Bookshelf: Cooking in Concert

Bury your nose, whet your appetite

Meals, Music, and Muses

Alexander Smalls is at once a renowned opera singer, chef, and storyteller. With roots in the
South Carolina Lowcountry, he’s made a career exploring the foods of his upbringing and those
of his African heritage with a handful of acclaimed restaurants in New York (all while winning
awards for his singing, including on the cast recording of George Gershwin’s Charleston-based
folk opera, Porgy and Bess). In his new release, Meals, Music, and Muses: Recipes from my
African American Kitchen, Smalls explores the intersection of his passions: “In the United States,
food and music are inextricably linked, especially in African-American culture,” he explains.
“Cooking without a song—in your heart, if nothing else—is like cooking without salt and
pepper.” Touted as a playlist of essential African-American dishes, the curated collection of
recipes spans classic preparations of field greens and spicy okra to frogmore stew and sweet
potato muffins. (Flatiron Books)

A Good Meal is Hard to Find

Over strawberry cake and mason jars of bourbon, painter Amy Evans and longtime friend Martha Foose penned a quirky cookbook about the foods that tell our stories. Along with cheerful illustrations, each simple (and sometimes semi-homemade) recipe is accompanied by a vignette of a different fictional woman’s life—in the style of the South’s beloved spiral-bound Junior League compendiums. Grace makes her own peanut butter-filled Nabs fuel a trek to meet her grandbaby in Texas. Rita whips up a girls’ trip sipper from vodka, Mexican lager, and frozen limeade. And Clementine’s crawfish puppies aren’t complete without her abuelita’s cheese dip. (Chronicle Books)

Get the Recipe: Sweet Potato Muffins

Cooking in Marfa

In the vast and often inhospitable Chihuahuan Desert, a mere sixty miles from the Mexican border, sits the tiny urban oasis of Marfa. Both undeniably Texan and imbued with Mexican heritage, it’s the birthplace of Tex-Mex cuisine—created by Tula Borunda Gutierrez back in 1887, or so the story goes. And in recent years, the town of 1,700 has become a modern art mecca, drawing both tourists and artists taking up residence. Written by Long Horn State native Virginia Lebermann, Cooking in Marfa takes a deep dive into its food and entertaining traditions and how they’ve evolved with the desert town’s growing popularity. (Phaidon)

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At age 80, the doyenne of modern Southern cooking reflects on forging her own path, the power of female connections, and why she cooks grits in the microwave.