The Essence of How to Cook Southern Style

Admit it, we all have an idea of what Southern cuisine is. Visions of traditional soul food favorites like collard greens, creamy mac and cheese, cast iron cornbread,  crispy fried chicken, and blackened catfish never fail to whet our appetites.

But the heart of how to cook Southern style is really less about specific recipes and more about the individuals whose hands stir the pots.

“Southern-style cooking, at its essence, reflects the masterful hand of the Black cook who creates flavorful, time-honored cuisine that is instinctive, resilient and celebratory,” observes Tarsha M. Gary, the executive chef/owner of CRAVE Gourmet Catering based in Houston, Texas.

“Southern food is the fingerprint of those people who created it.”

Where Southern Cooking Can Be Found

To home in on the birthplace of Southern cuisine, Gary shares we need only “follow the trail of the enslaved people.” And with that, we can see the influence of Southern cooking on the American food foundation.

“When you think about American food traditions, the different holidays—such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and 4th of July—we have to go back to all of those dishes that are found and are derived from Southern-style cooking: barbecue, smoked meats, fresh vegetables, salads, desserts. Any holiday that we look at in American food traditions has come out of Southern-style cooking,” observes the award-winning chef.

So when it comes to the southern table and how to cook Southern style, where does soul food take a seat? “Soul food is really speaking to the resilience of the people, of taking nothing and making something out of it like the greens nobody wanted, the pigs’ feet. It really speaks to the struggle and sustainability of the cook,” defines Gary about soul food as a cultural expression.

“It goes back again to our ancestry. The cuisine of our DNA is something that is in us…I think you can always tell the difference between the flavor profile of Black folks and other folks. We carry the complexity of a flavor profile and we are able to create these complexities out of simple ingredients.”

Key Ingredients

Gary points out that while ingredients used in southern-style cooking, such as the “holy trinity” (onions, peppers and tomatoes), can be found everywhere, “it really is interpretive.” She continues, “It’s the ingredients which lead us to southern food and, again, the mastery of the hands that prepared those dishes.”

The ingredients that make up the backbone of Southern dishes are reflective of African cuisine at its core, notes Gary. When learning how to cook Southern style, the first thing to notice is that fresh vegetables top the ingredient list of most recipes, points out the chef, who is also the founder/chief educator of ECOTONE World, an organization responsible for creating several urban community gardens in Houston.

Mustard greens, collard greens, spinach and dandelion greens, along with tomatoes (ripe for salads and unripe for frying), beans (red beans), peas (black-eyed and cowpeas) and the spectrum of peppers (ranging from sweet to hot, used dried or fresh) as well as corn and its byproducts (corn flour and corn oil) are just some of the ingredients playing major roles in Southern dishes.

“And, as we say, ‘You ain’t cooking if you don’t have garlic and onions in the pot,’” adds Gary.

“The yard bird has always been there,” observes the culinarian about a main protein staple. “Chicken, turkey, pork, fresh fish, seafood (oysters, crawfish and shrimp)—all are a definite part of our palate and ingredient pantry.” Additionally, the Southern cooking ingredient list wouldn’t be complete without rice, peanuts (raw and oil) and butter.

What’s in the Southern Pantry

As for those decadent desserts like Red Velvet cake and the gamut of delicious fruit pies and turnovers, Gary reminds us about the integral parts fresh fruits and sugars play in Southern recipes like watermelon salad, ice creams and peach cobbler.

Likewise, the chef adds, “We’ve got to have acid in the forms of vinegar, lemons and limes to create the complexity of our food. It looks to a lot of people that it’s simple [to make these recipes]. And it is. But, there’s a complexity in knowing the alchemy in using the sugar, molasses, honey, sugarcane, vinegar and citrus.”

Of course, according to Gary, learning how to cook Southern style also entails having a collection of these basic spices on hand: salt, pepper, garlic (dried and granulated), onion powder, dried peppers (like cayenne, jalapeño, paprika) along with “warming” spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger. There is also flavorful stylized flair found in the use of scallions and parsley (useful for garnish or to add to gumbos).

The Techniques For How to Cook Southern Style

While Southern cuisine recipes are many and varied, Chef Gary narrowed them down to three cooking techniques that form the core of Southern-style cooking.

Frying is about controlling the oil and getting it hot enough to achieve a “hard fry” describes the experienced chef and culinary podcast host. “People at a restaurant may say, ‘Make sure you fry it hard.’ And what they’re trying to say [about their order] is they don’t want a soggy skin. They want a crispy crust or bite. So we want to ‘hard fry’ catfish, chicken—and that’s a technique of controlling the oil.”

Charring is the cooking technique that delivers a deep, golden brown color to foods—that prime spot between caramelizing and burning. “We want to know that our food is cooked and we want to see that. We are definitely looking for a char. It doesn’t scare most of us to see a little black on whatever it is [we’re cooking],” says the chef.

“We’re not going to take out cornbread that’s just yellow out of the oven, it doesn’t say ‘done’ to us. That golden brown color when it comes out of the oven is what we want and savor with butter melting over the top, of course.”

Pickling using vinegar (white or apple cider vinegar) preserves food while also delivering a striking flavor, says Gary. “Pickling things like onions, okra and any of the harvest is a form of preservation and also as a form of counterbalance in flavors: sweet and pickled. When we’re developing the ‘pot liquor’ of a pot of greens, mustard or collards, we want to taste the natural flavor that comes with the greens, but we also want that counterbalance of the vinegar.”

The Future of Southern Cooking

While the recipes came from history and heritage, learning how to cook Southern style continues to evolve. For Chef Gary, it’s about unleashing the artistry of the cuisine. “Now we’re taking the ingredients that have been available to us all this time and giving it a different interpretation of those time-honored dishes,” she says.

“I see it evolving in that we, as the cooks, have taken off the shackles of what our food needs to be. This is the reason why it’s important for us to make the reference that the American food table is the food that comes out of the hand of the Black cook. When we start thinking about how we have affected the composition of many menus, then we are unbound as to how we express ourselves as chefs. We can feel confident that southern food is our food…and now we can put our own spin on it.”

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Unleashing The Creative Cooking Spirit

As an example of a new approach to Southern cooking, Chef Gary cites giving classic deviled eggs a remix by adding shrimp or lobster. Likewise, she creatively transforms traditional cornbread by adding unexpected ingredients like cracked black pepper and shredded coconut.

“For me, we can’t be caged by thinking of Southern cooking as being from a certain region. No, it’s not. It is in the hand of the cook—it’s the mastery of that flavor profile, that ancestry, that DNA,” she offers.

For more information about Chef Tarsha M. Gary and ECOTONE World , an urban sustainability model advocating urban agriculture, food education, organic commerce and global enrichment, visit online.

This story originally appeared in Cuisine Noir Magazine