Fresh Prince: Charleston Chef Sean Brock Reinvents Southern Cooking
Jeffrey Steingarten, Vogue, July 2012
Photo by Grace Beahm
“Buy food from only people you know.”
It’s the simple phrase some use to describe a movement that, since it’s birth ten years ago, has grown into a revival of Southern cooking. And it hasn’t slowed down, either. More and more chefs, restaurants, groceries and co-ops throughout the American South are shaping their professions around the growth and sustainment of locally produced food.
In North Carolina, groups like Allied Organic Farms put on five-course outdoor dinners built entirely with locally grown ingredients, sharing recipes such as Three Little Pigs: roasted pork loin wrapped in bacon, stuffed with house-made sausage and swiss chard with peach mojo and blackberry wine sauce.
Apple Crisp, Anson Mills buckwheat crumble, pecan ice cream – Husk Restaurant (photo by Adam Goldberg)
Farmers and artisans are now turning their craft inward, using regional ingredients and century-old methods to revive the South’s quintessential meals; like country ham, salt-cured from peanut-fed hogs, and grits, stone-ground from aromatic heirloom corn. One orchardist in North Carolina has preserved over 400 varieties of heirloom southern apples. Even my parents now have their own orchard.
But no one is as deeply rooted into this rebirth as Sean Brock, subject of Vogue’s recent piece Fresh Prince: Charleston Chef Sean Brock. The playful, charismatic and sometimes brash Charleston chef of McCrady’s and Husk, two restaurants located in the heart of the town’s historical districts, the latter of which was hailed as the “most important restaurant in the history of Southern cooking” before it even opened.
Husk Restaurant, Charleston
Every single ingredient of a meal at Husk Restaurant has been produced in the American South. Hanging near the wood-burning oven in the center of the 19th century antebellum home-turned-restaurant is a large black chalkboard. It’s the menu; erased and updated daily depending wholly on what the chef receives from farmers each morning.
“Buy food only from people you know” is today’s catchy ideal but impractical in many American cities. Sean rarely deviates from it. He buys his seafood from fishermen who themselves are expert at finding and caring for the best species from the best waters—shrimp, crabs, oysters, clams, flounder. The bacon at Husk is Broadbent’s renowned smoked country bacon; cornmeal comes only from the equally renowned Anson Mills.
The 32 year old spent years studying food science that gave him a knowledge of each recipe down to it’s molecular gastronomy. “Take a steak dinner,” Brock said. “On the plate, you see a grilled rib eye with mashed potatoes. In my head, it’s all science. It’s about butter emulsification in the potatoes and protein coagulation in steak.”
Ironically, the seemingly simplistic farm-to-table culture can be incredibly difficult to sustain. It’s a discipline. But Brock embraces it. He needs it. The revival needs him.
“I talk to other chefs from other parts of the country all the time who are jealous of what we have,” Sean Brock told Garden & Gun in 2010. “They’re jealous of our ingredients. They’re jealous of our bourbon whiskey. They appreciate what we have. Too often we don’t. I want to fix that.”
Seven Hour Smoke 