American

I’m not fond of a garlic press—cleaning out all the holes is a chore. I prefer chopping garlic, but finely chopping or mashing large quantities to a paste (see page 72) can be tiresome. Recently I picked up my Microplane, a rasp-type grater, and grated the garlic directly over my saucepan. A couple of swipes back and forth and the garlic had disappeared into the pan below.

A little dab of this hotness on fried fish will set you up! Capsaicin, the chemical compound in chiles that makes them hot, is water repellent. Not only does water not stop the fire, but it also spreads the capsaicin around. However, it easily combines with fats. So, if you’ve had a little too much heat, reach for milk or yogurt instead of water, wine, or beer.

Many of the store-bought Creole seasonings are mostly salt, sometimes with added chemical preservatives and anticaking agents. This simple seasoning blend is a mixture of salt, pepper, and dried herbs and spices. How’s this for anticaking: shake the jar.

The secret to a creamy, emulsified dressing or vinaigrette is mustard. You’ve probably noticed that when you combine oil and vinegar in a bowl they form separate layers. If you whisk the mixture it will combine only for a brief period, then separate out again. Mustard helps thicken liquid sauces by absorbing some of the liquid and allows the suspension of one liquid in another. Try this savory-sweet combination over crisp salad greens or buttercup lettuce or as a dipping sauce for the Oven-fried Chicken Breasts with Pecan Crust (page 102). If Vidalias are unavailable, use another sweet onion, such as Walla Walla or Texas Sweet.

Almost every diner and “meat and three” establishment across the South has a jar of hot pepper vinegar on each and every table. A dash or so of this potent liquid on greens is a revelation. The longer the mixture sits, the more potent it becomes. It also makes a great gift. I prepare several batches with peppers from my garden and present them as hostess and Christmas gifts. Nothing says love like a little heat.

There has seldom been a time in my life when a mason jar of this sauce wasn’t in a corner of my mother or grandmother’s refrigerator. The truth of the matter is, once you have had homemade you will go off the store-bought kind for good.

The key to this great cookie is the mix of chocolates—semisweet, milk, and creamy white—and just enough batter to hold together the good stuff. After the boxed brownies, making chocolate chip cookies was the next step in my young baking career. I was able to make the cookies without (much of) Mama’s supervision. The recipe was from my very first cookbook, Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls, given to me on my eighth birthday. I top each of these cookies with a flawless pecan half, which makes them picture perfect. My pecans of choice are a variety called Elliot, which are petite, yet plump and rich with natural oils. For years, I’ve ordered them from Pearson Farms in Fort Valley, Georgia, for myself, and also have sent them as Christmas gifts to very special people all over the world.

For the most part, Mama has always made everything from scratch. Homemade cakes, cookies, and pies were the norm, but she would open one box when she made brownies. My father worked for a company that made, among myriad other things, brownie mix. I remember opening the Christmas gifts from corporate friends that contained a potpourri of company products, including the familiar red box—the brownie mix. Perhaps one of the reasons I am so fond of these brownies is that they represent my first solo forays into baking. Other than turning on the oven, I was allowed to prepare the brownies all by myself.

Meme called this “lemon cheese cake,” which is somewhat confusing since people more often use that name for a New York–style cheesecake. This is one of the recipes that “got away.” Meme often recorded a recipe on a card or on the previously mentioned interior of her cabinets. Trouble is, she only wrote down the ingredients and rarely included instructions. She used to actually cover her version of the cake in lemon curd. Normally, lemon curd is soft and not firm enough to frost a cake. I have tried to make the curd with her ingredients list every way but Sunday with no success. I’m afraid now I will never know. Instead, I fill between the layers with curd and flavor the frosting with it as well. The cake itself is an excellent rich, moist, cake that would also be delicious with chocolate frosting or served with strawberries and cream.

When I was older, Meme and Dede would travel to Florida in the winter and stay near a citrus farm. They would return with bulging sacks of oranges, lemons, and grapefruit. I know Dede enjoyed the trip, but I sometimes wondered about Meme. She must have been in her eighties when she derisively commented, “There’s nothing but old people in Florida.” Citrus fruit has a strong presence in Southern cooking. Lemons and other citrus from Florida and the Caribbean were used in Southern cooking as early as the Colonial period. A recipe for lemon pudding appeared in Mary Randolph’s 1824 cookbook, The Virginia Housewife, the first regional cookbook published in America. Lemon meringue pie holds a special place in people’s memories, as do lemon curd and lemon squares like these. Store these bars tightly wrapped in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.

This cake has been a constant in my life and it has been my birthday cake many times. Our family holidays would not be complete without it. The best part is the crispy, dark-brown sugary edges. Much to my mother’s consternation, more than once, little pesky elves raided the opaque Tupperware cake container and nibbled away those tasty bits.

