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South treats the food of the American South as a regional culinary tradition with its own ingredient culture, rather than as comfort food with plenty of butter.
Sean Brock grew up in the coal-mining districts of Virginia and made his name at Husk in Charleston. He won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southeast in 2010, and what sets him apart from others in the region is his obsession with ingredients that have almost disappeared.
He works with Carolina Gold rice, the variety that made Charleston rich in the eighteenth century and was effectively extinct until seed preservationists brought it back. Then there are Sea Island peas, benne, the sesame seed brought from West Africa by enslaved people, and a range of corn varieties ground on stone mills. It is the same work the Nordic movement did with heritage grains, only twenty years later and on a continent where far more had already been lost.
The book is also personal in a way its predecessor Heritage was not. Brock stopped drinking in 2016 and has spoken openly about it, and South is the book that followed. You can sense it in both the tone and the food. Simpler, less demonstrative, closer to what he actually cooks.
The contents include cast-iron cornbread, biscuits, cooked beans, cabbage and leafy greens, pickles, fried chicken and slow smoking. He states plainly that the foundation of Southern food is Black cooking and returns to the point throughout the book.
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Artisan
ISBN: 9781579657161
Language: English
First published: 2019
