Southern Roots

Sara Foster is letting her Southern stripes show.

Foster has been the owner of Foster Market in Chapel Hill and Durham for about 20 years. These cafes have always been casually comfortable yet sophisticated, and the menu reflective of a contemporary, casual gourmet flair borne of Foster's years in the food business in New York and Connecticut, including a stint as a chef for Martha Stewart's catering company.

Even these days, Foster's menu of fresh mozzarella sandwiches, breakfast burritos and Thai chicken wraps belies her upbringing.

Foster hasn't tried to hide her roots. But now she is "coming out of the closet," as novelist Lee Smith says in the foreword of "Sara Foster's Southern Kitchen" (Random House, $35).

Foster's new cookbook is her fourth, but it is her first to focus on Southern food instead of the casual gourmet fare served at Foster's Market.

" 'Southern Kitchen' combines my Southern roots and my take on Southern, which is lighter, fresh and faster," Foster said in a telephone interview.

Foster grew up in Jackson, Tenn. And many of her weekends and summers were spent at her paternal grandparents' nearby farm. There, she got some of her first cooking lessons. She watched Maude Foster not only cooking everything from scratch, but also "fetching eggs and cleaning the henhouse, tending her garden, feeding the pigs, shelling peas, and making all kinds of pickles, preserves and relishes from the fruits and vegetables in her garden," Foster wrote in the book.

Those memories form the backbone of the book, combined with Foster's experiences living in Mississippi and North Carolina. And her grandmother's farm cooking is just as relevant now as ever.

"I look back on it now and feel like we've gone full circle with the farm-to-fork movement," she said. "It's so good to see people going back to knowing and caring where their food comes from."

While working on the book, Foster had access to many of her late grandmother's recipes.

"A lot of them were just notes. She would write things like, 'Take five cents' worth of mustard seeds,' and I had to figure out what that meant back then. It was fun to take her notes and make them into recipe form."

So the book's 200 recipes include many traditional Southern recipes, such as fried chicken, fried okra and Brunswick stew.

But Foster's creative side comes out in many other recipes that veer a little or even a lot from tradition.

A little basil brightens up an otherwise traditional succotash. And a basil mayonnaise is paired with traditional fried tomatoes and bacon in a contemporary take on BLTs.

More substantial updates include the way she uses country ham and greens as a braising medium for chicken breasts, and the roasted butternut squash and blue cheese that Foster serves atop creamy grits.

"That's a perfect combination of my idea of Southern," she said. "You have grits in there, but then you put in something surprising like butternut squash."

Other recipes in the book's 12 chapters include summer squash soup, homemade biscuits, pickled jalapeno meatloaf, Memphis-style ribs and shrimp jambalaya.

Like the classic Southern cookbooks of old, Foster's book devotes a chapter to canning and preserving, offering quick cucumber pickles, green-tomato chow-chow and sour-cherry preserves.

Canning and preserving are less common these days, but that chapter was one of the most enjoyable for Foster. "That was the fun part," she said. "A lot of people are overwhelmed or intimidated by (preserving). It's really not that difficult, especially if you do things in small batches."

Desserts include Hummingbird cake, peach cobbler and Granny Foster's simple pound cake. One of Foster's new favorites is bourbon apricot sweet-potato hand pies.

"I ate a lot of fried pies as a child. This is like my version of fried pies," she said.

The book also includes quite a few "Sidetracked" sidebars that highlight notable foods at particular restaurants throughout the South. These include the Texas-style beef brisket served (in the heart of pork-barbecue country) at the Original Q Shack's in Durham; the fried chicken at Gus's World Famous Fried Chicken in Memphis, Tenn.; the fried catfish at Taylor Grocery in Taylor, Miss.; and the classic layer cakes at the Grit diner in Athens, Ga.

"I feel like that's part of our culture," Foster said. "We're known for driving two hours out of our way to go to a certain place. I hope to be able to do more of those on my blog (at www.fostersmarket. com)."

Foster said she still benefits from a lot of the lessons she learned on her grandparents' farm: Eating locally and seasonally is extremely satisfying, and eating together is valuable time for friends and family.

"We all connect through food. Today, people are so busy going in so many directions. You really need some family time," she said.

"I want people to start cooking and to understand the importance of eating seasonal and locally and supporting your community. And maybe taking those family recipes you have and updating them, bringing them back — that was the fun part of writing this book for me."

mhastings@wsjournal.com

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