When I first saw this book advertised many years ago, the concept intrigued me. I found a copy at my public library. While the recipes are not that difficult and are generally made from fresh, locally-sourced ingredients, I didn't find it to be a cookbook that fit the South in which I grew up--the Deep South. Most of the ingredients would not be able to be sourced locally away from the Eastern coastal areas. The flavors are not the ones I crave. Ultimately I found a couple beverages and one other dish I wanted to try. Much of the rest did not even remotely appeal to me. If you grew up near Charleston, Savannah, Wilmington, New Bern, or the Outer Banks, this may appeal to you. If you did not, find a cookbook more oriented to the Deep South. ( )

Good writers, good background/history/stories... may have to purchase ( )

The book that will stay open on the kitchen counter for most of the next couple weeks is Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern, which has entire chapters devoted to things like “cold sides”—a category of food that becomes paramount here in the South in July and August. This is the book I use when I’m just cooking for me—which I usually am. Ted and Matt Lee are pure geniuses at taking traditional southern fair and making it work for a modern kitchen and modern tastes that are more concerned about things like additives and red dye no. 5. They are just good at getting at what’s important about a dish—such as their Shrimp and Deviled-Egg Salad Rolls, which they claim was inspired by a casserole dish from a 1964 PTA cookbook that, to my mind anyway, sounds like the cook must have been into the sherry:

. . . .it calls for making a batch of deviled eggs, and alternating layers of them in a casserole pan, topped up with a milky, roux-thickened cheese sauce studded with whole shrimp and spiked with ketchup, sherry, and Worcestershire sauce. You cover all that with a carpet of butter-soaked bread crumbs, bake it for half an hour and then serve it over ‘canned Chinese noodles that have been heated in a slow oven.’

Frankly, I’m at a loss as to what you could possibly taste after adding in ketchup, sherry, and Worcestershire sauce. “Wild” is the Lee Brothers’ comment. But it didn’t distract them from noticing how well shrimp and deviled eggs would go together once, you know, you got rid of the ketchup.

What I like most about the Lees Brothers cookbooks (Simple Fresh Southern, and that modern bible of southern kitchens, Lee Bros. Southern Cooking) is that none of their recipes are scary. I am an impatient cook, not an expert one, and there is not a dish in their book that I don’t think I could make. There are some I wouldn’t want to make—even Ted and Matt’s baby-faced good looks aren’t enough to make me prepare ambrosia salad voluntarily—but if they were holding a gun to my head, I could do it. Under protest. More to the point, theirs are the books I turn to when I have a lot of fresh vegetables I need to do things with very quickly, which is what I’m faced with this week. read full review