The Lady and Sons
Authors: Paula Deen
The most devoted supporters and confidants
of my adult life have been my Aunt Peggy and
Uncle George Ort. It is to Aunt Peggy and in
fond memory of my Uncle George that this book
is most affectionately dedicated.
Growing up in Albany, Georgia, I used to spend hours at a time in my Grandmother Paul's kitchen at River Bend. Grandmother Paul was a wonderful cook, and she handed down her love of cooking to her three daughters. They in turn passed this love on to me. My life has been surrounded by the many wonderful cooks in my family, and I have been blessed by them through their stories and their food.
In 1989, newly divorced and unemployed, I was living in Savannah and was determined to succeed. Using the cooking skills I learned as a child, I invested my last two hundred dollars in a catering business that I started with my two sons, Jamie and Bobby. I had decided to follow in my grandmother's footsteps.
After a few years of local catering, high demand helped my small-scale business evolve into The Lady & Sons Restaurant. My sons and I function as owners, proprietors, chefs, and hosts. We and our staff are dedicated to providing the finest home-cooked meals in an atmosphere of true Southern hospitality.
I hope my story will inspire others to accept the challenges that life offers. My experience proves that whenever one door closes, another one always opens. I hope you will enjoy these favorite recipes of mine. They have been created with love, sweat, and tears.
There are many people in our lives who deserve a great big thank you for helping us produce this book. They include our outstanding staff, the many wonderful customers who have passed through our restaurant doors, the small businesses in the area who have helped support us, and, of course, our dear family and friends.
If you are lucky enough to be in the Savannah area, we would love for you to stop by the restaurant. Please visit us at:
The Lady & Sons
102 West Congress Street
Savannah, GA 31401
(912) 233-2600
If you can't get to Savannah to sample the wonderful food at The Lady & Sons, you can still taste the dishes at home. The recipes in this book that we serve at our restaurant are followed by:
The Lady & Sons
Additional copies of this book can be ordered by calling
(800) 793-BOOK.
Our mother, Paula H. Deen, is a true symbol of strength and perseverance. This book is a product of her twenty-hour workdays. It is her “third child,” and she has nourished and cherished this book just as she has cared for her two sons, in a way that only a mother could do. This book spans many years and many jobs; from homemaker to bank teller to caterer to restaurant owner, our mom's dreams for the future have come true.
Thanks to our mother, these are now the best days of our lives. We have more pride in this lady than can possibly be imagined. She has our undying adoration and our commitment to follow in her direction. Mother is a remarkable lady. We hope you enjoy her wonderful cookbook.
We love you, Mom.
Jamie and Bobby
John Berendt
AUTHOR OF
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
Friends planning a trip to Savannah usually ask me for travel tips, and I'm always happy to oblige. Naturally, I suggest a walk through the city's twenty-two sumptuous garden squares and a visit to a few of the museum houses. I tell them not to leave Savannah without taking a short excursion to Bonaventure Cemetery, surely one of the most peaceful sanctuaries on earth, with its avenues of live oaks hung with Spanish moss and its romantic statuary set among flowering shrubs and gentle breezes from the meandering inland waterway.
Then I tell them about food.
I tick off a few of my favorite Savannah eating establishments: Williams Seafood, where locals line up for shrimp, oysters, and crabs that are hauled off fishing boats at a dock a mere stone's throw from the table; Johnny Harris, a tradition for special family occasions since the twenties and known for its barbecued lamb sandwiches; Mrs. Wilkes's, one of America's true culinary landmarks, which lists itself in the phone book simply as “Wilkes L H Mrs, 107 W Jones St,” and where lunch is still served at big tables for ten in the old boardinghouse style.
I also tell Savannah-bound friends that if they want a short course in the meaning of Southern cooking—the flavors, the ambience, indeed the very
heart
of Southern cooking—they should drop in at the Lady & Sons. The Lady is a hugely popular downtown eatery that serves the whole gamut of Southern dishes and starts serving you steaming, fresh-out-of-the-oven cheese biscuits while you're waiting on line for a table and then keeps a steady flow coming to you all during your meal.
Paula Deen is the gentle force behind the restaurant and the cookbook you now hold in your hands. Lucky you.
Southern cooking is a hand-me-down art, and that's how Paula Deen came into it. Her grandfather drove a dry-cleaning truck, but he knew all along he had a jewel in Paula's grandmother, because she was a fantastic cook. So he bought her a hot-dog stand in Hapeville, Georgia, in the early forties, and put her to work, with Paula's mother waiting on tables. They did so well they moved up to country steak and creamed potatoes. “The reason I can remember they served steak,” says Paula, “is because one day a customer got fresh with my mother, and she slapped him with a piece of steak.”
Paula spent whole days in the kitchen with her grandmother, learning the techniques as well as the intention of Southern food. “You have to understand,” she says, “Southern cooking comes from within. We show our love for someone through the kitchen, through food. We bake a pie or a cake as a welcoming gift or as a show of support in tough times. Southern cooking is comfort food. It's flavorful and filling, and it makes you feel good.”
Authentic Southern food is not about pretension. “It does not require a sophisticated palate,” says Paula. “It's poor-man's food. Kids don't have to acquire a taste for it. They love it from the start.”
And Southern food is distinctly Southern. “Nothing's flown in,” she says. “It's all home-grown. There's no quail, no pheasant, no filet mignon, no foie gras, no truffles, no snails, no caviar, and no crêpes. Southern dishes do not require split-second timing. They do not ‘fall’ in the oven. We don't go in for ornate presentation, either, or sculpted desserts. We just heap food on the plate.”
Paula knows that some aspects of Southern cooking are disdained by outsiders. “There are some things we do that would make a French chef sick,” she says. “Like, for instance, the way we make redeye gravy—country ham cooked in a skillet with water and strong coffee. But let the French chef taste it, and he'll get over being sick real quick!”
Southern cooks are proud of their cuisine, and they are not hesitant to tell you that, stacked up against any other cookery, it comes out on top. As Paula says, with a wink to me, “I've never heard anybody say,
‘Gee, golly, I can't wait to get up to New York so I can have some of that good Yankee food.’ “
The staples of classic Southern food, as laid out in this book, are butter, sugar, salt, pepper, hot sauce, vinegar, ham hocks, and, to lay it on the line: fat. “We can make concessions for the health-conscious,” says Paula, “by doing things like using smoked turkey wings instead of ham hocks. But a better approach for weight watchers is to look at Southern food as a treat and just go with it.”
Southern food is tied in with the Southern experience, which is a heady combination of good times and bad. Paula has had her share of both. She lived the life of a Southern princess for her first nineteen years— happy, pampered, and carefree. Then her father dropped dead, and four years later her mother died of a broken heart and bone cancer. Paula had to go to work. She was head teller at a bank for a while until a bank robber put a gun to her head and she decided she wasn't cut out for banking.
With her marriage coming to an end and creditors closing in some years ago, Paula got into what she knew best: cooking. She took two hundred dollars and opened a service with her two sons and their girlfriends, wheeling hot lunches through office buildings in downtown Savannah. They called it the Bag Lady. Paula got up every morning at five o'clock and made 250 meals in her own kitchen—grilled chicken, lasagna, trio sandwiches, and custards, banana pudding, and fruit salad for dessert. “If the business hadn't made it, I was looking the Salvation Army square in the face,” she says. But it did make it, and Paula's customers insisted she open a restaurant, which she did.
“The day we opened,” she recalls, “I was overdrawn at two banks, not just one. I didn't even have enough money for the parking meter. My banker called, and I said to him, ‘Just let me open my doors.’ He did, and the people came flooding in.”
And they still do. Businessmen, housewives, lawyers, students, tourists, and celebrities. The mayor is a regular customer. Paula has had to extend her hours to accommodate all the business.
Ms. Deen is an irresistible example of that extraordinary phenomenon of Southern womanhood, the steel magnolia. She is always appealing and gracious but possessed of an unfailing survival instinct—a necessary character trait for a Southern cook to make it.
And make it, she has. If you go to Savannah, you can understand the reason for it by sampling her famous cheese biscuits, her hoe cakes, her sensational gooey butter cakes, and all the rest. However, if you can't wait till then, you don't have to. Just follow the Lady's instructions on the following pages and you'll know soon enough what all the fuss is about.
J
OHN
B
ERENDT
New York
January 1998
HOT APPETIZERS
Pecan-Stuffed “Dates
Georgia Sugared Peanuts