Monthly Archives: October 2016

Chef Sean Brock

Leave a reply

sean-brock-photo I admit that there is very little that inspires me to make the two hour drive up I-65 to Nashville these days. I have lived there twice and used to visit fairly regularly but eventually I felt like I had gotten all of the sugar out of the Nashville gum – or perhaps all of the Goo Goo out of the Nashville cluster.

Now that I have finally sampled Chef Sean Brock’s food, I long to get back to Nashville soon to enjoy a meal at the Nashville version of his award-winning restaurant, Husk (www.huskrestaurant.com), which opened in Music City in 2013.

Sean Brock is the James Beard and multi-award winning chef most identified with the original Husk in Charleston. Heritage, Brock’s 2014 cookbook, is one of the most beautiful and certainly most readable cookbooks ever. Brock challenges himself to only use Southern indigenous ingredients in his restaurants – often from his own garden and herd of pigs – and the results are creative and special. “If it ain’t Southern, it ain’t walkin’ in the door” is my favorite Sean Brock quote. Heritage contains a recipe for “cornbread and buttermilk soup” that I will be making forever. It was inspired by the chef’s early habit of crumbling cornbread into a cup of buttermilk — a meal my Granddaddy Harbison ate regularly.

Sean Brock is humble and authentic.

I finally had my first Sean Brock meal at the Alabama Chanin Factory in Florence last Saturday evening when my friend Anne and I travelled over for the most recent Friends of the Café dinner. We got off to a bad start at the Factory when someone in the Alabama Chanin organization had misplaced our reservation and a staffer was a little rude to us before they found their mistake. It’s the first time I was ever made to feel uncomfortable at a Factory event and the lack of grace with which the situation was handled tainted the good feelings about the Factory that I have written about so many times in the past.

That early unpleasantness faded quickly, however, when Sean Brock’s food made its first appearance and a series of passed hors d’oeuvres circulated among assembling diners. Jimmy Red Johnny Cakes with pimento cheese, grilled oysters on the half shell with ‘nduja sausage and lovage, and beef tartare lettuce wraps were carried around accompanied by the first of the pairings from Grassroots Wine, a stalwart of the Southern Foodways Alliance. Southern Foodways Alliance was once again one of the beneficiaries of the dinner’s proceeds. A last minute decision was made to share those proceeds with victims of Hurricane Matthew which was bearing down on Sean Brock’s beloved Charleston as we gathered.

When it was time to be seated, Anne and I were reunited with our friend, Barbara from Tulsa, who we met at the Adam Evans Factory dinner in August, and introduced to Barbara’s friends, Carol and Paul from Chicago, and to Cindy, a Florence local. A hallmark of the Factory dinners has always been the instant community that is formed. I quickly enlisted Jason at the table behind me to keep me posted on the Alabama-Arkansas score.

Before the first course arrived, each diner was presented with a benne-buttermilk roll accompanied by a smear of butter — a Husk tradition. The courses arrived amid oohs and aahs from those gathered and with enough time in between to cultivate conversation and camaraderie. When a tomato and okra stew was served as the first course, some people bristled at the grilled pig tail that garnished it but when they tasted it they were delighted. A gentleman at another table who introduced himself as “a Jew from New York who is not quite sure why I’m here” declared the pig tail “delicious.” dscn0525

The second course, a savory and exceptional shrimp and eggplant purloo, brought together a number of Brock’s influences. Purloo, a South Carolina Lowcountry standard, is reminiscent of Gulf Coast jambalaya, which is itself closely related to Spanish paella. The third course was a perfectly grilled Denver steak with black truffle and sweet potato. The portions, the flavors, and the aesthetic were perfection. dscn0527

Finally, a panna cotta made with Cruze Farm’s buttermilk, muscadines, and brown butter completed, once again, one of the very best meals I have ever tasted. Several of those meals have been consumed in Florence, Alabama.

I have regularly written about the magic and community that make the regular pilgrimages to the Florence Friends of the Café meals so special. Like an author with his books, it’s hard to choose a favorite among the Factory meals – it always seems like the most recent is my favorite.

Either way, Sean Brock is now one of my very favorite chefs. He signed cookbooks after the event and his courtesy and patience, his eagerness to talk about his food and how honored he was to be serving us, his pride and his passion for locally grown and sourced food – were infectious and inspiring. He is also the source of my favorite anecdote about Birmingham chef Frank Stitt.

