Damon Lee Fowler

You may have noticed that new Recipes and Stories entries have been rather sporadic over the last couple of years. That's because now that I'm no longer teaching and writing a newspaper column there's just so much to say about the cooking that goes on in my kitchen day-in-day-out. A lot of it I've already written about more than anyone needed to read, and the rest isn't easy to put down—not because it's complicated, but because it's just cooking—without a recipe either in front of me or even the front of my mind. Things are measured, though not with scales, cups, and spoons but with my eyes, tongue, and hands, relying on five decades of experience. That's something a teacher can tell students about, but the only way to really get it is by doing it.

It usually evolves along these lines: last week was St. Patrick's Day, which is a big deal where we used to live. You couldn't miss it in Savannah if you were blind and deaf. Well ahead of time, Read More 

If you've followed this page for any time at all, you know that the fall of 1978 was a pivotal time in my life. That was when I was lucky enough to begin my graduate architectural studies with four months in Genova, the capitol of Liguria and heart of Italy's Riviera. That's where Clemson owns a modest Renaissance-Revival villa in the hilly suburb above the old city.

With its sun-drenched terraced gardens and incomparable views of the bay, It was an idyllic setting for studying architecture—and I did. Some. Half my time was spent either in studio or tramping, sketchbook and journal in hand, around that ancient city, the other picturesque towns of the Riviera, and some of Europe's oldest capitols.

The thing that changed my life, however, and eventually took it in a completely different direction had nothing directly to do with ancient art and architecture. It was the way I spent the other half of that four months: in the kitchen with our beautiful cook, Ilda Gemme Torti.

That kitchen was an experience all by itself:  Read More 

Back when I was still writing a column for the Savannah Morning News, I planned one on hearty winter soups made in a slow cooker and asked friends to share their favorites. Cherie Bailey offered this hearty, warming stew from her friend Amanda Hoven Havelin—who with good taste like this, quickly became a friend of mine.

It has been a winter comfort staple in our house ever since.

Below are two versions, the recipe as it was given to me (for 6 servings), and the way I make it now. The original Read More 

One of the things I love about living in Virginia is that we actually have winter here.

As much as I loved the Georgia Lowcountry, its version of winter was brief and left a lot to be desired for someone who actually enjoys cold weather. Yes, I realize that a mild, short cold season appeals to a lot of people. But the tradeoff is summers that are long and brutal, with air so humid and thick that one can almost chew it.

Here in Southern Virginia, winter is relatively mild, but consistently colder, and lingers until just before the spring equinox. We usually get at least one good snow, which always has the good grace to melt before we get tired of it. And while temperatures may dip into single digits, they don't get stuck there. It's just right for the kind of comfort cooking that I love best, lots of warming soups, stews, pastas, pot roasts, and casseroles.

One favorite of those comfortable dishes is bean soup,  Read More 

We've all encountered those cooks who operate on the maxim "if a little is good, a lot will be better," who never seem to know when to leave well-enough alone and quit while they're ahead.

If we're honest, most of us have been that cook at one time or another, taking a dish one step, one minute, one ingredient (or two or half-a-dozen) too far. But if we're paying attention, these moments of going too far can inform us and make us better cooks in the long-run.

But then there's the other extreme, the cooks who never go far enough, who've gotten fixed on a number. Read More 

[Nathalie Dupree, the undisputed Grande Dame of Southern Cooking, died on Monday, 13 January 2025, at the age of 85.]

Nathalie Dupree was the big sister I never had. And while I was never one of her "chickens" (her nickname for the many young interns and students that she mentored), over the more than thirty years that we knew one another, she was indeed a mentor that I was lucky enough with time to know as my colleague and friend.

Our acquaintance began when I was still trying to practice architecture while working on my first cookbook. I'd written to her about her then new book  Read More 

We woke up this morning to one of the prettiest snow coverings we've had since we moved to Virginia. But this season, the beauty is tempered more than usual. While we're cozy in our well-heated home, as always we think of the many who have inadequate shelter—or none at all.

And then there are those images of the wildfire devastation on the other side of the country from us, not to mention continued heartbreak, illness, and just plain disappointment among our family and loved ones here at home.

