BY CHEF JOHN CURRENCE
So here’s a little something few people know about me: for about six or eight months in 1986 during my tenure at UNC, I posed as a vegetarian. I say “posed” because, as much as I wanted to impress that very special young lady in my life, I knew all along I was a fraud . . . a terrible, hypocritical, meat-loving fraud.
I wore my façade nobly. I had just started cooking professionally, so I soldiered stoically through bacon-heavy shifts at Crook’s Corner and absorbed occasional chiding. I girded myself for visits home to unrelenting attacks from my dad and brother, who both still have fun with my “phase” to this day, almost thirty years later.
How I returned to carnivore-ism is a subject of mystery. Whether it was my inability to withstand the draw of a corn dog at the North Carolina State Fair or a muffuletta given to me in my weakened condition by a friend, the reason is lost at this point, but what I do know is that my status was surrendered because I knew I just didn’t belong among a noble few. I didn’t care about the animal lives sacrificed. I was well aware that the diet was not necessarily any healthier than a meat-peppered one. And I was heart-broken, so I was returning to my old ways.
As a budding line cook, I was part of a vitriolic pirates’ movement in the kitchens I worked in during the 1980s. Vegetarian requests were met with profanity-laced insults of the infidel who would make such demands. We begrudgingly assembled vegetable plates and sent them out with even less ceremony. Our places were temples of flesh, and those who came to worship our ability to manipulate muscle were adored. All others were nothing more than nuisance.
So, when I opened my first restaurant, City Grocery, in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1992, in my mind, the kitchen would be the rogue-est of any I had ever worked in. Testosterone bled from the walls, Gun and Roses blared from a stereo twice as big as the room needed, and NOBODY questioned our combinations or dish design. The wait staff were terrified to submit special orders, split plate requests, and, most of all, vegetarian queries. It was no way to run a kitchen, and I realized it very quickly.
The order of the day became, quickly, that special requests and vegetarian considerations be given the same respect as any other order to come into the kitchen. It was in these months, coincidentally, that my food was beginning to take shape. I was beginning to understand what my place was in the South and how that informed what I was trying to create, both with the food I was making and the place we were serving it.
A significant part of what my food spoke to was directly related to time I spent working with my maternal grandparents in their vegetable garden during the summers of my childhood. We harvested in the mornings, processed midday, canned in the afternoons, and stored in the evenings. It was a daily ritual, and though it was definitely not what inspired me to become a chef, it ultimately gave me the ability to understand and respect those things we worked so hard to grow and preserve.
It was a brush with death that finally brought me to full appreciation of the vegetable. I was sidelined with a case of pancreatitis in the summer of 2009. It is a catastrophically painful condition, and there is little that they can do for it other than starve you and pray. Mine was brought on by poor diet and even poorer genetics, it turns out. As it became clear what had happened to me, the immediate concern was whether I would ever consider food or cook it the same way again.
Though I had begun the process of lightening our food somewhat in the several years prior, I began in earnest as soon as I was able to get back to work. Vegetables took on a new significance, and again our food and attitude toward it changed.
It didn’t hurt matters that in these dark porcine days, chefs across the country were loading everything they could think of with bacon to be more “Southern.” For those of us growing up with and appreciating all parts of the pig and understanding how and where each piece of that animal was best used, it became an embarrassment that the long-awaited interest in Southern food was being immediately compartmentalized as little more than a pork-centric flash fascination.
The American South was, until the 1940s, the absolute breadbasket of vegetable production. There is nowhere in the country that can boast as rich a tradition of vegetable cultivation and perhaps family garden tending as the South. There are generations of family seed savers who swapped heirloom varieties and helped neighbors when there was crop failure or drought or whatever of the dozens of things that could go wrong did go wrong. Vegetables are our community.
This is what I love about food now. I revel in understanding and feeling why these things matter to us and how they guided us to where we are, and as a result, our kitchens don’t look at vegetarians as adversaries now. Our non-meat-eating guests provide us with a unique opportunity at every order to celebrate that corner of the culinary landscape that is as Southern as anything else you may argue.
What you have in your hands is a gift. It is a fresh, fun, slightly irreverent and joyful new look at Southern vegetarian dishes . . . a look that needed to be taken. Justin and Amy aren’t hemmed in by any of the tired clichés or stereotypical humorless dishes frequently found in “vegetarian” cookbooks. This tome is just playful while entirely on point in its objective. And what’s more, the grand melting pot of the South is embraced as these recipes touch everything from traditional American to Latin to Indian to Asian and beyond, illustrating the magnificent tapestry that makes up the food of our corner of the country. It is simply exciting and vital.
So, now, run—do not walk—to your closest farmers’ market, CSA, or local vegetable stand, arm yourself with whatever is in season, flip through these pages, and eat your vegetables. You’ll be very happy that you did.
Radishes with softened butter are WAY underappreciated.