A self-described “small-town chef,” Peter Dale—whose sophisticated interpretations of Southern food have been fêted by The New York Times, Bon Appétit, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—is a world traveler who still works and resides in the town where he grew up: Athens, Georgia.
“I like being in a small town,” he tells me at his restaurant, The National. “I have a lot of freedom.”
As a small-town chef, however, Dale must walk a tightrope, serving the food that he wants to make—much of it influenced by his time in Spain—while still catering to his audience of mostly Southerners. “People in the South eat shrimp and grits,” he tells me as we enter his laid-back kitchen. “This is my interpretation of that.”
He pours olive oil into a pan and adds diced chorizo. “I love Spanish chorizo,” he says. “There’s a great fattiness that coats your mouth and the paprika turns the oil orange.”
Sure enough, as he turns up the heat, the air becomes fragrant with spice and the oil begins to tint red. “In the South, we normally use bacon for this dish, but I like it better this way.”
His customers like it too. He uses sweet Georgia shrimp, a hat-tip to the South, while serving it all on polenta, a hat-tip to Italy. The finished dish marries the food of his childhood with the food he discovered in his travels, and it’s all the better for it.
Other interesting parallels abound between the food here in the South and the food he’s discovered in other parts of the world. “I love Middle Eastern and North African food,” he tells me. “You find okra in those areas, but also here.”
Okra, which is much maligned by those who find it slimy (count me among them!), is prized by Dale. “We love it down here,” he tells me as he begins prepping his next dish, a fast sauté of okra and chickpeas. “Okra can be fried or stewed with tomatoes or pickled.”
Dale’s technique for cooking it is ingenious in the way that he avoids the slime factor. He gets a pan very hot, adds a splash of olive oil, and adds the okra, which he’s sliced in half vertically. “If you cook it on high heat,” he explains, “you sear it and lock in the gumminess.”
The finished dish, which looks pretty Southern at first, gets topped with house-made harissa and a yogurt sauce made with lemon juice. Once again, it’s a tribute to Dale’s two primary influences, his childhood and his travels.
Dale’s final dish, which is an homage to a dish he ate at Albert Adrià’s Inopia, in Barcelona, is simply a pineapple dressed with lime sugar and pomegranate seeds. At Inopia, the dish got a drizzle of molasses from the Canary Islands, but here Dale uses cane syrup that his friend Jocelyn’s dad has been making in his retirement. “They don’t sell it,” he says. “They just give it away.”
A very Southern touch in a very Spanish dish; that’s the way Dale likes to cook and the way his customers like to eat here in Athens.
“In Spain, they keep the shell on the shrimp and suck the head. We met with a little resistance to that here.”
Serves 2
Chorizo is a magical ingredient, the kind of thing that makes your food taste way more accomplished without asking anything of you beyond just buying it. D’Artagnan sells a good-quality chorizo that is readily available (see Resources); just make sure you’re buying Spanish chorizo, which is already cooked, and not Mexican chorizo, which is raw. You can expand or contract this dish based on your needs: Feeding a bigger crowd? Double the amounts. Feeding just yourself? Cook as much chorizo and shrimp as you’d like to eat. It’s really that simple.
2 cups water
2 cups whole milk
A pinch of kosher salt
1 cup polenta* (not the quick-cooking kind)
½ cup small-diced Spanish chorizo
1 tablespoon olive oil
8 to 12 fresh uncooked shrimp, peeled and deveined, patted dry with paper towels
¼ cup white wine
¼ cup chopped fresh tomatoes
¼ cup chopped roasted red peppers
A big pinch of chopped Italian flat-leaf parsley
A handful of arugula
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
¼ cup freshly grated Parmesan
To make the polenta, bring the water and milk to a boil, add a pinch of salt, and then turn off the heat. Sift the polenta into the hot liquid, whisking all the while (this prevents lumps). Turn the heat back to low and cook, whisking every so often, for 30 minutes, or until the polenta gets really thick (you may need to switch to a wooden spoon).
Meanwhile, add the chorizo to a medium skillet (not nonstick) with the olive oil. Slowly bring up the heat to low and render the fat. You don’t want too much color or for the chorizo to get crisp.
