Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Cookbooks

‘Julia Reed’s South’: Entertaining, in Luxurious Down-Home Style

Chess pie squares.Credit...Lisa Nicklin for The New York Times

When Julia Reed, the author of several Southern cooking and entertaining books, was growing up in the Mississippi Delta, there wasn’t much to do or many places to go. Entertaining at home was a necessity, and as much a part of Ms. Reed’s childhood as oak trees dripping with Spanish moss and ice-cold sweet tea.

Later, as a young journalist in Washington, she tried her hand at what she calls more “pretentious” menus, but found herself returning to her Southern culinary roots and her mother’s timeless advice: “Why don’t you just serve something that tastes good?”

Image
Credit...Sonny Figueroa for The New York Times

Ms. Reed’s latest book, “Julia Reed’s South: Spirited Entertaining and High-Style Fun All Year Long” (Rizzoli, May 2016), celebrates that very ethos. Many of the recipes could easily be found in a tattered spiralbound community cookbook (bourbon balls, mock cheese soufflé), others in a current issue of a glossy food magazine (asparagus with brown butter vinaigrette, deconstructed street corn).

Their similarity, Ms. Reed posits, is that they all taste good, and that they are not difficult to make. Entertaining, after all, should be fun for the host as well as the guests.

It is not a cookbook for ingredient purists — recipes call for packaged items like Pepperidge Farm Very Thin white bread and Uncle Ben’s Original Converted Rice — and she extols the virtues of serving Popeye’s fried chicken at dinner parties with Champagne. But in the age of D.I.Y. everything, hers is a refreshing if not entirely artisanal approach.

There’s a down-home luxuriousness about her recipes that Southern cooks have arguably perfected. Take the mock cheese soufflé, a glorious, cheesy puff of a dish made from packaged white bread, shredded Cheddar and beaten eggs. It’s not exactly a traditional soufflé (it’s more like a bread pudding). But whatever it is, you want more, and why haven’t you been making this for Christmas brunch?

Then there are her chess pie squares. These heavenly little bars are a picnic-ready version of the traditional Southern custard pie. They are like lemon bars without the lip-puckering citrus: a blanket of egg-rich custard generously laced with vanilla, atop a crumbly shortbread crust.

Like much of the rest of Ms. Reed’s book, they are unapologetic in their simplicity and Southern-ness, equally at home on a picnic blanket or a monogrammed silver platter.

Recipe: Chess Pie Squares

A correction was made on 
June 8, 2016

A recipe last Wednesday for chess pie squares, adapted from the new cookbook “Julia Reed’s South: Spirited Entertaining and High-Style Fun for All Year Long,” misstated the metric equivalent for the six ounces of butter used in both the shortbread crust and the filling. It is 170 grams, not 57.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: It’s All About Entertaining, Southern Style. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT