Brothers put tasty spin on Southern cooking

Southern with a twist
They like their tea sweet, their peanuts boiled and their grits gussied up.

They love Sally Bell’s Kitchen.

They believe in controlling okra ooze, except when it’s appropriate.

They’re Matt and Ted Lee, the newest go-to experts on Southern food. You’ll find their writing — their specialty is the travel story with recipes — in such places as The New York Times and Gourmet magazine.

They believe that recipes add a third dimension to travel writing in the way they evoke place, time and people.

The brothers—Matt’s 38 and Ted’s 36—know how to tell a story and write a recipe.

This spring, their cookbook, “The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-Be Southerners” (more than 200 recipes, 589 pages, W.W. Norton, $35) won a gracious plenty of prestigious awards.

Never mind that they were born in New York and now live there part time. They grew up in Charleston, S.C., still spend a good chunk of time there and consider that city, the location of their mail-order food business, home base.

Their cookbook won two awards from the James Beard Foundation (Cookbook of the Year and Food of the Americas) and two from the International Association of Culinary Professionals (American and First Book).

Good for them, but let’s hear more about those boiled peanuts.

Q. Why do boiled peanuts—salty, mushy and wet because they’re boiled instead of roasted—alarm some folks?

Matt: They challenge a bedrock assumption about flavor—“I thought I knew a peanut”—and that’s sort of frightening. You taste what looks like a peanut, and it tastes like a different food group.

Ted: People are so used to eating roasted peanuts, they’re not used to dialing it back and thinking of it as what it is, which is a legume, a bean.

Q. Okra’s another thing people shy away from. That’s because of what you call “the ooze factor.“ How do you avoid that?

Matt: One way is to eat it raw, and I encourage people to do that with the tenderest pods. It introduces you at the ground level to what flavor you’re really working with there. It’s a beautiful, crisp and delicate texture when you bite into a fresh pod.

People have had okra stewed so many times, they almost forget what it really tastes like. It tastes a little bit sweet and a little bit blossomy, like a flower. We say honeysuckle to get people in the right zone.

I use it raw. Slice thin disks of it and toss it in a salad. Use it as a garnish, and float some of those disks on top of a nice soup.

Q. Any other ways to avoid the slime?

Matt: Another way is to basically dry fry it. Keep the pods whole, heat up a dry cast-iron skillet or pan and stir it around until it just begins to brown around the edges. It sort of half cooks it, and then you can use it. We bake it into corn and okra pudding.

Or just to use it whole. Cutting into it is what encourages the slime.

Or fry it. Batter it or dredge it and fry it. Ted calls that the South’s popcorn. It’s very addictive.

Q. What made you decide to take familiar Southern foods and give them different twists, say, putting ginger and lemon zest in shrimp burgers and making ice cream with buttermilk?

Ted: That’s a lot of what we do, to get people to look at things in different ways. So many people love buttermilk but have never thought of it in a dessert application. The thing I love is it’s not really getting fancy with buttermilk. There’s nothing easier to do than buttermilk ice cream, but it does get people thinking in a new way.

Q. Has winning the cookbook awards made any difference in your lives?

Matt: It has. It put a little spring in our step. It really felt good to have Southern food recognized on a national platform. A lot of people don’t perceive Southern food to be special, which is sad and a shame. They somehow perceive it to be less than whatever fancy food they must be making up north.

To see Southern food recognized at Lincoln Center in the middle of New York City with a thousand French and Italian and fancy New York chefs standing around was cool.

Southern food is as good as the finest food in Europe—or at least it can be—and it can be talked about with the same sense of pride.

Jann Malone is a staff writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.