Conde Nast Traveler, November 2012

Transcription

HARVEST SWOON
The bounty of the
South now gets the
chefs it deserves—
these morsels are
headed to the kitchen
of Blackberry Farm,
a Tennessee gourmet
shrine (and Relais &
Châteaux estate).
Opposite: Wild
grasses enrich the
milk at Knoxville’s
Cruze Dairy Farm—
especially famous
for its buttermilk.
Grits
Gone
Wild
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Like Tuscany in the 1980s and
California in the late 1990s, the American South is in the grips of an
epic culinary boom. Adam Platt’s plan? Start in Tennessee and slowly eat his
way east until, like General Sherman, he reached the sea
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
Peter Frank Edwards
I’D BEEN ON THE ROAD FOR A DAY OR TWO, TACKING
to and fro among the nouveau food snob destinations of backwoods Tennessee, before I met the man
gourmet chefs in tony Yankee-style restaurants call
the Rock Star of Country Ham. During the course
of my travels, I’d already tasted “hand-wrapped”
artisanal chocolates touched with barrel-aged
bourbon and discussed the merits of the corn bread
1.
SOUTHERN
COMFORTS
1. Fried sweetbreads
with dilly beans,
shallots, mustard
greens, and carrot
puree at Blackberry
Farm. 2. The bar
at Charleston’s
FIG (Food Is Good)
restaurant.
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2.
madeleine with several loquacious self-proclaimed
food snobs from Nashville. I’d stood in line for a
taste of that city’s famously addictive Prince’s “hot”
fried chicken and paid one hundred dollars for an
elaborate eleven-course tasting menu that included a strange, intoxicating substance called Wonder Bread Purée. I’d visited with an artisanal “seed
saver” who travels the mountain valleys looking for
ancient beans and strains of corn, and sat at the bar
of a little barbecue joint in Nolensville, Tennessee,
contemplating the Big Momma Sampler, an impressive local specialty that includes a pile of barbecued
pork products roughly the size of my head.
The Rock Star of Country Ham received me in his
smoke-tinged office, which contains a desk clut-
tered with papers and old ballpoint pens, an ancient
push-button telephone, and weathered laminate
walls the color of tobacco. “I tell people I operate
out of a cigar box, and that’s not far from the truth,”
said Allan Benton, with a friendly grin. Benton
grew up on a backwoods farm in the Appalachians
of southern Virginia and moved to Tennessee to be
a teacher. After deciding that he couldn’t subsist
on his meager salary, he bought a
small smokehouse and began curing hams in a mixture of salt and
brown sugar, the way his parents
did on their mountain farm. He
flavored them for days in clouds
of hickory smoke. “For years my
customers were a few local hillbillies and a couple of greasy spoon
restaurants up in the mountains,”
said Benton, who has operated out
of the same cinder block building
off Highway 411, near Madisonville,
Tennessee, for the last thirty years.
Benton’s fortunes changed a
decade ago, when the chef at a
nearby resort called Blackberry
Farm began serving hickorysmoked Benton ham and bacon
to his guests for breakfast. The future Top Chef judge Tom Colicchio
tasted it there and began serving
plates of Benton’s country ham
at his influential New York restaurant Craft. To his amazement,
Benton now ships his hams and
slabs of smoked country bacon to
all fifty states. He entertains food pilgrims from
far-off places like Munich, Puerto Rico, and New
York City. “We get the food people coming from all
over,” he said as we wandered toward the belching
smoker, which he tends himself seven days a week.
“I never in a million years thought high rollers in
white-tablecloth restaurants would want a taste of
my hillbilly ham. Now I like to eat it with a little bit
of cantaloupe, like Italian prosciutto. Sometimes
I’ll buy myself a bottle of hundred-dollar wine.
You could even say I’m a bit of a foodie myself.”
TRAVEL THE BACK ROADS OF THE CAROLINAS,
Georgia, and Tennessee these days and you will find
food icons like Allan Benton in all sorts of unlikely
“We get the food people coming from all over,”
said ham smoker Allan Benton.
“I never in a million years thought high
rollers in white-tablecloth restaurants would want
a taste of my hillbilly ham.
Now I’m a bit of a foodie myself ”
TENNESSEE TARTARE
Beef tartare with
trimmings as served
at the Catbird Seat
restaurant in
Nashville—you
might have to wait
an entire month for
a reservation at the
twenty-seat counter.
WHERE’S THE PORK?
Any concerns about not getting
enough to eat disappeared around
course number six—wagyu beef,
I dimly recall, infused with a sweet hint of smoke,
like some strange,
ethereal version of beef barbecue
Forget overflowing
plates—at Blackberry
Farm, artistry appears
in carefully composed
dishes like fenneldusted striped bass
with saffron-scented
Carolina Gold Rice,
shrimp, mussels,
and Clammer Dave’s
clams. Dinner at
the farm (and inn) is
served in a cathedralsize Amish barn.
DIXIE DELIGHTS
They’re doing ice
cream differently
down South: A
palette of flavors is
served on charred
oak at Nashville’s
Catbird Seat, where
there’s a $100 sevento eleven-course
tasting menu.
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The Nashville dandy sitting next to me
took one dainty bite of this curious dish
and then another.
“This is freaking excellent!” he said.
