Tag: southern

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Mahogany sets the scene.

CREDIT: Photographs by Justin Fox Burks

If you want to eat at the newly open Mahogany, it’s best that you make a reservation. It’s been packed since it opened on November 14th. In fact, one customer has vowed to dine in every seat to take in all the vistas. (It might take a while, as it has more than 120 seats.) It is the place to see and be seen.

Perhaps a more apt word is “scene,” as Mahogany is working a movie theme from its name to the decor and menu.

Mahogany is a nod to the movie starring Diana Ross at her (overwrought) chicest. “Rich, dark, beautiful, and rare” is how the day manager Jessica Miller defines Mahogany’s niche.

Photographs by Justin Fox Burks

Christopher Hudson, chef at the newly opened Mahogany

The restaurant is in Chickasaw Oaks Village in the old Just for Lunch and The Farmer space, near La Baguette. The ye olde country look has been ixnayed for something a bit more glamorous — modern grays, a dark bar, pretty green chairs for a touch of pizazz.

That touch extends to the menu, overseen by chef Christopher Hudson. The menu is divided into sections: the Extras (appetizers); the Props (soup and salads); the Wrangler (for kids); the Cast (entrees); the Stunts (sides); and the Finale (dessert).

The Cajun Chicken Egg Roll is among the extras, and it is extra. Hudson describes it as gumbo in an eggroll. The eggroll features okra and sausage. Another dish Hudson is proud of are the oxtails. He takes extra care with these, describing a two-day process that involves braising, then smoking. The Memphis Fried Chicken “feels like home,” says Hudson. It has buttermilk, hot sauce, oregano, and thyme.

Also on the menu are the Lasagna Roll; a Grilled Black Angus Burger; meatloaf; catfish; and salmon croquettes.

Hudson says what sets his dishes apart from other upscale Southern places is his gift with spices. He likes to use berbere and Creole spices, to work in Caribbean and African flavors.

Let’s move on the cocktail menu. Again, it’s a run through Hollywood with drinks such as the Etta James aka At Last, the Tom Jones aka Pussy Cat, and the Pam Greer aka the Foxy Brown.

The Edison aka Black Maria is a luminescent black drink. Vodka is soaked in black rice, which changes the color but not the taste, then a little pearl dust is stirred in. The Idris Elba aka American Gangster is $100 (and worth every penny, I’m guessing). It’s Remy Martin Louis XIII Cognac. The Bob Marley aka One Love is a multi-colored delight, which Miller promises will put you in a chill mood.

As for the desserts, Hudson says, “A lot of bourbon is used here.” It’s used in the Pecan Dessert Flight with Chocolate Pecan Pie, Pecan Ice Cream, and the Pecan Pie Cocktail. It’s used in Bananas Foster and the Peach Cobbler.

Mahogany is owned by Carlee M. McCullough, who is a lawyer. She recognized Hudson’s talent and wanted to showcase it, according to Miller. Hudson’s education was financially backed by Isaac Hayes. Hudson asked him if there was anything he could do for Hayes in return. Hayes’ answer? “Do great.” It’s worth noting that Hayes reached the peak in film. He won the Oscar for “Best Song” for “Shaft” in 1972.

Mahogany, 3092 Poplar, 623-7977, mahoganymemphis.com

Resilience IPA

Sierra Nevada is brewing Resilience IPA as a fund-raiser for Camp Fire Relief efforts, with 100 percent of beer sales going to the cause. The brewery has invited their cohort to get involved and have helped with donations of malt, hops, and yeast. More than 1,000 breweries nationwide have answered the call. Locally, two breweries have signed up: Crosstown Brewing and Memphis Made. The beer should be ready in a couple weeks and will be available until it runs out.

sierranevada.com/resilience-butte-county-proud-ipa

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Book Features Books

Grievous Angel

“He was a good Southern boy,” Chris Ethridge said of his onetime bandmate Gram Parsons. “Loved to rock and roll, sad all the time.”

“With certain people,” Chris Hillman said of his onetime bandmate Gram Parsons, “you figure there is nothing you can do.”

Ethridge and Hillman were right. Gram Parsons had the wealthy makings of a good Southern boy, and he loved to rock when he wasn’t crooning according to the sounds laid down in Nashville and Bakersfield. At heart, he was a sad guy too, and what could anyone do? Nothing, apparently, but watch as drug usage and drinking landed Parsons — former member of the International Submarine Band, the Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers and later solo artist or in partnership with Emmylou Harris — in an early grave.

Parsons died in 1973 at 26. But before he could reach that grave, there was one thing ex-con artist Philip Kaufman could do: honor Parsons’ wish to be cremated and scatter his ashes at a site where Parsons, in life, found peace: Joshua Tree, California.

So, following Parsons’ death, Kaufman and Parsons’ friend Michael Martin stole the coffin containing Parsons’ body in Los Angeles, drove it to Joshua Tree (where Parsons had died of an overdose), poured gasoline on the body, and set fire to it. Then Kaufman and Martin drunkenly hit the road back to L.A. But Parsons’ remains didn’t stay in Joshua Tree for long. Parsons’ stepfather had them flown to New Orleans and buried.

And yet, today, when it comes to Gram Parsons, things still don’t go right. As David N. Meyer reports in the 500-plus pages of Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music (Villard), the singer-songwriter’s date of birth on his grave is off by two days. But that figures, given the facts of Parsons’ emotionally charged household chronicled in the opening chapters of Meyer’s thoroughly researched and highly readable biography:

Those facts include (but are hardly limited to) the suicidal gunshot death of Parsons’ biological father, Ingram Cecil “Coon Dog” Connor, when Parsons was 12 years old and the alcoholically fueled death of Parsons’ mother, “Big” Avis, after she entered into a tumultuous marriage to Robert Parsons, himself a towering alcoholic. And what of “Little” Avis, the sister Parsons adored. In 1991, she and her daughter were drowned in a freak boating accident. And what of Polly, Parsons’ daughter? She’s seeing to her father’s musical legacy in the form of tribute albums, which comes as a surprise, since Parsons hardly saw to Polly’s welfare growing up.

More on his mind was music in all its popular forms, be it rock, country, pop, gospel, folk, R&B, or rockabilly — the more “authentic” and unpolished the better. It was that way when Parsons was a teenager attending prep school in Florida and already playing in bands. And it was that way when Parsons entered Harvard. (“Attended” isn’t the right word; he split after one semester.)

But if Parsons’ sights were on making music, recording that music was another matter. So too, rehearsing. So too, performing, all of which Meyer covers in often depressing detail. Only his late work with a team of seasoned musicians (including members of Elvis Presley’s Las Vegas band) and his duet work with Emmylou Harris gave Parsons the discipline and professionalism he needed — and then only when he put his mind to it. Parsons’ fabled friendship with Keith Richards, no stranger to excess? As Meyer explains, even the Rolling Stones knew when to get down to business and nail the details.

“Gram fled those details, refusing to confront them, thus avoiding the rigor of making good work great and great work immortal,” Meyer writes.

And that’s not all. Meyer condemns the romanticized circumstances behind Parsons’ death and calls the man himself, by turns, “a pathological liar, an unreliable friend, a narcissistic husband and careless father.” Parsons’ sizable talent? “He threw it all away.” In the same breath, though, Meyer will add that Parsons’ “songwriting showcases the bravery with which he described the self he could not bear.”

That’s beautifully put by David Meyer. And though Gram Parsons didn’t write it, that’s just what you hear from Parsons on a song called “Sleepless Nights.”

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.