Tag: cookbook

Categories
Book Features Books Food & Wine Food & Drink

Fresh out of the Oven

(Photo: Courtesy Chloe Sexton)

On her TikTok account, Chloe Sexton, owner of BluffCakes, revealed that she’s in a bit of a dilemma. Google her name, and you get her TikTok, her cookies, clips of her on The Kelly Clarkson Show, a host of articles, from Today.com to yours truly, the Memphis Flyer. But Google “Chloe Sexton book,” and you end up with some results leading to an array of adult novels by another “Chloe Sexton.” “Turns out I’m not the only Chloe Sexton on the planet. Go figure,” she says in her video. “Only 7 billion people on the planet, but all the 7 billion people whittled down to make this happen to me.”

Fortunately, we’re not here to talk about that Chloe Sexton’s literary achievement. Rather, we’re here to talk about Memphis’ own Chloe Sexton’s new cookbook, Big Yum: Supersized Cookies for Over-the-Top Cravings, released yesterday by Page Street Publishing, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers. The cookbook, Sexton says, might just be the biggest book deal to come out of Memphis. 

Sexton first caught the attention of Page Street two years ago through her TikTok account (@chloebluffcakes), where she shares her personal life and her love of baking — specifically baking large cookies for her online business. Since then, the account has grown to 2.1 million followers and 75.5 million likes, and Sexton has even opened her brick-and-mortar storefront in Germantown. Through it all, over those two years, Sexton had also been developing Big Yum. 

The cookbook has 52 giant cookie recipes, most of which were created just for this cookbook. “We’ve got at least two or three recipes in this book that we not only ship internationally, but yes, we offer at our storefront here in Germantown,” she says. “But the rest of them — other than those like two or three — are completely new. We’ve never shipped them. We’ve never sold them in a store. They are completely organic to the book, so you’re gonna make them yourself and be surprised.”

Though the baker admits she hasn’t “done a ton of teaching people,” her start as a home-baker has served as an advantage while creating the cookbook. “I did not at all come from a background of a pastry degree or go to the Culinary Institute of America,” says Sexton, who worked as a news producer before turning to baking full time. “I had to start from my own kitchen, and have been baking from 14 years old on. So I really know what does and doesn’t work in a home kitchen.”

But the cookbook isn’t just recipes, she says. “I’m sharing my life in the book. The people who are going to buy this book — they know me. They followed me for a long time. A lot of my content has been about the business and it’s been about the cookies and promoting this thing that I’ve built, but more than that, there is an audience that’s gonna buy this cookbook because they watched me lose my mom and watch me actively take on a role at becoming my sister’s sole guardian, and I had an opportunity to really dive deeper into more things maybe they don’t know about me. 

“I want them to see that it matters to me that I’m having a conversation with the reader,” Sexton continues. “I’m not gonna put out a cookbook and pretend like, oh, none of that really, really difficult stuff ever happened. No, it’s present. We are gonna talk about it. And I want them to know that there’s not going to be a chapter where I just stop talking about what made me me, what put me on the map on social media.”

In fact, when conceiving these recipes, Sexton looked for inspiration in what brought up her best and favorite memories. One cookie is named after her late mom Jenny Wren; another, the Dreamsicle cookie, takes her back to her childhood in Florida, chasing after the ice cream truck in hopes she could score one of those orange frozen treats. “When I normally bake for shipping or for our bakery, it’s all about what the consumer wants,” she says. “Whereas the book is more about what I want to share.”

Among the things she wants to share is her pride for the place she calls home: Memphis. “[The book deal] is definitely something that makes me really conscious about representing the city that I’m proud of,” she says. 

In honor of the book’s release, Novel is hosting a launch party Friday, September 22nd, at Restaurant Iris. The chefs at Iris will offer an intimate two-course dinner, and Sexton will do a live cooking demonstration, preparing a vanilla cheesecake with a berry compote. Tickets ($75) are required for this event and include a copy of Big Yum and the opportunity to meet the author and have your book signed. A virtual option is available for $23.99 and includes a signed copy of Big Yum and a link to watch the live cooking demonstration. Find more information about the event and purchase tickets here. 

