Taking a Closer Look at Southern Cooking, One Region at a Time
The New York Times
With her cookbook, “Our South,” Ashleigh Shanti is one of a few chefs who are focusing closely on regional cuisine — and redefining it in the process.
It’s hard for the chef Ashleigh Shanti to pick a favorite region of the South, but if pressed, she says she’d pick Appalachia, specifically Carroll County, Va., where her great-aunt Hattie Mae lived.
For Ms. Shanti, childhood visits to Hattie Mae’s meant wandering the woods, plucking branches, berries, mushrooms and leaves — anything that caught Ms. Shanti’s eye — and taking them back to her great-aunt. “Hattie Mae would name every single mushroom, branch, berry and leaf I held in my dirty hands,” she said.
These days, Ms. Shanti, 33, is still exploring. She’s one of a few chefs interpreting Black cooking with a measured specificity, making well-researched dishes that are rooted in tradition but also immediate, infused with ingredients from other cultures or countries.
At Good Hot Fish, her casual 18-seat restaurant in Asheville, N.C. which reopened last month after Hurricane Helene tore through the western part of the state, she takes Southern dishes and inflects them with Appalachian notes. In her hands, sweet potatoes become crispy pancakes with cabbage, Sea Island red peas are stewed until tender and local catfish gets breaded and fried in benne seed flour, then served on squishy white bread.
