- Michael Gebert
- Paul Fehribach with 1840s-style snowballs at a 2012 bourbon dinner
So right as yesterday’s segment of my interview with chef Paul Fehribach of Big Jones about his upcoming southern food cookbooks was being editorized for enpublishment, Twitter went kerflooey over a spectacularly nasty review of an Appalachian-themed restaurant in uberhip Bushwick, Brooklyn:
—But right there, you said fry in lard. And people don’t fry in lard, they use corn oil or something.
It sort of reminds me of my mom’s cooking when we were growing up—we never ate big portions of anything. We ate food that you would certainly consider rich, but we never ate big portions of it. And if you eat that kind of food, it kind of sticks to your ribs and you feel good. I think that’s a big difference, and you could say that it’s a little more expensive to feed people this way. But if you’re in the business of trying to feed people, why would you try to save a few pennies this way by using an industrial product instead of something that’s a genuine food? Something that we evolved with and we’ve been eating for so long.
All right, let’s get back to the book. What are some other things that will be in it, that people have asked about? I remember you talking one time about hunting down boudin [sausage] in Louisiana.
- Michael Gebert
- Salt-rising bread from the early 1800s
It’s interesting you say that, because I’ve made popovers and I think a lot of those things are really simple. And the effort to reward ratio is pretty high—they’re simple and yet they’re pretty dramatic. So how did something like that fall out of fashion?
And a lot of times it did mean getting up at 5:30 or 6:00 [AM] for the first three or four years, every Saturday and every Sunday. But I just felt that if people want to go out for brunch, they should be able to go somewhere that actually cares about what they’re cooking. And that’s not a machine or an industrial process, but a process of love and caring and participating in a food community.
