John Fleer’s Essential Reads

By: The Local Palate

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For Winston-Salem, North Carolina, native John Fleer, books are like little portals into other worlds. From his early years as a novice home cook to today, with his Asheville, North Carolina restaurants Rhubarb and The Rhu, Fleer has turned to cookbooks as a way to understand other places and their distinctive cultures. We asked him to contemplate the shelves and shelves of food books he’s acquired over his career and share with us the 12 titles he feels every Southerner should have at home. The sweeping list, which includes a few time-honored tomes on mountain cooking, a cookbook that sings the praises of scratch-made breakfasts, and a culinary historian’s somber dive into his family’s history in slavery, speaks to the power of food across the Southern landscape.