Right now all those people with short fuses for food "bloggers" who go on and on with convolutions of memory before they get to a an equally convoluted and overwrought recipe are tuning out. Well, if that's you, bless your heart and bye-bye.

But seriously, all that Read More 

If your idea of a good time is to meet the new year by drinking yourself into a stupor surrounded by a big drunken crowd of people doing the same, well, bless your heart: have at it. Frankly, the only thing I can think of that would be less fun is prepping for a colonoscopy. And the older I get, the less it appeals.

Ever since we bought our house in Petersburg, our tradition for meeting the new year has been to spend it with our two oldest grandchildren, eating tacos, watching favorite old Christmas movies, playing Scrabble, and toasting the new year Read More 

Eleven dozen Christmas star-shaped cheese straws later, my holiday baking is beginning to get caught up. Next is the daunting job of baking the fruitcake. Daunting not because any step of it is all that difficult, but because it's a bit messy and does take three days.

Once upon a time fruitcakes took longer than that: The citrus peel (assuming one could even get oranges and lemons), had to be cleaned, blanched, and candied. The raisins, currants, and other dried fruits had to be "stoned" (not like we mean it nowadays—they didn't come already seeded), then reconstituted  Read More 

One of the things I love best about cooking is that it's predictable (to a point) and yet always evolving.

Yes, there are certain reactions that are basic and scientific. If you add this to that, you'll get a predictable result. Handle pastry dough with tender finesse and it'll be delicate, flaky, and tender; treat it roughly and it'll be hard and tough. The opposite is true for a yeast bread dough. But even with things we've made a thousand times and gotten the same result for almost every one of those times, there's always the opportunity for that unexpected "aha" moment.

I've been making cheese straws for my entire adult life—longer if I count the hundreds of my mother's  Read More 

The difference between a good Thanksgiving dinner and a great one is homemade broth. But it's Thanksgiving morning and you're on the internet. If you don't already have the stock pot simmering, it's still possible to have homemade broth, but you need to get cracking.

It would help if you'd bought extra turkey parts for making said broth, but you probably didn't. Don't worry, if you've got a whole bird, you're in business.  Read More 

26 November 2024: Thanksgiving Cranberries

In the best-laid plans department, this essay was intended for posting on Monday, but we had some last minute changes to our plans for the week and I had to shift gears with the intention of posting it early this morning. But then the electrical company shut off the power to work on our area's grid for several hours, so I'm awfully sorry to be several hours late with it.

The reason it ought to have posted yesterday was because the recipe that follows needs to be made at least 24 hour ahead, and is all the better if it's made 36-48 hours ahead.

Cranberry relish has been a standard in our family for almost as long as I can remember. But the traditional recipe makes more than half a gallon of the stuff Read More 

Over the more than three decades that I've been teaching and writing about cooking, the biggest challenge has been coming up with fresh ways to talk about coping with our big cook's holiday, Thanksgiving. In all that time, the focus, both in my work and most everyone else's, has been on tackling a feast for a crowd without killing ourselves.

It never occurred to me—or apparently anyone else—that, as challenging as cooking for that crowd might be, it's nothing to the challenge of The Dwindling Thanksgiving Table. That, I had to learn the hard way.

When we moved to Virginia, I happily imagined our dining room table at Thanksgiving, Read More 

Tomorrow is my birthday, and ushers in the last year of my sixties.

It's a milestone I suspect none of us is ever ready to face, and is coming at an especially difficult time for my family and for our country. Consequently, that need for comforting soup in my household hasn't lessened; if anything, it's only gotten more pronounced.

Whenever that need becomes acute, the soup that provides it best isn't, oddly enough, one I grew up on, but a classic Italian minestrone. True, it's a kissing cousin of my grandmother's vegetable soup, but its comfort isn't rooted in childhood memories as are most other "comfort foods." When I was traveling to teach a lot, Read More 

Usually Autumn is a season that fills me with hope, a time of golden light, of doors opening on new beginnings, and of joyful anticipation as we look forward to the winter holidays. But this one has been dark, a season of endings, sadness, and anxiety, of doors not just closed but slammed in our faces. We've needed comfort in large, hefty doses, and while it's been tempting, not all those doses could take the form of ice cream and bourbon.

