Smoke and Pickles: Recipes and Stories from a New Southern Kitchen
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2013: Among the most inventive restaurateurs fueling the Southern food renaissance is Edward Lee--Top Chefcompetitor, multiple James Beard Award nominee, and proprietor of 610 Magnolia. Born in Brooklyn, where he grew up on his grandmother’s Korean cooking, he opened his first restaurant in New York but instinctually claimed his true culinary vernacular when he landed in Louisville, Kentucky. Mixing stories of turning points in his food life with lick-the-page photos—the best of them 2-page spreads of full-on feasts of down-home sophistication, shot from above—and 130 recipes that beg to be tried,Smoke & Picklesilluminates Lee’s flair for marrying Korean and Southern ingredients and techniques, which have so much natural overlap--starting with barbecue as the backbone, and pickles (of all varieties) to cut the smoke’s intensity. Lee’s food and stories reflect an intense sense of place, a love of his region’s fecundity that encompasses not just the farm, but also the hunt and the mindful abattoir. His recipes “belong here, in this unique place and time, nowhere else but now,” and all our tables will be richer for discovering them.--Mari Malcolm