This was the final 2016 dinner for the Factory series. May 2017’s line-up be equally inspired. And may Sean Brock keep exploring and teaching what Southern food really means. sean-brock-photo-2

“The American Way …”

Leave a reply

dscn0522 There was a joke back in the 70s that went like this:

Q: When will we know that the Baby Boomers are getting old?

A: When “New York” magazine runs a cover story on “The Hottest New Funeral Homes.”

I think we’re there. I’ve done my last will and advance directive documents. I’m an organ donor. But I haven’t gotten around to making arrangements for disposal of my remains when the inevitable happens.

One reason for my hesitance may be that I read and never forgot Jessica Mitford’s brilliant expose of the American funeral industry, The American Way of Death (1963), and her updated revision, The American Way of Death Revisited (1998). In both volumes Mitford addresses the ways in which the funeral industry exploits the grief and shock of the bereaved to charge jacked-up prices for often unnecessary services. The 1998 update asserts that things have gotten even worse with the conglomerates swallowing up the local mom and pop operations which once dominated the industry.

It’s like this: The corrupt and sadistic medical insurance industry plays games with our mental and physical health and then, at the end, the funeral industry delivers the final punch in the face.

This comes to mind because I’ve had to think about death and dying more than usual this year. And, as I commented to my mother recently, I’ve spent more hours in cemeteries this year than I ever imagined spending in my entire life. My mother visits my father’s grave every day and when I’m in town I go over there with her.

My parents have four plots in Elmwood Cemetery in Birmingham. Dad is there and Mother will be beside him but the two extra plots haven’t been claimed. Mother’s hints that she wants me to take one of the remaining plots have become gradually more frequent and more insistent.

Elmwood is a beautiful cemetery, one of Birmingham’s oldest and one of the largest in the country. It’s a beautiful and peaceful place and its inhabitants are a composite of the social, cultural, political, artistic, medical, academic, industrial, and sports history of the city. The Elmwood staff was lovely to my family as we made arrangements for Dad’s memorial and burial there earlier this year.

If I decide to be buried, I would be perfectly happy to be buried at Elmwood if they allowed natural burials. There is still a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about what kind of burial is “natural.” It’s ironic, really, since most Americans had some form of natural burial before modern times and modern laws and the emergence of a very powerful funeral lobby.

There is a history of embalming throughout civilization, of course, but modern funeral practices and preservation really took hold in the United States during the Civil War when embalming became a way of preserving soldiers’ bodies so they might be returned to their families. “Morticians” around that time re-classified themselves as “Funeral Directors” and the modern death mega-industry was born.

Here’s what I mean when I say I want a natural burial: I want my physical remains and the vessel that contains them to go back to the earth as naturally as possible. My preference is to be buried in a pine coffin without any sort of preservative and let nature take its course and reclaim my remains. That means no embalming or preservation of any kind, a coffin that is biodegradable, and no burial vault.

As I’ve researched natural burial, I have found that the tree-huggers can be just as rigid in their own way as the funeral conglomerates. For example, many natural burial sites do not allow tombstones or markers, or they mandate burial in shrouds. I’d personally like an upright stone marker at my grave and I wouldn’t mind being buried wearing clothes.

I would always prefer gentle and natural burial to harsh cremation (who among us really wants to be burned to a crisp in a fire?) but the restrictions imposed by the industry do not necessarily support my preferences. The only reason I might consider cremation is if I am unable to be guaranteed the kind of natural burial I desire. The options of cemeteries that allow natural burials are still few and far between and I have found only one in Alabama and it’s too far from home. Having my ashes cremated and scattered is the closest thing I can conjure to natural decaying as a way of returning to the land if I can’t be buried according to my wishes.

I realize that I will not be around when all of this comes about and that, at that point, it really doesn’t matter what becomes of my remains. Even so, I want my end-of-life rituals to be based on personal and spiritual decisions – not corporate ones. I have always liked the concept of “ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”

I know that thinking too much about such things may seem (and is) morbid, but after a year of the deaths of several loved ones and friends, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

As a friend of Dad’s said (with a nod to Hemingway) many years ago, reacting to the unexpected death of a mutual acquaintance – “It seems like people are dying these days that have never died before!”