These were more or less my sentiments
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CRAVEABLE CLICHÉ
Okay, so it sounds
like a joke about
preconceptions of
Southern food—the
chicken skins at the
Catbird Seat are
served with dumplinglike Wonder Bread
Purée—but you won’t
hear any complaints.
places. Like Tuscany in the ’80s and California a decade ago, the American South is in the grips of what
one cultured gastronome in the food-obsessed city
of Charleston described to me as “a culinary boom
of epic proportions.” Young chefs in former gourmet backwaters like Charleston and Athens, Georgia, are penning glossy coffee-table cookbooks
and demonstrating their recipes for corn bread to
adoring audiences on national TV. In the great gastronomic capitals up north, fancy food snobs who
once preoccupied themselves with dishes like foie
gras and puffy French soufflés are exchanging recipes for fried chicken and quibbling over the merits
of various increasingly pricey Kentucky bourbons.
“There’s a deep and profound interest in the
Southern food culture right now, and it’s because
in these overprocessed times, people are hungry
for anything that’s real,” said John T. Edge when I
met him over fancy sixteen-dollar bourbon cocktails in one of Manhattan’s snootiest Michelinstarred restaurants. Edge is the director of the
Southern Foodways Alliance, in Oxford, Mississippi, and for more than a decade now he’s traveled the country, writing and preaching about
the Great Southern Food Revival. Like his mentor,
John Egerton, who co-founded the organization,
Edge considers old-fashioned Southern cuisine
to be the closest American equivalent to the Slow
Food traditions of Europe. Once upon a time, ambitious cooks fled the South to make their reputation up north. But these days, with the help of local farmers and producers, they are reviving these
techniques, the way French chefs from Lyon did
for New Yorkers and Parisians generations ago, and
turning them into something fresh and new.
In a region once known for whole-hog eating
contests and a fondness for lard, you can now find
master bakers, ambitious vintners, and discreet
gourmet destination restaurants where the waiting list for a reservation is more than a month long.
COOKING WITH FIRE
There are rice snobs in the newly food-conscious
Red States of America, barbecue snobs, pimento
cheese snobs, grits snobs, and pork snobs who specialize in making delicate strips of prosciutto out
of antique breeds of feral pig. In the last few years,
discerning gourmets from up north have been canceling their reservations to passé food destinations
like Napa Valley and Provence and making pilgrimages down South to attend fancy food festivals,
nibble delicately on regional specialties like fried
green tomatoes, and deconstruct recipes for that
Charleston New Year’s specialty, Hoppin’ John.
From left: Emily
Railsback serves
classic cocktails at
the Patterson
House, in Nashville;
soft-shell crab at
The Admiral, in
West Asheville,
North Carolina.
AS A PROFESSIONAL RESTAURANT CRITIC AND CARD!
The Truffle Man
carrying Yankee food snob, I’d dined around the
world, in New York, Tokyo, and the great food
capitals of Europe and Asia. But now it was my
turn to experience the wonders of this unlikely
gastronomic revolution. I wanted to taste the
perfect Carolina oyster, to addle myself with nouveau gourmet versions of pork and beans and fried
chicken, and to delve into the sophisticated pleasures of a real buttermilk biscuit. I’d prepared for
my trip by going on a monthlong diet. I’d read up
on the ever-expanding canon of trendy cookbooks
that have been pouring out of Dixie recently the
way trendy cookbooks used to come out of Paris
and Rome. I’d quizzed chefs on the special places
they went to eat during their foraging trips down
South, and I’d even cultivated a scraggly Colonel
Sanders–style goatee for the occasion.
It was my idea to pick a spot in the middle of
what one of my New York gastronome friends
fondly calls the Lard Belt and then eat my way
slowly east until, like General Sherman, I reached
the sea. I decided to begin my travels in Nashville,
a town that is filled with fashionable new restaurants but that also has its own dining pedigree.
From there, I’d drive to Blackberry Farm, in Walland, Tennessee, where guests pay a thousand dol-
Many have tried to
grow the fickle,
famously pungent
Périgord truffle of
France in U.S. soil,
but the truffle
pioneer, Tom
Michaels, who runs
Tennessee Truffle
from orchards in the
rolling foothills of
the Blue Ridge
Mountains, is the
first to produce
them in commercial
quantities. He sells
to fancy restaurants,
even in New York,
for upwards of $60
an ounce. “The
Southern diner is
more interested in
the truffle than he
used to be,” says
Michaels. “There’s
something about
the truffle that just
lights up the plate.”
“I raised chickens, but they’re too puny,”
said one farmer.
“I raised sheep, but they’re stupid.
Now look at the pig. The pig is intelligent.
GREEN ACRES IS
THE PLACE FOR ME!
It might be any
sleepy crepuscular
Southern scene—
but for one clue, the
carefully husbanded
vegetable and herb
gardens at Blackberry
Farm, beacon
of a gastronomic
revolution.
There’s a fan club for every part of the animal.
Everybody loves the pig!”
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The Bespoke
Grits King
Nothing is more
emblematic of the
Great Southern Food
Revival than the rise
of the lowly grit. Just
ask Glenn Roberts
of Anson Mills, in
Columbia, South
Carolina, who began
milling grits in
Charleston two
decades ago and
now sells numerous
varieties of this
suddenly exotic
product (along with
Carolina rice, flour,
and polenta) to
grand chefs around
the globe, from
California to Tokyo.
“You can peer at
history through
these seeds,” says
Roberts, whose
products have
evocative antique
names like
Appalachian
Heirloom Sweet Flint
Popping Corn and
Colonial Coarse
Pencil Cob Grits.
“I know it sounds like
the ravings of a wild
man, but it’s true.”
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lars a day to taste rustic country hams and meet
with chefs who come from around the world to
study Slow Food ingredients and techniques. I’d
travel over the Smoky Mountains to Asheville,
North Carolina, and end my journey in the epicenter of the nouveau Southern food snob culture,
Charleston, a place so inundated with destination
restaurants and tempestuous superstar chefs that
some of the more food-conscious residents have
taken to calling it the Paris of the South.
“We’re used to big portions in the South, so in
the beginning some people were concerned they
wouldn’t get enough to eat,” said Benjamin Goldberg, whom I met shortly before dinner on day one
of my great Southern gourmet tour. I’d driven in
from Nashville International Airport just hours
before, in a rented Ford Ranger that had battered
Georgia license plates and smelled faintly of tobacco. Already, during the course of the afternoon, I’d ingested several Southern-size portions
of sour cream caramel cake, the fiendishly addictive local delicacy, and discussed the merits of the
city’s famous “hot” fried chicken with Nashville’s
former mayor Bill Purcell at Prince’s Hot Chicken
Shack, on the east side of town. During his time in
office, Purcell used to bring visiting dignitaries to
Prince’s, where the crunchy, napalm-hot chicken
is spiced with a secret combination of cayenne and
other hot peppers, cooked to order, and served
over a slice of white bread with a pickle on top.
“People used to take food for granted in Nashville,”
said Purcell. “We don’t do that anymore. This excellent fried chicken is the closest thing this city
has to an indigenous food.”
Ben Goldberg and his brother, Max, grew up in
Nashville eating Prince’s chicken and the famous local cafeteria delicacy called “meat and three.” Three
years ago, however, they opened the Patterson
House, a popular retro-cocktail bar whose menu
includes haute cuisine renditions of old Southern
dishes such as salty popping pork rinds seasoned
with fresh rosemary and stacks of delicately cooked
“Tater Tots” served with horseradish dill cream.
Their latest venture is the Catbird Seat, a discreet
gourmet restaurant that opened last year above
the Patterson House in a space that used to house
a beauty salon. The multi-course, hundred-dollar
tasting menu features new- (Continued on page 197)
ON THE WATERFRONT The seafood comes right to
the dock at Charleston’s Bowens Island Restaurant,
a quieter spot than the foodie crush of downtown.
P L AC E S & P R IC E S
Just Like Mama
Used to Make
As in other great culinary
regions, there’s no bad
route to take when searching for a good meal in the
American South, and no
bad time to do it, although
harvest season has obvious
advantages. The modern
equivalent of Homer’s Odyssey for Southern food
freaks is John Egerton’s
magisterial Southern Food:
At Home, on the Road, in
History (University of North
Carolina Press, $33), and if
you want a manageable,
state-by-state guide to
greasy spoons and fry
shacks, John T. Edge’s
Southern Belly is the book
to get (Algonquin Books,
$15). Egerton is one of the
founders and Edge the current director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an
invaluable resource for the
literature, history, festivals,
and everything else connected to the Great
Southern Food Revival
(southernfoodways.org).
The classic Southern cookbook remains The Taste of
Country Cooking, by Edna
Lewis, the Julia Child of
Southern cuisine (Knopf,
The Grand Bohemian Hotel,
in Asheville, North Carolina.
$25). My favorite of the
many modern compendiums of down-home recipes
is The Lee Bros. Southern
Cookbook, by those eloquent sons of Charleston,
Matt and Ted Lee (W. W.
Norton & Company, $35).
Prices quoted are for
November 2012.
NASHVILLE AND
BEYOND
All well-heeled foodies stay
at the Hermitage Hotel. Its
restaurant, Capitol Grille, is
home to the influential chef
Tyler Brown, who harvests
many ingredients himself at
the local Farm at Glen Leven (615-244-3121; doubles
from $299; entrées from
$22). For a truly pampered
Southern foodie experience, stay at Blackberry
Farm, in the Great Smoky
Mountains. The resort
serves elaborate seasonal
meals in its grand barn dining room and has tastings
and seminars (865-9848166; doubles from $795;
dinner, $125). The Patterson House is the place for
retro bourbon drinks and
haute Southern bar foods
Prince’s Hot Chicken
Hot chicken (half chicken, $7.65)
“There are many pretenders to
the hot-chicken throne in
Nashville, but this great original
is still king.”
NASHVILLE
START
40
Platt’s Plates
The dishes he absolutely loved
Blackberry Farm
Dinner ($125)
“A classic combination of downhome Southern goodness and
snooty gourmet technique.”
Nolensville
Martin's BBQ Joint
Big Momma Sampler
($20 for two)
“All the variegated, messy
joys of Tennessee barbecue
on one giant plate.”
Walland
Madisonville
The Admiral
Heritage Farms barbecued pork chop ($26)
“In a region saturated with epic pork chops,
this might be the best.”
Asheville
Benton’s Smoky Mountain
Country Hams
Hickory-smoked country bacon ($24)
“Mr. Benton’s crunchy, smoky, addictively
delicious bacon is the Proustian madeleine
of the new South Slow Food movement.”
26
Columbia
Mack’s Cash Grocery
Sausage-and-egg biscuit
with tomato, hash browns,
and coffee ($3.74)
“This throwback diner also
makes an exemplary ye
olde baloney sandwich.”
CHARLESTON
END
Hominy Grill
Shrimp and grits ($18)
“An iconic Lowcountry
classic, rendered with
elegant new South
cooking technique.”
such as a riff on Tater Tots
that includes crème
fraîche and pork cracklings (1711 Division St.; 615636-7724; small plates
from $5). Reservations at
the Catbird Seat open up
a month in advance and
are gone in minutes (1711
Division St.; 615-8108200; 7- to 11-course tasting menu, $100). The best
place for a traditional
Nashville cafeteria-style
“meat and three” meal is
Arnold’s Country Kitchen, in south Nashville. The
fried green tomatoes are
legend among snobs of
same (605 Eighth Ave. S.;
615-256-4455; lunch from
$7). Prince’s Hot Chicken
Shack has terrific chicken
and irregular hours—call
ahead (123 Ewing Dr.; 615226-9442; entrées from
$6). If the lines are too
long there, try Bolton’s
Spicy Chicken and Fish,
in a cinder block shack
(624 Main St.; 615-2548015; entrées from $6).
The best time to visit
Nolensville and Martin’s
Bar-B-Que Joint is a
whole hog weekend,
when Martin cooks a beast
in his smoker and sells it
off, piece by mouth-watering piece (7238 Nolensville Rd.; 615-776-1856;
entrées from $4). If you
have a reliable GPS, you
can drink buttermilk and
converse with the chatty
Cruze family at their farm
in Knoxville. Or follow
them at cruzefarmgirl
.com or Twitter@Cruze
Farm (7309 Kodak Rd.,
Knoxville; 865-363-0631).
Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams sells
bacon online and at the
smokehouse/store, 50
minutes west of Blackberry Farm (2603 Hwy. 411 N.;
bentonscountryhams2
.com; ham from $8).
In Asheville, North Carolina, Obama favorite 12
Bones Smokehouse
serves just lunch on weekdays (5 Riverside Dr.; 828253-4499; lunch from $4).
Order the pork chop at
The Admiral, in West
Asheville. On Saturday
nights, the tables disappear after 11 and the joint
goes honky-tonk (400
Haywood Rd.; 828-2522541; entrées from $24).
The Early Girl Eatery, in
downtown Asheville, is famous for its nouveau
Southern breakfasts, so
get a side of tempeh with
your grits and bacon
(8 Wall St.; 828-259-9292;
entrées from $3).
COLUMBIA TO
CHARLESTON, SOUTH
CAROLINA
In Columbia, the Hilton
may be the best place to
stay (803-744-7800; doubles from $169). For a
classic and economical
Southern breakfast,
Mack’s Cash Grocery
serves a perfect sausageand-egg biscuit topped
with a slice of fresh tomato, its version of Tater
Tots, and coffee for $3.74.
And its “ye olde” baloney
sandwich is the stuff of
legend (1809 Laurel St.;
803-779-9681; lunch
from $2). For a more
GO TO CONDENASTTRAVELER.COM/FOOD TO SEE ADAM PLATT’S SNAPSHOTS
FROM HIS SOUTHERN JOURNEY, AND OTHER STORIES ON FOOD ACROSS THE GLOBE.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS? E-mail the editor: dinda@condenasttraveler.com.
haute experience, try one
of Emile DeFelice’s favorites, Terra, famous for its
Crispy “Buffalo” Sweetbreads and the fried
green tomatoes with
shrimp remoulade (100
State St.; 803-791-3443;
entrées from $10).
In Charleston, many
companies offer culinary
walking tours; Bulldog
Tours charges $42 per
person for its Savor the
Flavors of Charleston
(800-979-3370). Downtown, the venerable Planters Inn has a goldembossed volume of the
city’s restaurant menus in
its lobby (843-722-2345;
doubles from $224; entrées from $29).
Sean Brock’s McCrady’s has a $60 fourcourse dinner. If you can’t
get a table, sit at the commodious bar, which has
particularly inventive
snacks (2 Unity Alley; 843577-0025; entrées from
$29). Brock’s new, more
casual Husk books up
weeks in advance. It’s eas-
ier to get a table at lunch,
and the Husk Cheeseburger is on the menu
(76 Queen St.; 843-5772500; dinner entrées from
$24). Sample the legendary pork chop at Bertha’s
Kitchen (2332 Meeting
Street Rd.; 843-554-6519;
entrées from $5). To mingle with members of the
Charleston food cognoscenti, belly up to the bar
at Mike Lata’s FIG (232
Meeting St.; 843-8055900; entrées from $29).
For the full experience
at Bowens Island Restaurant, sit downstairs under
the memorial photos of
oystermen (1870 Bowens
Island Rd.; 843-795-2757;
entrées from $7). The
Hominy Grill serves wonderful sandwiches at
lunch and an excellent
dinner, but to experience
the Southern breakfast
in all its glory, order the
Big Nasty ($8.50) with a
side of the famous house
grits (207 Rutledge Ave.;
843-937-0930; entrées
from $15).
–A. P.
DOWNLOAD OUR DIGITAL EDITION FOR A SLIDE SHOW OF ADDITIONAL
PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE TOUR AND MORE HAUTE HILLBILLY EATERIES.
ILLUSTRATION BY PETER OUMANSKI
heaves; it surges; it stretches 6,500 unbroken miles to Antarctica. There’s one more
color too. Here, at what feels like the end
of the world, the sand of a half-dozen little
beaches is green.
Papakolea Beach—nowadays most folks
call it simply Green Sand Beach—is the
most famous of them. We crest a last rise,
come out over a ledge, then half-slide,
half-stumble down a plunging gray-green
slope and take off our shoes.
It’s the green of a wet Ionian olive, and it
comes from the semi-precious stone olivine, a crystal born deep in magma chambers on Mauna Loa long ago, then carried
out to sea by lava flows, and slowly beaten
off the cliffs by the waves. The lightweight
black lava gets dragged away; the heavier
crystals remain.
Guidebooks often say to skip this place.
It’s too exposed, they argue, too hard to
get to. Old-timers in Hilo say the sand here
used to be more green—emerald green,
Slytherin green—but that weathering and
tourists have hauled too much away.
I think it’s dazzling. Especially if you
get up early enough to be alone on it:
The tide erases the previous day’s footprints; you feel like a discoverer. When
you run your hands through the sand, it’s
like watching ten thousand infinitesimal
gemstones spill between your fingers,
each sparkling individually.
I sit on the beach and daydream about
the mangoes of Waimanu Valley; I hear
the crackle of molten lava on the coastal
plains; I think of the oldest Hawaiians,
the first Polynesians who crossed the seas
in flotillas of sailing canoes carrying wayfinders, navigators who had been training since birth to read the humidity of
the skies, the direction of the waves, and
the pattern of birds, who could detect the
presence of islands beyond the horizon
by watching swells pass the bow of a canoe. Those were such elemental people,
more deeply engaged with the physical
Word Trips
FOR THIS MONTH’S CONTEST, SEE PAGE 194.
“Around the World in 18 A’s”
(September 2012)
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world than I could ever hope to be. And
yet could they have imagined, in their
most outlandish visions, an island where
a person could hike up into snow and peer
down into smoldering lakes of lava, a place
where waterfalls drop two thousand feet
and beaches are paved with green jewels?
Within an hour the first trucks start
making their way out to the beach, locals
in battered pickups who charge thirty dollars a head to bounce tourists two miles
through the dust. But to walk the walk, I
think, that’s the real thing. To come into
a place at the proper speed, and with the
proper effort: to remind yourself that, like
everything, this too will someday be gone.
That’s a kind of respect, isn’t it?
In a week my brother and I saw the rosecolored plume atop Kilauea caldera rising
into a trillion stars. We pulled on a hardware store utility glove and caressed the
red-hot skin of Pele. We floated over sofasize coral heads in the unsettling, magical
blue of the sea. We spread peanut butter
with a machete. We ate Chips Ahoy for
breakfast. We set these things in memory,
layering new flows down atop older ones,
so that when we got back to our families,
to landscapes where the ground does not
open to show the raw, crimson heart of
the world beneath, to 451 new e-mails and
a broken dishwasher, to our grown-up
selves, those visions would still be there,
whole and glowing, ready for us to draw
them back up.
“If the house would only burn down,”
Mark Twain wrote to a friend in 1881, pining for his months in Hawaii, “we would
pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the
blest, and shut ourselves up in the healing
solitudes of Haleakala and get a good rest;
for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet
the telephone and the telegraph.”
Isn’t that ultimately why we travel? To
escape from the tyrannies of the familiar?
To see the places we go to—and the places
we left behind—with new eyes?
We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. Even now,
weeks later, I think back to a moment in
Waimanu, when I was rinsing the dishes
knee-deep in the surf, a full ten minutes
during which I stopped doing anything
except looking: the enclosing arms of the
cliffs around me, the cobbles piled up in
their millions, the tourist helicopters
gone, the ocean empty of lights, and behind me our tent lit from within by my
brother’s headlamp as he read, a tiny
cradle of light against the huge, darkening backdrop of the valley.
I stood and watched Waimanu go dark,
a light rain starting to fall, until all I could
see were the white slashes of the waterfalls
on the back wall, and then I climbed into
my sleeping bag beside my brother and
slept the sleep of a very tired boy.
Southern Food
C O NTI N U ED FRO M PAG E 1 9 2
fangled gourmet combinations such as
pork belly sprinkled with foraged radish flowers, and pigeon legs flavored with
smoked hay, and if you want a place at
the small twenty-seat dining counter, the
wait for a reservation is a month long.
The only time I could get into the Catbird
Seat was at 5:30 on a Saturday, and when
I arrived, the room was already filling up
with women in flowery sorority dresses
and Nashville dandies dressed for dinner in
their blazers and country club ties. The tattooed young cooks at the Catbird Seat have
trained at Napa’s French Laundry, among
other world-renowned restaurants, and
they prepare your meal in front of you like
the grand chefs of Japan. The first thing
they served was a tasting of oysters, flown
to the landlocked Southern city from the
great Yankee oyster beds of Cape Cod, followed by a gourmet version of corn bread,
fried in duck fat and served on a tiny pillow of gently dissolving bacon mousse.
Any concerns about not getting enough
to eat disappeared around course number
six—wagyu beef, I dimly recall, which the
chefs infused with a sweet hint of smoke,
like some strange, ethereal version of beef
barbecue. Dessert, when it finally arrived,
was an unusual concoction called charred
oak ice cream, served with liquid bourbon
balls on the stave of an old oak barrel. The
Nashville dandy sitting next to me took one
dainty bite of this curious dish and then another. “This is freaking excellent!” he said.