Red velvet cake has inspired as many theories about its provenance as there are recipes in a Junior League cookbook. The question cannot be definitively answered. We do at least know why the cake is red: most red velvet cakes use acidic ingredients—buttermilk and vinegar—and cocoa, which contains a reddish pigment called anthocyanin. The acidic buttermilk reacts with the cocoa and actually makes this red pigment appear even redder. Somewhere along the line, someone decided the cake needed a little more rouge and added red food coloring. Some chefs try to gussy it up using beet juice or deconstruct it into something it’s not. My friend Angie Mosier, who is an incredible baker in her own right, once very aptly described red velvet cake as “the Dolly Parton of cakes—she’s a little bit tacky, but you love her.”

Even though peaches are considered the quintessential Southern fruit, the phrase “as American as apple pie” applies to the South, too. Apples grow in the cooler mountainous regions from Georgia to Virginia. There is no longer an issue with refrigeration, but apples were an important fruit for people in the country who lived off the land. When held in a cool cellar, apples lasted for months, providing much needed vitamins and nutrition in the winter. Many factors affect an apple’s juiciness: the age of the apple, the weather and climate where it was grown, and how it has been stored. In a pie, there’s sometimes a fine line between juicy and sopping wet. Flour is one ingredient that will help absorb some of the cooking juices. This is my sister’s favorite dessert and she always requests it on special occasions.

When I was her apprentice, Nathalie Dupree spent hours on my baking and pastry education, patiently showing me again and again how to create perfect pie crusts, homemade breads, puff pastry, and rolls, until I had the techniques down cold. She crafted this recipe for beginners: it’s an easy crust for novices because it’s made in the food processor and because of the combination of butter and shortening. Shortening does not melt as readily as butter does and makes for a more forgiving dough. As Nathalie knew, a beginner’s first taste of sweet success in the pastry kitchen can be inspirational. For a double-crust pie, simply double the amounts and divide the dough before rolling out.

Cousin Michele makes this pie for her family each and every holiday. She learned it from Aunt Dolores and has taught her daughter, Nina, and son, Walker, to make it, too. The passing of recipes from one generation to the next is a thread of continuity, of family roots and place. Sweet memories in every bite, it’s a small but amazing bit of history. Let me just say I have never had “French” coconut pie in France. This pie is more along the lines of winning a blue ribbon at a country fair, not Le Cordon Bleu.

Too many pecan pies are mostly goo without enough pecans, making them far too sweet. The secret to the success of this pie is that its pecan-to-goo ratio is just right. As a child, I helped Mama make this pie. It was my job to help her coarsely grind the nuts. She still uses a hand-held grinder; it has a crank that forces the nuts through two opposing forklike blades and a glass jar to catch the nut pieces. The metal top that screws into the glass jar is bent and dinged, but the tool still coarsely cuts the nuts just right.

What other dessert brings out the kid in us more than chocolate pudding? If you want a pudding that is slightly more grown-up, substitute bittersweet chocolate for the semisweet. The taste of the chocolate is heightened with the addition of vanilla extract. Use only pure vanilla extract, not imitation. To make your own vanilla extract, halve six vanilla beans lengthwise to reveal their seeds. Steep the beans in four cups of best-quality vodka in a dark place at room temperature for one month. After steeping, you’ll have a flavorful extract.

Meme’s sister, who died long before I was born, was named Julia. She also liked to cook. Meme used to tease me that I was a lot like Julia in that we both would dirty every pot in the kitchen when we cooked. This is hands-down my favorite dessert. Mama makes it almost every time I come home to visit. When I was in culinary school, I took a look at the recipe and was certain with my newly learned techniques I could improve the consistency of the pudding. Wrong. It was a disaster, and the pudding mixture never congealed—which brings to mind the expression, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”

It is necessary to sift the flour before measuring it for this cake. This is an anomaly; if flour is sifted at all these days (not that common anymore), most baking recipes call for sifting after it is measured. Here, the flour is sifted once before measuring, then an additional four times with the sugar to prepare this batter. It may seem like overkill, but it is completely necessary to achieve the traditional light-as-air texture of angel food cake. There is an unusual implement for cutting these delicate cakes found in many silver chests throughout the South. These old-fashioned rakelike cutters typically have a long, slightly offset handle with 3- to 4-inch-long tines that actually split, rather than cut, the cake. They can still be found online and in gourmet catalogs.

Forget fancy gènoise or sponge cake; in the South, a shortcake is really just a sweet biscuit. Granted, this recipe is a step above, flavored with orange zest and sprinkled with raw sugar that sparkles like amber on the golden tops. At Martha Stewart Living Television, we served miniature versions of these buttery brown sugar shortcakes filled with peaches, strawberries, and blueberries at a luncheon attended by President Clinton.