So I’m going to do three, maybe four, dishes from Brock today: a clams casino recipe, the West African BBQ sauce wings, a watermelon salad and maybe a caramel cake.
The small dishes interest me more than the entrees but they have the same structural issues as the rest of the book. More than any other cookbook I have, I think, Brock’s book depends on you to make his distinctive pantry, often for just a tablespoon or two of some ingredient that is, unfortunately, pretty important to what he’s shooting for in terms of taste, or is the flavor element that’s going to distinguish his version of the dish.
Many of his pantry items can’t be made in really small batches, and they require considerable advance planning. (Honestly, there’s got to be 10 recipes or so that you can’t really cook the way he wants them done if you can’t get ramps, which around here is about a three-month window. I love ramps—but because of that I know they’re not more-or-less the same as scallions or leeks.) He’s got his pickled peaches in a number of dishes, but it’s not the right time of year for peaches and far more importantly, they take a week to pickle (as do most vinegar pickles). And a fair amount of his pantry lasts somewhere in the neighborhood of a month or two after being made in the best-case scenario, so he’s really envisioning a home cook working on a production cycle that is derived from a restaurant if they really want to make these recipes.
Unlike a fair number of cookbook authors in my collection—even from restaurants—he doesn’t write his recipes as ideas or suggestions. Sometimes he explains them as his personal variation on a baseline dish (the caramel cake I might tackle today, for example). I’m comfortable adapting this cuisine and adapting his recipes, but I really think many home chefs picking this book up would just have to read it as a series of nice photographs and dream of the next time they can eat at Husk.
The one really weird thing is the BBQ sauce for the wings. It’s got a lot of aromatic spicing that’s meant to make it West African, and I approve of all the ideas. They’re all an addition to his baseline homemade BBQ recipe and that’s where the strangest inconsistency kicks in. The main flavor components? Apple cider vinegar (fine, that’s pretty common) and ketchup. Just ketchup: he doesn’t insist that you make your own ketchup according to his pantry recipe or use ‘Chups fruit ketchup or Brooksmade 5-pepper ketchup, etc. I’m going to do an end run around the whole thing and just buy one of my favorite commercial BBQ sauces to be the base that I build his flavors into, but it just struck me as a curious concession to culinary common sense.
Picking through the recipes and strategizing about substitutions or simplifications in general also made me think a lot about the discussion over the impending closure of the famous Danish restaurant Noma. The major takeaway from it seems to be the unsustainability of a labor model that requires huge amounts of unpaid time, whether from interns or paid staff, in order to meet the always-escalating, always-competitive expectations that fine dining has come to entail. Rob Anderson in The Atlantic Alexandra Bliszczyk in Vice did a great job of summing up the specific ways that Noma was abusing interns, but I especially appreciated North Carolina restaurant owner and chef Vivian Howard talking about the wider problems with the labor model and aspirations of fine dining everywhere.
South has grabbed my attention as a cookbook partly because it gives me a different look at some of the conceptual apparatus that has floated up out of this approach to professional cooking. Brock’s approach to distinctiveness isn’t the ridiculous theatrics of Noma, but it does entail this idea of a hyperlocal, hyperfresh cuisine that is also at the same time drenched in some kind of regional nostalgia, fueled by a desire to pay tribute to food histories and past households—families, neighborhoods, communities, distinctive places.
It’s become a sort of common expectation in what is often referred to as farm-to-table cuisine—a virtuous loop on one hand of food provisioners and restaurants serving to customers who are both local and from far-away (often both, in the persons of cosmopolitans who have come to rest for some duration in a place they weren’t born in and are trying to embrace), and on the other hand, a way of imagining and then practicing some sort of heritage. It’s not an unfamiliar mix in food history: that’s the role that “cuisine” in some sense has played in creating regions, nations, diasporas and social hierarchies since the end of the 19th Century.
The problem I think is just that in its farm-to-table, fine dining form, this virtuous loop often misremembers what households, and especially women in households, did on a day-to-day basis. There’s a kind of vision of harvesting, preserving, preparing, flavoring, that is imagined as having covered the entirety of a regional foodway, and in that vision, the work that required is either disappeared entirely or rendered into something fantastical. South isn’t the only cookbook where the emphasis on authenticity and masterful control over food in one’s kitchen relies on an unreal investment of time and attention to multi-week preparation cycles. In an earlier moment, that was the kind of fantasy being sold by Martha Stewart, among others, who would showcase a sort of welcoming, beautiful (and very presumptively female) household that she performed as if it were the labor of one woman in one middle to upper-middle class home when in fact anybody who tried the things she performed discovered that they were only possible with an army of helpers or a bunch of purchasable shortcuts.
I’m attracted enough to the fantasy of eating what Brock shows me how to make, in all of its dimensions, to stick with it and remain unresolved in my feelings about it. But I have a big collection of cookbooks that I think make a far better peace with real life in a real home while also setting out local, authentic, fresh and tasty recipes to cook.
Image credit: "Organic Ramps (Wild Leeks)" by beautifulcataya is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.