These were more or less my sentiments
as I drove east out of town the next day,
past suburban gun shops and great gothic
mega-churches on the tops of hills, to
Martin’s Bar-B-Que Joint, in Nolensville,
Tennessee, where the local pork aficionados were lined up at the bar on a Sunday
afternoon like walruses on a rock. In a few
short years, Patrick Martin has earned a
reputation as a master of the delicate art
of whole-hog cooking. His barbecue joint
is built out of red brick, like everything in
Nolensville, and unlike the stunted faux
barbecue shacks I was used to back in Manhattan, it had a chimney stack forty feet
high. Lunch was served on a tin plate piled
with mountains of pulled pork that tasted of hickory and burnt sugar, and slabs
of dry-rubbed pork ribs which fell apart
delightfully in my fingers. But the dish I
couldn’t stop eating was the savory white
corn bread, which was flat like a pancake
and cooked on the griddle. When I asked
the waitress for the key to its deliciousness,
she gave me a happy smile: “Pork fat.”
THERE WAS no barbecue for sale in the gift
shop when I pulled into Blackberry Farm
NOVEMBER 2012 CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER
197
Southern Food
much later that evening, although guests
can browse a full line of boutique pickles and preserves prepared on the rolling
4,200-acre Relais & Châteaux estate, and
purchase do-it-yourself biscuit, griddle
cake, and corn bread mixes from the hotel’s vaunted home “pantry.” A classic old
farmhouse in the southeastern foothills
of the Smokies, outside Knoxville, it was
built in the 1930s, and over the last three
decades, it has been turned into a gourmet
mecca by the Beall family, who run the
popular Ruby Tuesday restaurant chain.
Dinner is served every evening in a cathedral-size Amish barn that was shipped
here, plank by plank, all the way from
Lancaster, Pennsylvania. A Périgord truffle orchard was planted on the property
several years back, and if you want to buy
one of the famous lagotto truffle hounds
from Italy, you can do that at Blackberry
Farm too, although the waiting list for a
three-thousand-dollar puppy already has
more than a hundred names on it.
“Hotel guests don’t want to go to the
spa anymore. They want to go to the gardens, they want to cook, they want to be
engaged,” said the hotel’s proprietor, Sam
Beall, whom I met the next day after touring the hazelnut truffle orchard in a golf
cart, and attending an impromptu lecture
on the etymology of heirloom beans and
seeds by the hotel’s master gardener, John
Coykendall, in his rustically appointed garden shed. Nobody used to care much about
seeds in the old days, Coykendall said, but
during the great Southern gourmet food
boom they’d become objects of fascination. He showed me knobs of old bootlegger corn dating from the 1800s, tiny “wash
day” peas that arrived in the United States,
like all peas did, on slave ships from Africa,
and ancient Cherokee pole beans, which
he said came from an old Cherokee bear
hunter up in the mountains. “Compared
with the modern bean that we’re used to,
these beans have an earthy, rich taste,”
said Coykendall, as a couple from Houston came by to snap his picture. “I call the
modern green bean the Yankee bean. You
heat it up frozen out of a bag and slap some
butter on it. It tastes like nothing.”
During my stay at Blackberry Farm,
I tasted vividly green garden peas; soft,
spicy salamis that reminded me of the finest salumis in Italy; and gourmet servings
of shrimp and grits that were delivered to
my private cottage in the woods on a silver
tray. I toured the hotel’s pickling farmstead
and interviewed the master of the truffle
hounds, Jim Stanford, who told me that his
last job was training elephants in the Knoxville Zoo. I was conveyed to Jim Benton’s
smokehouse in one of the hotel’s “cour198
CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER NOVEMBER 2012
tesy Lexus vehicles,” and when I returned
in the afternoon with my clothes smelling
of hickory and pork fat, the tinkling sound
of bluegrass music was echoing from tiny
speakers placed invisibly among the bushes
and trees. In the evening, I dined on fresh
bread with black-eyed pea spread (“It’s like
hummus,” the waiter said) and creations
with names like chicken-fried sweetbreads and pickled haricots verts, and later
on, when I called the front desk to inquire
about possible indigestion remedies, two
pink Pepto-Bismol tablets were delivered
to my door more or less instantly by a gentleman driving a pine-green golf cart.
“WITH THE NEW GPS systems, we get
more and more people coming this way,”
Cheri Cruze told me the next morning,
when I stopped by her rambling farm east
of Knoxville, on my way over the Smokies,
to soothe my stomach with a bottle of the
Cruze family’s famous buttermilk. Cheri
and her husband, Earl, have been making
buttermilk for decades, and it’s as different from the store-bought variety as skim
milk is from Devonshire cream. Buttermilk
is the creamy, tangy liquid that’s left over
after butter is churned, and it’s used in
classic Southern cooking as a thickening
agent (biscuits and pancakes), a tenderizer
(chicken), and an all-around health cure.
Cheri and Earl’s daughter Colleen confided
that she bathed in buttermilk “on special
occasions,” and with the high-end food
market taking off, the family had begun to
feature buttermilk as a flavor in their new
line of gourmet ice creams. “Faux Southern food, that’s a Northern thing,” said
Cheri as I wiped drips of the buttery, golden liquid from my new goatee. “Down here
there’s nothing faux about the good things.
It’s all in the ingredients and technique.”
