Enlightened Southern Cooking

A Q & A With the Lee Brothers

Ever since their first cookbook surfaced, the Lee Brothers—Matt and Ted—have become the go-to guys for the last word on Southern cooking. The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook nabbed two James Beard Awards, as well as two more from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. They continue to preach the gospel of down-home good taste in their latest, The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern: Knockout Dishes With Down-Home Flavor.

So when this Charleston, South Carolina-bred duo tells you that the foods made famous south of the Mason-Dixon line can be just as healthful as their Northern counterparts, they're not just whistling "Dixie." Here, they dish on the good health behind the good taste.

Q: Do you think traditional southern cooking has an undeserved reputation for being high-calorie and unhealthful?

A: Absolutely undeserved! We encounter that misperception often, especially when we travel outside the South, and we find puzzling on a number of levels. First, because traditional southern cuisine--and by “traditional,” we’re referring to the cooking of southerners of our great-grandparents’ generation—was very much in touch with the land and seasonal (both by necessity and frugality). Whether you lived in the coastal South or the mountain South, vegetables were king, and the midcentury’s culinary crutches—the mayo, the processed cheese, the corn syrup—didn’t exist back then.

Secondly, what’s unfair about that reputation is that we think it’s largely due to the rise of those midcentury convenience foods, which completely changed the way everyone cooked in this country, not just the southerners! You’ll find the same mayo/processed cheese/cream-of-whatever-soup casseroles in community cookbooks from the Northeast to the Midwest, out in California, even in Hawaii. But if you look in southern cookbooks from the latter half of the midcentury, there’s always been contrarian southern voices, focusing our attention on the fresh, the local, the healthy—in the '70s, it was Edna Lewis, Bill Neal, and Craig Claiborne; in the '80s and '90s, Ronni Lundy and John Martin Taylor.

The great news is that we think that, largely due to the work of these writers and the cooks they influenced, that old saw about southern food being unhealthy is changing. Nowadays people all over America are digging more deeply into southern food, going beyond our beloved barbecue and fried chicken and learning about the lesser known, iconic foods of different regions of the South—shrimp and grits in Charleston, for example, or the jambalaya of New Orleans.

And as people dig more deeply into the cuisine of the South and old southern cookbooks, they tend to find out just how diverse and varied and nutritious southern food is, and that—as with most of the world’s great regional cuisines—there are many different interpretations of it. As you travel the South today, certainly you’ll find southern cooks doing devil-may-care-decadent interpretations of southern food, but you’ll also find southern cooks with kitchen gardens, eating healthily and sustainably. You’ll find southern cooks adapting their favorite southern dishes to ingredients and seasonings they’ve encountered in travels to France or southeast Asia or India. Southern cooking is a vibrant, living art, and it’s truly exciting to see where it’s headed.

Q: Can you give some examples of some healthy dishes or healthy trends in southern cuisine?

A: Throughout the South, food culture is focusing on local ingredients. The farm-to-table movement has truly taken hold throughout the South in the last 10 years, led largely by farmers and chefs carrying forward the mantle of Edna Lewis and Bill Neal: Scott Peacock in Decatur, Georgia; Andrea Reusing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Amy Tornquist in Durham, North Carolina; Hugh Acheson in Athens, Georgia; and John Currence in Oxford, Mississippi.

The emergence of great farmers' markets has encouraged even the supermarket chains to keep up, to label what’s local and organic. Throughout the South now, you’ll find a renewed emphasis on our produce that’s also extended into our meats and fish. The focus on the quality of the ingredients inevitably leads to healthier cooking because simpler, cleaner preparations can showcase the flavor of the peach, the tomato, or the blue crab to better effect.

Another thing: Our pantry staples have gotten better in quality in the last 10 years, especially milled products like grits and cornmeal. The flavor of real corn grits had been bred and processed out of them in the midcentury, so much that people almost lost sight of what they were: corn! Nowadays organic, stone-ground corn grits are widely available and they have an incomparable corn flavor.

At the level of specific dishes: in Charleston, we’ve seen in the last 10 years the rise of dishes like “Greens and Grits”—an adaptation of our iconic shrimp and grits, where the grits become a bed for lightly poached or grilled asparagus or braised green like collards, mustards, or turnips.

Q: You refer in the book, with respect to freshness, to "new directions for a familiar southern standard." Were those new directions driven purely by taste or also by considerations of health?

A: We love to have fun in the kitchen, to come up with new ways of using southern ingredients, and all our recipe development is driven by the balanced considerations of nutrition, flavor, and, since most of our inspiration comes from Charleston, where we grew up, a certain “southern-ness.” Take our Carrot and Turnip Slaw, for example. Carrots and turnips are some of favorite root vegetables; we shred them, raw, and toss them with a ton of fresh dill, and a dressing we think has a classic southern hot-pickle profile: vinegar, garlic, crushed red chile, cumin, a little olive oil. It’s not a classic southern slaw per se, but it tastes southern because the ingredients and the flavors are so much of this place—and, it’s healthy as heck!

Another example: our Soybean and Cherry Tomato Salad, which has a buttermilk-garlic-basil dressing. Fresh, shelled soybeans (edamame) were never, as far as we know, used traditionally in southern cooking, but they have long been grown in the South—and especially in our home state ofSouth Carolina-for export to Japan. Now that fresh soybeans have become an ingredient that’s widely consumed in the United States, it makes sense to incorporate them into our cooking because they’re good for you, we can get them locally, and they taste great!

Q: Certainly some southern favorites are high in calories and fat. Do you think southern culinary traditions are evolving to accommodate health-conscious eaters? What changes do you see?

A: Yes, absolutely, chefs and home cooks alike are evolving, and there’s no doubt that healthier cooking is on the rise in the South. Again, we think it’s driven by the fact that many Americans are paying greater attention to where their food comes from. The changes we see are at every level, from the farm to how it’s processed (if at all) to how it’s prepared at home. We see people eating more balanced diets, simpler preparations, and we also find more compelling healthy options appearing on menus at casual restaurants.

Southern chefs are crafting their healthy dishes, paying utmost attention to the quality of ingredients, and often it’s these dishes that become the chef’s signatures, such as Mike Lata’s warm salad of local shrimp and radicchio at FIG in Charleston. Even at a place like Monza in our hometown-a pizzeria whose clientele in mostly college students-you’ll find a simply dressed salad of local butterbeans when they’re in season. We think when people encounter healthy, delicious dishes when dining out—especially ones as simple as the salads mentioned above—people realize they can make healthy southern food in their own kitchens.

Q: Can you offer some general tips for making traditional southern dishes a bit healthier without making them any less authentic?

A: Use buttermilk as a substitute for cream or mayo. It has a wonderful tangy flavor; comes in whole, low-fat, and nonfat varieties; and adds authentic southern flavor to all kinds of dips, dressings, desserts, and casseroles. And it makes superb, light sauces for poached, steamed, or grilled fish in an instant: Just pour a cup of buttermilk in a food processor and add fresh summer herbs like mint, basil, or dill, add a pinch of salt, some sour cream if you prefer a thicker consistency, or a bit of extra virgin olive oil, and process until the herbs are finely chopped.

Use smoked paprika or chipotles (smoked dried jalapeno chiles) to achieve smoky flavors. Smoking was originally a way of preserving meats. Nowadays, ground smoked paprika and chipotles are in supermarkets everywhere, and they’re wonderful. When we braise collards, we’ll broil fresh tomatoes and onions until they’re blackened, buzz them up in a blender with some chipotle or smoked paprika, and use that as our braising liquid. The flavor is phenomenal, and phenomenally authentic!

— Kate Jackson