Tales are her appetizers to recipes with regional roots

COOKBOOK REVIEW

July 20, 2011|By T. Susan Chang, Globe Correspondent

A SOUTHERLY COURSE: Recipes and Stories From Close to Home By Martha Hall Foose

Clarkson Potter, 256 pp., $32.50

Martha Hall Foose has been a professional baker, an executive chef, and a food stylist, but it was her 2008 book debut, “Screen Doors and Sweet Tea,’’ that charmed readers nationwide (and earned her a James Beard award). You could practically smell the thick, mint-scented air, see the porch swing, and feel the warm, weathered wood against your back.

Foose writes storybooks. In a typical cookbook, headnotes on recipes offer a bit of vital information about technique or sourcing ingredients. Foose’s headnotes and subtitles are so wildly creative they are practically a genre of their own. “Prawns in Dirty Rice’’ takes the cryptic subtitle “Water Wells,’’ and the headnote heads straight for the shrimp nurseries off the Mississippi. A recipe for pepper steak comes with a story about an old gentleman friend named Junior Pepper.

The author’s approach is neither traditional Southern nor new Southern. Despite her professional background, this is not show-off food, but rather a mix of your neighbors’ recipes, your recipes, great-aunt’s recipes, what-I-learned-in-France recipes, and potluck recipes. In short, food that real people eat. Foose is not afraid to go a little retro to make things easier or tastier. I cannot remember the last time I saw canned soup in a recipe, but there it was - tomato soup, in a dressing for a carrot side dish she calls “Copper Pennies.’’ It’s got the unfashionable sweetness of bread-and-butter pickles, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good.

Soybean salad is more forward-looking, making use of shelled edamame you can find in the freezer section these days. It’s got cucumbers and onions for crunch and is cool enough to serve at a midsummer picnic. In the same vein is a black and white bean salad, with just enough green pepper and red onion to relieve its starchy character; the hardest part is finding the can opener.

I especially like a slaw of peanuts and Napa cabbage, dressed with sesame oil, soy, and rice vinegar, a fuss-less fusion on the Asian-Southern axis that is typical of Foose’s approach.

Main dishes are high-heat but low-labor. It never occurred to me to put peanut butter where the butter usually goes - under the skin of a roast chicken - but it’s an easy and direct route to major flavor. If you don’t care a bit about setting an example, you can win over any child with Foose’s sausage dinner, which is nothing more than 6 sweet sausages baked in a high-rising batter, like pigs in a blanket.