WHERE TO BUY IT
“A New Romance”: Page 172: Her dress by Dior,
$20,000 (available at Dior Beverly Hills, 310-859-4700);
shoes by Jimmy Choo, $795 (jimmychoo.com); watch
by Cartier, $21,000 (available at Cartier boutiques nationwide); bangle by Amrapali, $3,250 (amrapalijewels
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His jacket and pants by Calvin Klein, $650 (available
at Macy’s); shirt by Brunello Cucinelli, $910 (Brunello
Cucinelli, Chicago, 312-266-6000); watch by Audemars
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$780 (mulberry.com); earrings, $3,800, and bracelet
on left wrist, $18,100, both by Elizabeth Locke (available at Neiman Marcus stores); watch on left wrist by
Cartier, $21,000 (available at Cartier boutiques nationwide); bracelets on right wrist by De Beers, $2,800 each
(debeers.com), Roberto Coin, $19,800 (800-853-5958),
Shashi, $18 each (shopshashi.com), Jook & Nona, $870
(jook and nona .com), Rebecca Norman, $42 (rebecca
norman.com), and Tateossian, $150 (tateossian .com).
His jacket by Gucci, $2,995 (gucci.com); shirt by Nautica, $50 (nautica .com). Page 175: Her shirt, $1,600,
pants, $1,600, and shoes, $750, all by Céline (Céline,
N.Y.C.). His shirt by Calvin Klein, $70 (available at Macy’s); pants by AG Adriano Goldschmied, $168 (agjeans
.com); belt by Gucci, $225 (gucci.com); shoes, $445,
and bracelet, $225, both by Tod’s (Tod’s boutiques nationwide); watch by Omega, $7,800 (Omega Boutique,
N.Y.C.); necklace by JvdF, $1,450 (jvdf.net). Page 176:
I kept hearing more or less the same thing
as I drove in a kind of dreamy food coma
haze up over the mountains, through Asheville, and down into the Carolina Lowcountry toward the sea. In food-mad Asheville
these days, there are pop-up restaurants
and high-end barbecue joints serving platters of strange purple grits tinged with
blueberries (at President Obama’s favorite local barbecue joint, 12 Bones Smokehouse). I enjoyed what is possibly the finest
pork chop I’ve ever tasted in a lifetime of
diligent pork consumption, at the Admiral,
a renovated honky-tonk bar on the west
side of town; slept fitfully at the Grand Bohemian, a small hotel appointed, like an old
Bavarian hunting lodge, with stag’s heads
on the walls; and traveled down to Columbia, South Carolina, the next morning for
an audience with Emile DeFelice, which
in the burgeoning boutique hog farming
circles of the South is the equivalent of discussing varietals of grapes with a learned
vintner from Bordeaux.
“I describe myself as a set designer, and
this is my theater,” said DeFelice, as we
ambled around his impressively bucolic pig
farm, which sits among stands of oak and
holly trees near St. Matthews, on the way
from Columbia to Charleston. Like lots of
boutique swine herders these days, DeFelice has cultivated other interests besides
pigs. He was the moving force behind the
All-Local Farmers’ Market in Columbia, a
would-be politician (he’d tried, unsuccessfully, to be elected as South Carolina’s commissioner of agriculture), and a practiced
tango dancer. He’s known for helping reintroduce original domesticated “heritage”
pigs, like the Ossabaw, into pig circles, but
now he favors a more docile English breed
called the Large Black, which he fattens for
fourteen months on acorns and rice bran
Her dress by Carolina Herrera, $3,990 (Carolina Herrera Boutique, N.Y.C., 212-249-6552); shoes by Converse, $55 (converse.com); hat by Dorfman Pacific, $21
(800-367-3626); ring by De Beers, $23,000 (debeers
.com). His jacket by Bottega Veneta, $4,980 (bottega
veneta .com); pants by James Jeans, $150 (American
Rag, L.A.); shoes by Converse, $50 (converse .com);
hat by Eugenia Kim, $125 (eugeniakim.com). Page 177:
Her shirt, $825, and pants, $1,195, both by Ports 1961
(Ports 1961, N.Y.C.); shoes by Christian Louboutin, $1,195
(Barneys New York, 888-222-7639); bag by Victor Hugo,
$795 (Victor Hugo, N.Y.C.); bracelets on right wrist by
De Beers, $2,800 each (debeers .com), Roberto Coin,
$19,800 (800-853-5958), Shashi, $18 each (shopshashi
.com), Jook & Nona, $870 (jookandnona.com), Rebecca
Norman, $42 (rebecca norman .com), and Tateossian,
$150 (tateossian.com); necklace, $14,875, and pendant,
$3,225, both by Elizabeth Locke (available at Neiman
Marcus stores); necklace by Adeler, $10,950 (adeler
jewelers .com); watch by Longines, $14,925 (available
at Tourneau); ring by House of Lavande, $495 (561802-3737). Page 178: Her jumpsuit by Fendi, $1,790
(Fendi, N.Y.C., 212-759-4646); shoes by Jimmy Choo,
$795 (jimmy choo.com); clutch by Kate Spade, $248
(kate spade .com); sunglasses by Karen Walker, $250
(gargyle.com); necklace, $3,500 (paire.us), and ring,
$495 (561-802-3737), both by House of Lavande Made
in Italy; watch by Cartier, $21,000 (available at Cartier
boutiques nationwide).
(compared to six months on industrial
farms), puts gently “to sleep” in a $160,000
gas chamber that he imported from Denmark, and then sends off to the finest restaurants in New York and Charleston.