Big Yum: Supersized Cookies for Over-the-Top Cravings is available at all major bookstores and at Novel. 

BluffCakes is at 7850 Poplar Ave., Ste. 24, Germantown; bluffcakes.com. 

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Get Your Game On

“ESPN Gameday Gourmet is a cookbook aimed at football fans who are tired of just bringing a six-pack to the tailgate.”

So food writer and native Louisianan Pableaux Johnson stakes out his turf in the introduction to his new book. But in talking with him, it’s apparent that the book’s appeal is broader, and its impact greater, than one might first think.

Johnson, who has written food articles for The New York Times and two restaurant guidebooks to New Orleans, came at this book more from a food angle than a football angle. “I did not speak the language of football,” he says. “I just grew up in southern Louisiana as a big, hungry boy.”

But in Louisiana, everybody has a connection to Louisiana State University, and hence to LSU football games, and therefore to the ritualistic pre-game feast. Johnson, who is also a travel writer, says he always arrives in a new place and asks, “What do y’all got to eat?” So in that sense, the book is an exploration of America by way of its food traditions, from Duke Blue Devil Cheese and Bacon Dip to Union Bay Salmon from the University of Washington, where fans actually “stern-gate” on Lake Washington before games at Husky Stadium.

Along the way, there are some odd stops, like the (North Carolina State) Wolfpack Beer Can Chicken and (Wisconsin) Badger Orange Dip. But Gameday Gourmet, Johnson insists, isn’t just a fat-and-grease tour.

“I’m a big fan, as a cook and a partygoer, of having a specialty,” he says. “A specialty is a great place to start, not just for tailgating but also in the kitchen. What I want to do is show you how to take this technique, focus on the fundamentals, and get back into the kitchen.”

Still, there is a lot of football in the book, which was published by ESPN Books; the word “gameday” ties in with ESPN’s Saturday college football broadcasts, and several network luminaries contributed.

“It’s a fantastic subculture,” Johnson says. “Let’s say you walk through a lot wearing enemy colors. Folks are gonna give you some grief, talk about the game, then feed you and put a beer in your hand. It’s where generosity and rivalry come together.”

To research the book, Johnson says he reached out to people all over the country, seeking “hereditary tailgate recipes.” One of the goofier ones is “from a tiny-ass town in Wisconsin.”

“My basic formula,” Johnson says, “was to say, ‘Dude, it’s not a tailgate unless you have … what?’ And this friend in Wisconsin said, ‘Orange Dip.’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’ It’s got cream cheese, French dressing, onions, salt, and ketchup; you serve it with pretzels. It sounds horrible, but after the first time I had it, I would have stabbed somebody in the hand to get at that stuff.”

Such over-the-top reactions are common in a chat with Johnson — and also in any conversation with a Louisianan about food or football. He says, for example, that some dishes are routine at home but “take on transcendant powers” at the game. Of overlooked gameday foods like breakfast, he says, “When you show up at a tailgate with a cooler full of pre-wrapped breakfast tacos and a thermos of coffee, you’re a minor god.” He says you can learn to make proper biscuits for sausage sandwiches and “bask in the glory.”

For that old classic, Velveeta-RoTel Dip, which Johnson calls a “gooey bowl of boisterous flavor,” the book has two variations: the standard and the “beefed-up” version, which he calls “basically the love child of cheese dip and chili con carne.”

“People trash-talk Velveeta Dip,” he says, “but as soon as you taste it, you need a bag of chips. If we can improve on our childhood classics, I figure we’re good to go.”

The book is full of practical cooking advice; without coming right out and saying it, Johnson is appealing to the male ego that A) doesn’t know a spatula from a spoon, and B) wants to impress people. “We wanted to concentrate on recipes with a really high success rate,” he says.

He even casts his advice in football terms: Focus on the fundamentals, start with a strategy, develop a specialty, and practice, practice, practice.

“One of my core tenets is that you shouldn’t be trying to put together your tailgate when you’re standing in front of the beer cooler,” Johnson says. “Any good tailgate starts in the kitchen, and that’s where we want people to start.”

