a memoir, by the chef of Virginia’s Inn at Little Washington. Referencing the streets that border the two-Michelin-starred restaurant, the title does double duty: O’Connell also traces the story of his life as a gay man, from a troubled Irish Catholic boyhood in Washington, D.C., to rural self-invention on a Virginia farm, to the founding and ascent of the Inn, where his cooking fuses Southern cuisine with French luxury and idiosyncratic foothills flair. We’ll end our meal with his classic grapefruit tart, in which a chocolate-lacquered pecan shell cradles a cool grapefruit custard, earthy richness and citric brightness in precise negotiation. Coffee, anyone?
Jonathan Miles, a Garden & Gun contributing editor, has been the magazine’s books columnist since 2012. He is the author of three novels, including Anatomy of a Miracle, which was a finalist for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Fiction. A former resident of Oxford, Mississippi, he is currently Writer-in-Residence at the Solebury School in New Hope, Pennsylvania.
Garden & Gun has an affiliate partnership with Bookshop.org and may receive a portion of sales when a reader clicks to buy a book. All books are independently selected by the G&G editorial team.