texasmesquite

Southern Style: Mississippi Delta comes alive on the pages of cookbook

Clarkson Potter Photo

Regional favorites such as juleps, cheese grits and fresh coconut layer cake are included in this cookbook by a native of the Mississippi Delta.
WINSTON-SALEM JOURNAL STAFF AND WIRE REPORT
Published: July 9, 2008
■ Screen Doors and Sweet Tea, by Martha Hall Foose. Clarkson Potter, $32.50.
The best regional cookbooks evoke a sense of place not only through food, but through atmosphere. Screen Doors and Sweet Tea, written by a native of the Mississippi Delta who is now executive chef of the Viking Cooking School in Greenwood, Miss., is such a book.
The Delta lingers on every page of Martha Hall Foose's work, from the juleps that Foose likes to serve in cups made from Mississippi clay, to her recollections about soaking up Willie Morris' novels as a child and spending Christmas holidays cracking coconuts for cakes and ambrosia. Color photos of people, places and prepared foods are plentiful.
The book offers more than nostalgia, though. Foose has cooked her way around Louisiana, Mississippi and states far from the Delta in cuisine and geography; opened two bakeries; and studied pastry in France.
She offers inventive twists on Southern favorites, such as a frozen cucumber salad dressed with champagne vinegar and lime juice, as well as dishes influenced by 20th-century immigrants to Mississippi, such as watermelon salsa and Chinese Grocery roast pork. She also includes such standards as country-fried steak, cheese grits, red beans and rice, and fresh coconut layer cake.
The South in general and the Delta in particular come alive in these pages.
■ Grilled Pizzas & Piadina, by Craig W. Priebe with Dianne Jacob. DK Publishing, $20.
Craig Priebe and his wife, Karla, were the owners of the much-missed C.K.'s Grilled Pizza in Norcross, Ga. They left metro Atlanta after Karla Priebe was held up at knifepoint while delivering pizzas. Now working as a private chef for a Chicago investment firm, Craig Priebe shares recipes from the restaurant's favorites in the second book this season to focus on grilled pizzas. (The other is Pizza on the Grill by Elizabeth Karmel and Bob Blumer.)
One of those favorite recipes is the Gamberian, a shrimp and pesto pizza that won first place at an international pizza competition and put C.K.'s on the foodie radar.
Inventive flavor combinations, such as the Cherry Bomb, with brandied cherry sauce and chicken, are here, along with such crowd-pleasers as the Trattorian, with sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms and bacon. Detailed instructions start with recommendations on the best indoor and outdoor grills for pizza, and include from-scratch directions for dough, sauces and toppings. It's a pizza purist's dream.
A piadina, by the way, is a thin round of grilled bread, topped with prosciutto, salami or cheese, and folded over.