Pableaux Johnson will sign copies of ESPN Gameday Gourmet on Tuesday, September 11th, starting at 6 p.m., at Davis-Kidd Booksellers, 387 N. Perkins. Afterwards, the store’s Brontë bistro will serve recipes from the book. He will also be cooking at Zoo Rendezvous 2007, whipping up some red beans and rice (for Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q) on Saturday, September 15th.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Another What?

If there’s anything the world didn’t seem to need, it was another Southern cookbook. Grits, buttermilk biscuits, country ham, sweet potatoes — we get it. But the Lee Brothers, Matt and Ted, think there’s something new to say, mainly because there are new things to use.

“The spirit of resourcefulness, using the ingredients you’ve got, has always been part of Southern cuisine,” Ted says in a recent phone interview. “People always say, ‘Don’t mess with Grandma’s recipes.’ But it’s very likely that she messed around with other people’s recipes to get hers. There’s no reason to put Southern food in a museum.”

The Lees will be at the Beauty Shop restaurant on Friday, May 4th, signing The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-be Southerners (W.W. Norton). But what’s new enough to merit yet another Southern cookbook? It’s simple, Ted says: We have access to ingredients that Grandma didn’t.

“Consider fresh tarragon,” Ted says. “Back in the 1980s, you couldn’t find it anywhere, but now it grows like heck in Southern gardens. And it’s great with crab. Smoked paprika is another one. It’s made in Spain and just in the last few years become available across America. It adds so much smoky flavor, which is key because we all have vegetarian friends who want to eat tasty collard greens but can’t eat a smoked pig’s foot.”

The Lee Brothers would seem the perfect tour guides in this new world — although Ted admits his culinary training consists of “maybe one knife-handling class.” Nor did they grow up writing. Ted and Matt arrived at their first cookbook after a trip that started with a bout of homesickness.

They were born in New York, but the family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, when Ted was 8 and Matt was 10. They were immediately taken with Southern cooking, especially the direct connection between people and their food. Ted remembers learning how to tie a string around a chicken neck to go crabbing, exclaiming to his new friends, “Whoa — you catch your own food?!”

After college, the Lees resettled in New York and took “dead-end jobs.” They missed the food, specifically boiled peanuts, and during what Ted calls “the dark winter of 1994,” they decided to cook some up. Then they decided to sell what they presumed, in a fine bout of 20-ish male grandiose thinking, would be “the snack of the ’90s.”

But all the trendy “Southern” restaurants in New York at the time were owned, Ted says, “by guys from Long Island.” Still, Southern ex-pats in the city were interested, and a business was started in the brothers’ tenement apartment. Again thinking big, they sent a batch of the peanuts to a New York Times food writer, who hated them but whose husband, from Virginia, vouched for them. She put a few words in the Times, and 100 orders came in that day.

A few days later, the Lees made plans to go back to Charleston and make a go of it. Thus was born the Lee Brothers Boiled Peanut Catalog (boiledpeanuts.com), which soon came to include baked goods, preserves, pickles and relishes, sorghum, country ham … basically everything former Southerners need to stay in touch. The site won awards, which led to writing assignments, and here we are: two guys hip to the restaurant scene, cooking trends, food writing, and old-style Southern cooking. Ted even says things like “Allan Benton’s is the country ham everybody’s groovin’ on right now.”

“We are obsessed with authentic Southern recipes,” Ted says, “especially the ones from those community cookbooks. Part of me understands the impulse not to change these things. But at the same time, there’s all these new ingredients, so let’s use them.”

The book ranges from “super-traditional recipes” like fried chicken with ultra-thin crust all the way to the “kid-playing-with-the-chemistry-set” stuff like chocolate grits ice cream, which was inspired by a French chef in New York who hardly knew what grits were but made a chocolate soufflé with them. “That one really gets the traditionalist’s hackles up,” Ted says.

But this is not a novelty book; there’s no “country-ham cotton candy,” Ted says. Instead, for example, the brothers took inspiration from the famous buttermilk pie at the Hominy Grill in Charleston and created a sweet-potato buttermilk pie. They separate the eggs, whip the whites, and fold them back into the batter; that, plus a little buttermilk in the puréed potatoes gives it what Ted calls “a chiffon-like texture with a sweet-potato cheesecake flavor.”

