Innovation Meets Tradition Head-on

Matt and Ted Lee Bring The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook to Athens

originally published April 11, 2007

If you’re a regular reader of the New York Times food section on Wednesdays, you’ve probably wondered to yourself, “Just who are Matt Lee and Ted Lee? And why do they get to have so much fun?” The brothers, who grew up in Charleston, got into journalism by way of their craving for and subsequent evangelism and retailing of boiled peanuts and other Southern favorites, when they produced a mail-order catalogue for those specialties and were quickly drafted into writing at greater length. The past year has seen the printing of The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-Be Southerners, a 609-page monster guide to Southern cooking that’s just been nominated for a James Beard Award and features their smiling mugs on the cover. Next up is a mini-whirl of a book tour, self-organized and guerrilla-style in its approach to promotion, which swings through Athens on Apr. 13–14, with three events to choose from. So why should you bother? And what’s the point of this book anyway? Flagpole chatted with Matt Lee (he’s the one who doesn’t wear glasses) about all this and much more.

Charleston as Inspiration

One thing that the Lees grasp beautifully is the importance of minute regionalism to Southern cooking, and the book grew out of their first experiences with it, in Charleston. When asked whether they wrote it to capitalize on a vacant niche, Matt says, “It wasn’t so much to fill a need in the market as to fill a need in us. We’d been developing recipes and writing about food of all sorts since five years ago, when we began. And all along, we’d known that Charleston hasn’t really been done well. There are some highlights here and there, but no one has done Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil about Charleston yet, and not that our humble cookbook is that, but we did want to tell Charleston’s story. We grew up there. We learned to cook there. We were very inspired by the culture of food in Charleston. And it’s different from other places, especially from the Northern places that we tend to haunt these days. And we wanted to explain to people why it’s so special and unusual. If I had to put my finger on it, I’d say that in Charleston (and in the Low Country in general), there’s this all-embracing spirit of having fun with the raw materials of food, both plants and animals, and as a result, men and women, young and old, enjoy digging in deep, shrimping, crabbing, fishing, gardening. Charleston’s a place where 12-year-old boys know the genus and species of a thousand plants. It’s a place where people drive around with an oyster knife in the glovebox because you never know when you’ll stumble on an oyster roast and you don’t want to have to fight for the knife.”

Transplants to the area in their childhood, the Lees quickly fell hard for Charleston: “one of the first memories we had of why this place might be cool rather than annoying was that our friends would take us down to the bottom of our street, to the pilot boats and the dock next to the pilot boat dock, and someone would throw chicken necks tied to a string out into the water and someone else would stand by with a net to catch crabs, and that seemed so exotic to us, coming from New York, and so cool and fun, and it related to what got put on the table. They approached that procurement of food with a certain amount of joy and fun that you wouldn’t expect if you grew up in suburban America.” But don’t think the book is just an epic love poem to one city. The whole point of the thing is that Southern food is not a monolith but a crazy quilt, and there are recipes drawn from areas like eastern Kentucky, “where you can eat vegetarian without making a political statement,” northern Florida and western North Carolina, each of which has its own specialties and approaches.

For Neophytes and Epicures

Matt also emphasizes that it’s a cookbook with a dual purpose: “to tantalize and not bore the been-there-done-that Southern epicure, like our friends at the Southern Foodways Symposium, but also to try to extend the empire of Southern food to total neophytes. We don’t want to talk down to Southerners. We want them to have something to dig into. But we also wanted to make it very meaningful and approachable for the average person who might pick it up in Michigan or anywhere else. We collect a lot of Southern cookbooks and our sense was that a lot of the more recent ones were portraying Southern food as very exclusionary; you know, you can’t make biscuits correctly unless you use a certain… Our sense of it was that it was just not encouraging people to make Southern food, and our mission is just to get people into the kitchen cooking Southern and embracing it.”

The first draft, some three years ago, focused more on the gourmand crowd, with only 100 recipes, but the Lees were blessed with a Yankee editor who convinced them to expand the scope. Matt explains, “Our editor said, ‘I sense that you’re avoiding the cliches.’ I think we didn’t have a macaroni and cheese recipe, for example, because we were too busy coming with the shad roe and madeira gravy over grits recipe, which was really exciting to us. And she said, ‘you just have to have the confidence that when you do macaroni and cheese, it’s going to be unlike other people’s.’ So we went back, took another two years, and that was actually the most fun we had in the kitchen developing recipes, coming up with five different ways to do macaroni and cheese that would improve upon our experiences of macaroni and cheese, and narrowing down which one would be most fun, most inventive, most cool.”

The Lees learned not to take anything for granted, while maintaining their desire not to condescend to experts in the field, and it’s this embrace of breadth without foolish compromise that makes the book so accessible but also so deep.

One might think that in a time so afraid of trans-fats that Olestra was invented that a cookbook of what most people consider greasy, heavy food wouldn’t be a hit. The Lees are fighting against that perception. Matt said, “In the grocery stores [where they do signings, such as they’ll be doing at Earth Fare on Saturday afternoon], we’ll say, ‘Are you interested in trying a dip from our Southern cookbook?’ and people will say, ‘Oh, no, that’s unhealthy food.’ Well, it’s butter bean pâté; it’s butter beans and lemon juice and olive oil and parsley and buttermilk, and it’s like a hummus. It’s totally vegetarian. All the ingredients are somewhat Southern. It eventually sinks in. It’s just people who are ignorant about the whole scale of Southern food. It goes back to that diversity issue. Southern food is not just fried chicken with a heap of macaroni and cheese next to it. In the Low Country, it has everything to do with shellfish and vegetables, and up in the mountains, it’s even better vegetables. I think people are ready to hear it.” Not that there’s a need to deprive oneself even of fattiness all the time: “We go out on a limb on occasion. We’ve got oyster shooters in there, and we would never scrimp on using lard. We use tons of bacon, but always as a flavoring. Our editor nearly had a heart attack when the index came back in August and there were 18 entries under ‘bacon.’ She asked, if wherever in the manuscript it said ‘bacon,’ we could put ‘or olive oil.’ And we were like, ‘No. Way.’ We were very careful about not abusing bacon.”

Bacon and Butterbeans

That’s the lesson here in everything the Lee brothers do: you can have both bacon and butter beans, tradition and innovation, as long as you pay attention and allow ground for everything. Southern food’s rise as an object of interest has often been accompanied by a desire to preserve it in amber, and the Lees recognize that that’s not doing anyone any good: “There's that fear that by venerating it too much, you smother it, and you root that tradition so firmly in the past that you can't move forward. But I think that's betting against Southern food. I think Southern food is even more important than it was in the 19th century. It has the potential to infect other cuisines. Like now you'll see grits on a menu not in quotes around the country. That's progress. You would not have seen that 15 years ago unless it was in the context of a Southern restaurant or a special Southern dinner, so there's the hope for all these ingredients that if they're truly good, other cuisines will incorporate them and be fascinated and delighted by them. The extent to which Southern food culture has been preserved is a real strength, but it doesn't mean we can't go somewhere else with it. There's a part in the introduction where we claim for Southern cooking a kind of spirited resourcefulness, and it might have come out of hardship and poverty, but it's not a resigned, stuck-on-a-desert island kind of resourcefulness and it's not a clever, laboratory sort of resourcefulness. It's having fun with the ingredients and having fun with life and putting dinner on the table and getting people together resourcefulness. We've seen it time and time again, and if we can get the word out about that, I think people will have a better sense of what Southern cooking is about.”

Hillary Brown