The Puzzle of In the Paw Paw Patch

Dear Tamar,

I am about to embark on a yearlong fellowship in the culinary industry in Birmingham, Alabama. I will be moving from the Midwest. I have already acquired and begun to devour The Taste of Country Cooking. I wonder if you have any other literature on Southern cuisine to recommend? Restaurants in the area, or anywhere along the Southern seaboard: places to eat, or places to stage? Regional produce that can’t be missed? Chefs whose work you admire? What else?

-In the Paw Paw Patch

Dear In the Paw Paw Patch,

Whoooooooeeeee! Prepare for a wild ride. When I moved to Athens, Georgia, from New York (in 2004, I think) probably nothing could have prepared me for the difference I was about to encounter. I should write that with a capital letter: the Difference, which included ways of speaking, ways of meaning, etiquette, palate, style, cultural hierarchies, cuisine, literary, culinary, and political heritage and, yes, ingredients.

I also don’t know that preparation is all it’s cracked up to be. When I recount my bests so far in life, I find they’ve usually arisen from no expectation or preparation at all. There was a trip I took to Turkey on 24-hour notice only because I’d lost my Israeli passport in a taxi and couldn’t go to Jordan. There was the tasting of Quintarelli wines in a private cantina, reserved for professionals, which we somehow bumbled into. The best part of a recent weekend trip to Valencia with my son is a tie between finding ourselves at a puppet show at Teatro La Estrella (a marionette theater) and having to run 2 km with our luggage to catch a train, after learning that the streets were closed to traffic.

My point is obvious: being Open—“open” seemed like it deserved a capital, too—to Difference is the single best preparation for delight. I moved to Georgia in such a state. Having done no research, I found myself awash in a froth of the most poetically named fruits and vegetables I’d ever encountered. I would sometimes rub my eyes, listening to a farmer inventorying their delivery, not quite believing I wasn’t dreaming. I would let the words rise around me like a lather: Seckel pears, Muscadines, Scuppernongs, Canary Melons, Malabar Spinach, Ossabaw…I’m not providing links, so you still get to decide: Do you want to know about them in advance? Or do you want to splash in them as you wade?

Books are easier. Vibration Cooking isn’t really about cooking in the South, but it’s about cooking from the South. It’s also about poetry, community, Blackness, and the nature of storytelling. So, start there. When I ran a kitchen in Athens, Frank Stitt’s Southern Table lived at my bedside. I’m ashamed to remember how often I would simply leave a xerox-copied recipe directly from it on one of my cook’s stations, with the note: Please make this! I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial by asserting that most of the culinary heritage of the South is Black heritage, and most of the credit for it has gone to white people. It’s complicated to distill a whole history into a sentence, but I think that more or less sums it up. A decade ago, Toni Tipton Martin wrote, if you can believe it, a subversive bibliography. It’s called The Jemima Code, and turns the canon of Southern culinary writing on its head by showing how 150 cookbooks by Black Southern authors form the spinal column of Southern food.

As far as restaurants…two of my former cooks have great ones. Noah Brendel has Seabear Oyster Bar, and Matt Palmerlee (who’s had places in Atlanta and Savannah) is running The National. They’re both in Athens. Obviously those are the two best places to go.

Dear cook, I started by telling you to be prepared, and then told you not to be. Be Open, and be Willing to see things with fresh eyes. It took me ages to understand why everything in Georgia had to be fried. It took months for me to really know okra. Hell, it even took me a couple of tries to really understand the wonders of a paw paw.