“We make this thing for grandmas all over the country,” Ted says, “and they don’t say, ‘What have you done to my pie recipe?'”

The Lees won’t be cooking in Memphis, but they will be signing their book, and Beauty Shop owner Karen Carrier is putting on a prix fixe menu of dishes from the book, including butter-bean pâté; cold rice salad with country ham, English peas, and fresh mint; pan-fried soft-shell crab wrapped in prosciutto and sage with chow chow and muddled horseradish blueberry sauce; and fig preserve and walnut cake … and, of course, boiled peanuts.

Matt and Ted Lee will sign their book at the Beauty Shop on Friday, May 4th, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Dinner will follow the signing. The prix fixe menu is $55 with wine pairings, $40 without. Diners can also order from the à la carte menu.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Easy Does It

According to Memphian Jennifer Chandler, “it’s not a very glamorous story.” But it’s a good story — good enough, it turns out, to eat. Chandler, food editor of MidSouth magazine and Nashville Home and Garden and regular food columnist and feature writer for The Commercial Appeal, explains:

“Rutledge Hill Press, the Nashville publishing house, ran a contest among its staff. The publisher was looking for concepts, and the winning concept would be made into a book. Someone came up with an idea for a cookbook based on doctoring up bagged salads, and that idea won. All they had to do was find a writer, and thanks to a friend of mine, cookbook developer and Memphian Ellen Rolfes, I sent in some writing samples and a written proposal, and they chose me. It’s my first cookbook, and it was a labor of love.”

“It” is Simply Salads ($24.99), and nothing could be simpler: more than 100 recipes to spruce up those conveniently bagged greens — from the humblest iceberg lettuce to the fancier mâche rossettes — that you find at the grocery store. So, put your salad spinner to rest — Chandler has — and put some thought into the finishing touches: wasabi peas drizzled with ponzu ginger dressing; edible flowers covered in champagne vinaigrette; a meze platter of tabbouleh, hummus, and dolmas over hearts of romaine; or baked polenta salad with a balsamic grainy-mustard vinaigrette.

If you’re in the mood for some American classics, Simply Salads has them too, as in the three Cs: the Caesar, the Club, and the Cobb. Other recipes come from Chandler’s kitchen. Still others take inspiration from restaurants such as Automatic Slim’s, the Grove Grill, and Houston’s. And thanks to photographer Langdon Clay of Mississippi — working inside Chandler’s and her mother’s kitchens — picked, pre-washed, packaged greens never had it so good.

Chandler had it good too, when she trained as a cook in Paris after operating her own special-events business in Washington, D.C., a town she got to know during her years as an undergraduate at Georgetown University. After graduating, she got to know her true calling.

“While an event was going on, instead of hanging out in my office during down-time, I hung out in the kitchen,” Chandler says. “I watched what the chefs were doing. I thought, That’s the business I want to go into. So I started looking into cooking schools and went to the Cordon Bleu in Paris. It was an incredible experience. Obviously, you learn the basics. But the French appreciate food. It’s not a science. For the French, it’s an art.”

It took business smarts and the art of fine food for Chandler and her sister Susan (a chef herself) to open Cheffie’s Market and More in East Memphis in 1999. The store specialized in quality take-home entrées, side dishes, and baked goods and proved to be popular until Chandler learned the refrigeration system would have to be reinstalled. “At the same time, I got pregnant with my second child, and it just seemed like one thing after another,” she says. “We thought maybe God’s telling us something. We decided, after three years, to close.”

So Chandler decided to go a different route.

“I always thought food writing was something I’d retire into,” she says, “but right now it’s the perfect thing for me. I can still be in the food business, still cook, still meet people but not have the restaurant hours. [Those hours] are not family-friendly. My husband Paul and I have two small children. Maybe when they’re out of school, I’ll have that lapse into insanity again.”

But in the meantime, Chandler already has a couple of cookbook proposals. Watch for them. And in the meantime, go green. Make that “greens.” Simply Salads makes it easy to.

Jennifer Chandler will be signing Simply Salads at Babcock Gifts (4626 Poplar) on Saturday, April 21st, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Look for future signings at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in May and at Square Books in Oxford in June.