• Michael Gebert
  • Paul Fehribach

Southern-style comfort food is a fairly easy sell, especially after a few drinks. When Big Jones opened in Andersonville in 2008, it could have gotten along just fine doing a restaurant version of feel-good food, calories be damned. But chef Paul Fehribach, who opened it with co-owner Mark Armantrout, was determined from the start to do farm-to-table, whole-animal cooking, like people in the south always did. And the restaurant has grown in ambition to dig into the heritage of southern food over the years— especially in its series of occasional bourbon dinners, which resurrect forgotten dishes from old cookbooks, often things like calves’ jelly which you’ve never seen in a restaurant in these parts, at least in the last century.

I have another cookbook project on the table called Kitchen Garden and Bourbon Barrels, and that’s about sort of the ancestry of American country cooking, as it relates to Appalachia and the Buffalo Trace, and about how all these different things came together in the heartland and created what we know today as, what I guess a lot of people would call comfort food, but what I like to call country cooking.

Well, a lot of that historical approach is explained in the book. You know, the food we’re doing here—we’re about to embark on another major evolution in our menus here, the way we cook here, and the book is also going to deal with that history. But you know, all of these dishes have a story.

It is the two cuisines butting against each other. And you know, there are German communities in the south, the German Coast in Louisiana out around Lac des Allemands, which is called that because Allemagne [is] Germany. And Dutch Fork, South Carolina, and certainly throughout Appalachia—the Appalachian Dutch, those were German. So those influences came in, and the Ulster Irish and the Scotch— the British influence becomes less and less important the farther you get away from the east coast. Obviously the French influence waned a long time ago, although in restaurant kitchens that technique is still important.

So those are sort of the two big lines, but otherwise I’d say that a lot of what I grew up with was very southern. We did fried chicken, that was a big special occasion dish, [but] if it was a long time between weddings, we’d have it for Sunday dinner. My grandfather had a whole pantry full of chow chows and pickles and relishes.