When the oil has turned orange and most of the fat has been rendered, push all the chorizo to the side and turn up the heat to medium high. Add all the shrimp: they should sizzle. You want the shrimp to get some color, so make sure the pan is hot enough.
Once the shrimp have some color, add the wine to deglaze the pan. Use a spoon to work up any brown bits and then add the tomatoes and the red peppers. Turn up the heat to reduce the sauce.
Feel the shrimp: they should be relatively firm and should look opaque.* Add the parsley and arugula. Taste for seasoning; you may not need any salt because the chorizo is salted.
Stir the butter and Parmesan into the polenta and spoon the polenta onto serving dishes. Top with the shrimp and chorizo mixture and serve right away.
Serves 4
Fire is your friend in the kitchen, and never more so than when you’re cooking okra. Get your pan hot—hotter than you normally heat your pans—and watch as that slime-monster of a vegetable gets seared and golden brown on the outside. Make sure the chickpeas are dry so they get some color too. The finished dish, which gets topped with a harissa vinaigrette and a yogurt sauce, looks a bit like patatas bravas, Spain’s famous fried potato dish, which is often topped with a spicy red sauce and white mayo. Here everything is a bit more wholesome but no less tasty.
FOR THE HARISSA VINAIGRETTE
4 tablespoons harissa* (either homemade or store-bought)
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
FOR THE YOGURT SAUCE
½ cup plain yogurt
Fresh lemon juice
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
FOR THE REST OF THE DISH
Olive oil
2 cups fresh okra*, tops cut off, sliced in half vertically
1 cup canned chickpeas*, drained and patted dry
Make the harissa vinaigrette by whisking together the harissa, olive oil, and white wine vinegar. Taste to adjust.
Next, make the yogurt sauce by mixing together the yogurt, lemon juice to taste, and pinches of salt and pepper to taste.
In a small to medium sauté pan (not nonstick), heat the olive oil until almost smoking. When the oil is seriously hot, add the okra. Allow the okra to cook for a few moments and then flip it with a confident thrust of the pan (as one would flip an omelet) or, if that scares you, turn it with a spoon.
When the okra is nicely browned all over, add the chickpeas. Make sure the chickpeas are dry or everything will steam. Cook, tossing occasionally with tongs, until the chickpeas get a little color too. Season with a pinch of salt.
Spoon the okra and chickpeas onto plates and top with a generous amount of both the harissa vinaigrette and the yogurt sauce.
Serves 4
For those big heavy dinners after which you don’t want to serve a big heavy dessert, consider this simple dish of pineapple—beautifully presented in its natural container—topped with a few choice ingredients, namely, lime sugar, pomegranate seeds, and cane syrup. If you can’t find cane syrup, use something similar from where you live. Good maple syrup purchased from a farmer’s market works well; you can also try molasses. The lime sugar, which sounds fancy but takes just thirty seconds to make, is a great ingredient to keep around. Sprinkle it on other fruits (nectarines, orange slices) or, better yet, use it to coat the rims of the glasses the next time you make margaritas.
¼ cup sugar
1 whole lime
1 whole pineapple
Cane syrup (no set amount; judge it visually) or good maple syrup
½ cup fresh pomegranate seeds
First make the lime sugar. Over a bowl filled with the sugar, zest the lime aggressively, making sure to get only the green part (the white part, or pith, is bitter-tasting). Stir the lime zest and sugar together* until well combined.
Prepare the pineapple by slicing it vertically through the stem and leaves, leaving everything intact. Slice each half vertically again so the pineapple is quartered. With a boning knife, cut out the core on top of each pineapple segment. Then slide the boning knife between the pineapple and the skin in one fluid motion, so you can easily lift the pineapple meat out. Finally, cut the pineapple into 10 even pieces and, keeping them all together, place them back in the pineapple skin. Place each quarter on its own plate.
Sprinkle the pineapple quarters with the lime sugar (you probably won’t use all of it). Pour the syrup over the parts that aren’t dressed with lime sugar. Sprinkle with pomegranate seeds and serve.
