'When Southern Women Cook' is a diverse portrait of the American South's food culture
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Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Today's interview is about a cookbook, When Southern Women Cook by Tony Tipton Martin and Morgan Bolling. It's not just recipes, though. It's also essays and poetry and history about Southern food.

And I noticed something when listening to this interview between the two authors and Here and Now's Robin Young. And it's that Tipton Martin and Bowling are very careful about crediting people when possible. They're very aware that recipes and food traditions don't just come out of nowhere. Someone has to make them. Very often it's women, and very often their contributions are lost to the sands of time.

This was taped just before Thanksgiving, but it's pretty useful for any holiday cooking you've got coming up. So come for the historical analysis of cooking, but stay for the bit about forever slaw. That interview's up after this.

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If you cook or eat or are interested in history, geography, sociology, literature, anthropology, have we got a book for you. When Southern Women Cook is packed with America's Test Kitchen-approved recipes, so yes, it's a cookbook, but it's also an elegant and powerful homage to the American South and Southern women, black, white, indigenous, immigrant. It's about the food that empowered them to become activists and leaders shaping the region's history.

When Southern Women Cook is the work of two women here in the studio with lifelong ties to Southern food. Cook's country editor-in-chief, Tony Tipton-Martin, author of several books celebrating African-American cookbook history, a three-time James Beard Book Award winner. Hi, Tony.

Hi. And we're also welcoming into our studio Morgan Bolling, born and raised in North Carolina. She's executive editor of creative content for Cook's Country as well as a chef and food historian. Morgan, welcome to you as well. Thank you for having me. For talking about this book with us.

Yeah, and you both illustrate, you know, one of the things that really jumped out at me about the book. You, Morgan, are white. Tony is an African-American woman. That's only a part of the blend. So many ingredients in this stew. And, Tony, I want to start with you because I loved how in your foreword it seemed to start with the word hawk, as in ham hawk and ad hawk.

Yeah, isn't that a wonderful analogy? I wrote about that because John Edgerton, the journalist in Southern Sage, invited a bunch of us to come together to really explore common humanity using food as the tool to do that.

And he called us the ad hoc committee. I thought that was an interesting play on the words adding a hock to a simmering pot of green vegetables in the South. Right, which is key. Absolutely, you need that for flavoring. Well, and Morgan, talk about the structure. Essays beginning every section. Here's one from North Carolina writer and cookbook author Kia Mastroianni on how cottage bakers have reclaimed and transformed the domestic space.

and one by African-American food author Psyche Williams-Forsen on Southern fried foods and legacies worth knowing. Talking about the structure of the book, it's 14 chapters. Each opens with an essay from either a historian or author or chef. And then, of course, there are the delicious recipes, and each begins with a little head note saying,

that gives a little more context for the history. And then often within them, mixed within them, are either little backstories or colorful tales or an occasion poem. So it has a very different feel from the average America's Test Kitchen book to it. Well, it does. And it's the South. So Tony...

What are the through lines? Because you have immigrant stories. You have different kinds of approaches to food, but is there something where you can overall say that's South? Well, we wanted to be clear about what the boundaries of the South were, physical boundaries of the South, meaning as far north as the Mason-Dixon line and as far west as the center of Texas. But we also were aware that this is a nation of immigrants. And within that, we all brought our foodways with us.

It has been striking for some people to see that we have so many immigrant stories in this book, but the reality is that people have been migrating and coming and going to this region and throughout the U.S. from the beginning. From the very beginning. And I'm going to go to the Buttermilk Coast Law.

page 124, and historians are tracing it to the Dutch. Kool, meaning cabbage, and sla, meaning salad. But then the essay that precedes this recipe goes on to explain that in the South there's something called permanent sla. Morgan, tell me more. Permanent sla is this concept that you can find in the South of people would keep a

permanent amount of coleslaw in their fridge. And you kind of just keep adding and taking from it. And that's definitely like a concept in the South. We thought about trying to add that as a recipe in the book, but we were like, how on earth would we write that recipe? So we do have two or three coleslaws total in this book otherwise. Well, I just love that notion. I'm a slaw

fan myself. And with Thanksgiving coming, a lot of these, you know, especially going to resonate. We talked about ham hocks. Let's go to the Hoppin' John on page 162. And on this page is a story about Emily Meggett, who's passed. But tell us about, again, the story and the food.

Well, Emily Meggett is an iconic woman from Edisto Island in the Carolinas. And she instructed us on the process of using a fresh ham hock. Most of the time when we think about making a pot of beans or a rich pot of green vegetables, we think about a smoked piece of meat.

And I had been keen to interview her and spend time with her after years of hearing about her. I had understood that there was a woman in the region who was well known for her red rice and other rice dishes.

But once we learned that she was the very woman that I've been hearing about, I couldn't wait to get to that region. And we had an amazing time cooking with her in her kitchen. And her recipe collection went on to be a New York Times bestseller, which speaks so loudly of the interest that people have today in learning more and more about the nooks and crannies and corners of this country. I love that a woman's red rice is...

could draw you, you know, to her door. And stupid question here, what's red rice? So red rice is a Sea Island's Gullah Geechee specialty. It's familiar to many people as the basis for things like jambalaya. It begins with a type of a rice pilaf where you saute the rice grains in order to get them surrounded by fat so that they remain fluffy. But then on top of that, the cook's

Add a copious amount of either tomato sauce, tomato paste. That's the red. So it's become the basis of many other dishes, but it descends from a West African dish, which is jollof rice. Okay.

From Lafayette, Louisiana, you have the stuffed turkey wings and then eight different kinds of fried chicken, including a North Carolina dip chicken glistening with hot sauce, another called chicken fried chicken smothered with gravy. But we want to talk about the recipe for Gobi Manchurian, you know, traditional Indian food. Morgan, how did it make its way to the world?

To the South. Yeah. So this actually we were introduced from a restaurant in Asheville called Chai Pani. Mehrhawan Arani and his wife Molly have this restaurant. We have a piece running next to it about the Brown in the South movement. And that's this really interesting community driven thing of different chefs who have Indian descent, who have moved to the southern U.S.,

And they started this dinner series. You wouldn't think of like Gobi Menchurian as Southern, but there's people who are representing it in this really interesting way in the South. It is like a beautiful fried cauliflower pieces. Tamale pie, traditionally Mexican, and the Greek keftetes, it's a pork and beef meatball served with yogurt sauce.

Again, you know, it's not biscuits, you know. Toni, talk about some of the things you discovered in putting together this book. Well, we want to make sure that people are aware that, as I said earlier, American foodways are based on diverse contributions of a lot of different people.

We've had this way of categorizing and marginalizing communities and marginalizing women. And so we want to make sure that we make the point that these are communities that have contributed to what we think of and know of as the South. And it is certainly important to describe it as the global South.

and make that a modern intervention. For example, you mentioned Greeks. A lot of the barbecue culture in Tennessee, in Alabama, is rooted in the Greek community. It's funny because now that I'm thinking about it, which you've caused me to do, stereotypes sell.

Well, there's also the idea that recipes become embedded in the broader community. So one of the great examples of that is a recipe for something called a dauberge cake, classically known to be in Louisiana. But what we don't often talk about is that it's a recipe rooted in German culture, the dauberge torte. So you could see how a recipe changes over time and is adapted according to

Perhaps what's going on culturally, what's important socially. Maybe it's just a matter of whatever ingredients that they have. Who knew? The Duberge cake created in 1933 by Beulah Ledner, a New Orleans native and daughter of German immigrants. And she ran a bakery. And look at this. There's the cake. But there's pudding in the cake, syrup, buttercream, ganache. Beautiful. What else? I mean, we do have Thanksgiving coming. And everybody's kind of rooted in their own what they do. Is there...

You know, maybe one or two things that also jump out at you. There's Southern favorites here like brulee buttermilk pie, lemon chest pie. Tell us about Aunt Jewel's pie, named after an enslaved woman. Yeah, so that recipe had been floating around in the food world for generations. It is, however, known as the Jefferson Davis pie. Mm-hmm.

One would describe it as a chess pie or a pecan pie. Meaning? Explain what that means. Meaning it's got a very light custard, very sweet. But instead of those pecans, this recipe was based in raisins. At the time that it was created, raisins were very precious. And so that dish would have had high status. So it turns out that the name originated with a woman in Missouri who had a party.

And she asked her cook to bake this pie. And when asked about it for the society pages, she said, oh, it's the Jefferson Davis pie. Maybe she just wanted to give credit to a Confederate general. I don't know what her thinking was. But finally, we're able to give credit now. We know the name of the cook.

and her name was Aunt Jewel. And so we thought it was important to restore that recipe to its rightful owner. And in addition, we invited an activist baker in the Virginia area, Arlie Bell, to adapt that recipe for more modern tastes. We were thrilled to have it receive new life, not only through the story, but also as a dish that one would be proud to have on their Thanksgiving table with the pecan pie or in lieu of it. Yeah.

Well, it is in this phone book of a cookbook. And I say phone book and half the audience has no idea what I'm talking about. But it's just this wonderful, rich, deep book. When Southern Women Cook from Tony Tipton Martin, editor-in-chief at Cook's Country Magazine, Morgan Bowling, executive editor of the magazine. It's just beautiful. And I love that last story. We toast, toast Ann Jewell at Thanksgiving. Thank you both so much. Thank you for having us. Yeah, thank you so much for having us.

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