In the last decade, pork has become the
meat of choice for a new generation of
locavore-mad diners and chefs, for whom
pork belly is the new filet mignon. “I was
the number one man on the scene ten years
ago, and I started with just two pigs,” said
DeFelice, as we squatted down next to a
giant old Large Black sow who was taking
her ease under a holly tree. “I used to raise
vegetables, but they’re perishable. I raised
chickens, but they’re too puny. I raised
sheep, but they’re stupid. Now look at the
pig. The pig is intelligent. There’s a fan club
for every part of the animal. You call this
boutique farming, I call it old-fashioned.
Everybody used to raise pigs like this; they
just stopped doing it. Now we’re doing it
again, and all that negative energy which
used to surround the pig has been released.
Now everybody loves the pig!”
ON GRAND FOOD journeys like this one,
the appetite tends to decrease along the
way, but during my last bleary days on the
road, the opposite was true. By the time I
arrived in Charleston, the Ford Ranger was
cluttered with baseball caps, old menus,
and other sauce-stained mementos of the
road. DeFelice took me to a dining house
called Bertha’s on the north side of town,
where we sat at a table set with fresh marigolds and feasted on down-home specialties like fried pork chops softened in buttermilk (“Use your fingers!” cried the hog
farmer) and piles of tangy collard greens
mingled with soft red rice. I enjoyed a plate
of thin, deliciously briny Capers Blades
oysters at a polished restaurant called FIG
(Food Is Good) later in the evening and
then drove out for a nightcap to the famous
Bowens Island Restaurant, south of the
city, where the oysters are steamed under
a burlap sack, like the Indians used to do,
and served in giant, coral-like clumps.
I awoke blearily the next day at 8 ..,
took the last of my Pepto-Bismol tablets,
and went on a culinary walking tour of
the city with camera-toting tourists from
far-off places like Chicago and Lancaster,
Pennsylvania. “The original Charlestonians
wanted to create a little London,” said our
guide, whose name was Brooke, “so they
had their noses in the air about everything,
including food.” During the course of its
three-hundred-year history, the city had
gone through many food enthusiasms, she
said—for coffee, for chocolate, and for Madeira wine, which unlike the grand wines
from France, didn’t spoil in the heat.
Like lots of Charlestonians, Brooke could
tick off the names of the city’s prominent
chefs the way people in other Southern
towns name their winning football coaches. There was the James Beard Award winner Mike Lata (at FIG), and the master
of the haute Southern breakfast, Robert
Stehling, who won his James Beard Award
cooking elegant versions of fried green tomatoes, and shrimp and grits, at his restaurant, Hominy Grill. But no Charleston
cook was more prominent these days than
the poster boy of nouvelle Southern cuisine, Sean Brock. The precocious young
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chef grew up foraging for edible weeds
in the backwoods of Virginia and was a
devotee of the great French chef Michel
Bras. He was known for wearing trucker
hats in the kitchen, and like other sons and
daughters of the Southern food revival,
he famously preferred grits to fancy Italian polenta (“I preach the gospel of corn
bread, whiskey, and grits,” he told Charlie
Rose on TV) and Kentucky bourbon to the
finest French wine.
“EVERYTHING STEMS from being proud of
the ground you stand on,” said Brock when
I staggered into his latest restaurant, Husk,
later that evening. Husk has been a dining
destination for food snobs from around
the country ever since it opened in a refurbished late-nineteenth-century house
in downtown Charleston two years ago,
and when I arrived, tourists were standing in the garden snapping photos of each
other in the gathering dusk. The first dish
out of the kitchen was thin, prosciutto-like
pork fat “lardo,” which came, Brock said,
from an ancient breed of pig called the African Guinea hog that a friend of his had
raised in his backyard. There were fried
green tomatoes dusted with cornmeal after
that, and a serving of Capers Blades oysters
drizzled in buttermilk. Brock and his obsessive band of cooks have been attempting
to find the perfect fried chicken recipe for
five years now. (“We’ve almost got it,” he
told me.) So instead of chicken they served
me delicately fried pig’s ears, which were
wrapped in lettuce leaves in the Asian style
and spritzed with soy sauce that was cured
in old bourbon barrels by an artisanal sauce
maker in Kentucky.
My supper that night in Charleston included plump pieces of catfish served with
fresh butter beans and different silky varieties of grits, which Brock described in loving, worshipful detail, like exotic strains of
caviar. There were pickles cured in-house
and served in little wooden bowls, and
racks of pork and dry-aged lamb, which
the chefs cooked in the embers of a fire out
behind the restaurant and smothered in a
rich, pulpy tomato gravy. Somewhere in
the midst of this feast, a hot skillet of corn
bread appeared. Its edges were crisped
with bacon fat, and the center was spongy,
like a fancy French madeleine, and picked,
here and there, with nuggets of Mr. Benton’s bacon, which melted to a kind of soft,
smoky goodness on the tip of your tongue.
After the plates were cleared away, the chef
emerged from the kitchen in his trucker
hat. When I asked him to tell me the secret to his gourmet corn bread, a happy
smile spread across his face. Except for the
Benton’s bacon bits, it was the same recipe
he’d grown up on as a boy. “It’s cornmeal,
buttermilk, and a lot of lard,” said the
chef,“just like my mama used to make.”
NOVEMBER 2012 CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER
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