I really dug into Brock’s cookbook this last week and got a fuller picture of what it is and why I don’t find it that useful.
Fundamentally, it’s the cookbook of a highly successful chef who has run an acclaimed restaurant in Charleston South Carolina who has staked his claim in part around preserving local foodways, growing his own food, and in “new explorations” (the subtitle of South) of the cuisine, largely via modest infusions of techniques and ingredients borrowed from other global cuisines, most notably Japanese cooking. As he put it, he’s “hyperseasonal and hyperlocal”.
Cookbooks that arise from and to some extent advertise a particular restaurant and its executive chef’s work mean more to me if I’ve eaten at (and liked) the restaurant in question. I’ve never been to Charleston. For a moment I wondered if I’d eaten at Husk’s second location, in Nashville, but I realized that the dinner I was thinking of was at a place called Etch.
But often cookbooks that are too closely tied to a distinctive chef’s approach are more for study and less for actual use. I’ve talked about John Sedlar’s cookbook in this sense before in this column. I treasure it because I remember eating at the restaurant that inspired it, there’s a few recipes in it that I’m comfortable cooking, and it does give me some ideas—but it’s mostly not something I can use in my own home cooking.
Without the warmth of experience to soften my scrutiny, I can see a few things in Brock’s book that make for useful reference. Primarily I think it’s his pantry section which is a substantial portion of the book. He has a lot of ideas for preserved and stored food, for pickling and fermentation, that I really appreciate. But this points to the problem with the book in practical terms as well. You cannot pick up South in the middle of winter and cook most of his recipes in their full distinctiveness if you haven’t been invested in his full-year production cycle of pantry supplies. Take away a lot of the distinctive ingredients and what you have is often a pretty ordinary version of something with some finicky technique.
The techniques are finicky in many cases. I thought about making his cheeseburger recipe. He grinds his own mix, which is typical. I often try to do the same: I’ll often do some boneless shortribs, some chuck roast and then sometimes I toss in a single boneless ribeye. But I do it in the food processor—I process the chuck and the shortribs fine and then try to be a bit rougher chop on the ribeye. A dedicated meat grinder is just too much for my kitchen at it stands, with my counters already crowded with equipment. Using a grinder and getting two different grinds is a meaningful part of Brock’s recipe. I like his idea of using flank in his burger grind, sure. A lot of the book is built around grilling or cooking over a fireplace or doing something just so.
A lot of the book insists on highly seasonal recipes or the pantry ingredients that you’d have to have made back in the season or at least quite a long time before the recipe. Or it insists on very particular cuts or types of a product that generally require a special order or a high-end butcher.
There are other issues. The vegetable dishes all read like side dishes. There’s almost no one-pot stews, casseroles, or meals of that kind. There’s a fish-head stew and a tomato-okra stew and that’s it. (Which, I have to say, doesn’t feel very Southern to me—but it reflects the fine-dining restaurant pedigree of the book, because those sorts of dishes are the province of home cooking and mostly not what’s on the menu at those kinds of restaurants.)
So as I searched, I saw two choices. One is that some of the small dishes are genuinely appealing and more plausible. (This is a thing with high-end restaurants generally, I think: most of them put their best work into small plates and shared bites.) If I flunk the book for tonight’s dinner, I’m tempted to give it a third week where I do some of the small bites. That means, of course, that tonight I’m doing something different: I wanted to do something from the meat section of the book. (I would have done a stew or something of the sort if he had others besides the fish-head and tomato-okra ones.)
The meat section really sums up my beef with the book (so to speak). Here’s the choices:
Chicken breasts with peanut butter gravy. The peanut butter gravy is a nice idea! Brock wants you to use shelled green peanuts and Oliver Farm Green Peanut Oil, but I think that’s not essential. Ultimately I just thought this seemed a bit boring. If I kept the book, I’d probably do it some day.
Chicken breasts with herb dumplings. Also a nice idea, also a bit boring, also something I might make some day. The picture in the book includes a butter bean (aka lima bean) side dish which would be a nice combination.
Fried chicken. I navigated to this right away but nope, I am not doing his recipe. First off, I actually have a deep fryer, but I use peanut oil in it. He wants canola oil for this recipe. Swapping out oil is a big hassle. He wants a small amount of lard, rendered bacon fat, and fatty country ham trimmings in the oil. If I’m going to do a recipe for something like fried chicken, I want to do all the things the chef says to do, and this is already seeming like more than I feel like doing. The breaker on the deal is that he doesn’t want buttermilk involved. The recipe calls for overnight breading and then a second breading in advance of the cook. He’s got this thing about how “buttermilk creates steam and the steam blows off the breading”. I make a fair amount of fried chicken, mostly using Edward Lee’s recipe from Smoke and Pickles, and I’ve never had the coating get “blown off” by steam. That moves the recipe into “too big a hassle” and “I doubt this will be better than the really good one I like to make”.
Pit-cooked chicken sandwiches. I like the basics here: a smoker-cooked whole chicken, pulled, served on potato rolls with cole slaw and Alabama white sauce. But it’s a quintessentially summer thing, not a January thing. (The picture in the book oddly is of a fried-chicken sandwich.)
Grilled quail. Summer thing plus sourcing quail around here is kind of a pain—there’s a farm up Rt. 352 that has them but it’s just too much for a Sunday dinner for two.
Cured duck breasts. He insists on skin-on and bone-in, which pretty much means butchering a whole duck myself. Plus it’s curing, so I would have needed to start on this last Thursday. No.
Cheeseburgers. Already set out my reason not to do this. Plus, while I put some work into cheeseburgers when I do them, I’m not going to do quite this much precision work for what is usually a casual dish.
Pork shoulder steak. I like shoulder steak, but it’s hard to find around here. This recipe also just seems really basic: it’s the shoulder steaks with some wild mushrooms.
Strip steak with Worcestershire sauce. Seems fine. Almost chose that. Might want to make it if I keep the book.
Pork prime rib. That’s a cut that I’d have to special order but it’s also for a huge party or holiday dinner. So not this time.
Spring lamb. So it’s not spring and the lamb won’t have that special spring flavor that he describes (from being milk-fed, supposedly: I have to say I haven’t ever noticed the difference). But I like the recipe and I think I can do it. There are some issues: he wants me to use a loin roast, which I never ever see in any area markets. I’m using tenderloins, which will cook very fast. His glaze calls for a homemade pantry item, miso with hominy; I’m just going to use red miso. He calls for rhubarb butter, and there is no way I’m finding fresh rhubarb in the middle of January. I’m going to use a rhubarb-strawberry jam mixed into butter. That will take some care so that it’s not too sweet.
I’ll do his grilled mushrooms as well, though I honestly may not grill them but just put them under the broiler to finish.
And maybe that buttermilk pie.
Image credit: Photo by Bill Fairs on Unsplash
I was with you until you put up the picture of that cute lamb. Now i could not.