Yesterday's comfort came in the form of a velvety butternut squash and leek puree. Of all the winter squash, butternuts produce Read More 

My mother's cornbread, while I was growing up, was like so many other Southerners' bread back then, a round cake baked in a preheated iron skillet, just as her mother's and grandmother's and probably her great- and great-great-grandmother's had been before her. Cut into wedges and passed around while it was almost blistering hot, we eagerly risked a burn to split our steaming wedge and stuff it with as much butter as we could get away with.

It was the quintessential accompaniment for Mama's pots of greens, beans, field peas, and vegetable soup.

And yet, oddly enough, when I'm missing her and craving her cornbread, it's not a round skillet cake that I make, Read More 

Maybe it's all that going back to school in my formative years, but as the nights cool and the leaves turn and fall, autumn has never felt like an end of anything.

Until now.

This month, as always, has been filled with the usual transitions and milestones. But not all of them have been welcome or joyful, and the cool, clear air has brought with it a sharp, bittersweet reminder that I am no longer approaching the autumn of my life, but am deep in the middle of it.

Earlier this month, my husband and I marked our twenty-fifth anniversary and the beginning of our fourth year in Virginia. After a more than two year search, our parish here has welcomed a new rector who is filling us with fresh hope.

But in August we got the news we've dreaded for more than twenty of those years, Read More 

We're having our first hint of autumn here in Virginia, but in the Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry where I spent four decades of my life, summer lingers well into October. And even though autumn is whispering in our ears and we're now more than four hundred miles away from the Lowcountry, this is still when we begin to crave one of the lovely staples of the region's late-summer tables: butterbeans over rice.

Actually, beans or field peas with rice are staples down there throughout the year, but mid-to-late summer is when butterbeans (both the pale green and brown speckled varieties) are seasonal.

You may, by the way, call these broad, flat beans "limas" out of a Southerner's hearing, but don't do it in front of us. Read More 

If you're looking for capriciousness and absurdity (and all-too-often, even when you aren't), there's no better place to find them than food blogs.

Never content to simply relay how a thing is done well, far too many of my colleagues are instead eager to (one can only suppose) make a name for themselves with a quest for "the ultimate," "the perfect," or, worst of all, "the reinvented." Even if the ultimate or perfect was obtainable and a reinvention was needed, the real focus of such essays is but rarely, if ever, on the food: It's all about how much more clever the author is than you are.

What brought all this to mind was an essay someone shared Read More 

In my later years, the end of summer has become bittersweet. Not because I love it so much that I hate seeing it pass; actually, autumn is my favorite time of year and by the end of July I'm eager for it to come. What's bittersweet about summer's waning is that it makes me keenly aware that my own life's summer is waning—and a lot faster than I'd like.

I'm not, of course, alone in this. Recently an email newsletter landed in my in-box with a link to an article warning of twenty-five things we should NEVER eat once we pass our fiftieth birthday.

Yes, they said never. The lion's share of the list was processed food, which ought not to be the dominant part of anyone's diet. Predictably, the bad-boy contents of most of the foods and drinks on this list were Read More 

If we're paying attention, every venture into the kitchen is an opportunity for us to learn and improve.

A few weeks ago, a friend asked if I had a chilled cucumber soup recipe that I could share. It was funny that she would ask just then, because I'd been craving that very thing for several days. And as it happened, there was a recipe for it in my book Essentials of Southern Cooking. I sent it along to her, then toddled off to the store to buy the ingredients for a batch of my own.

But while I was making it, I found myself dissatisfied with that recipe as it was published.  Read More 

There's not a day, nor a time within them, that I don't miss my maternal grandparents, but mid-summer is when I always miss them most. Not because that's the time of year that, twenty-one years apart, they left us, but because the summer school holidays were when my brothers and I each got to visit them all on our own for two whole weeks.

The lion's share of those visits was spent in the kitchen with MaMa Read More 

The best cooking is always the simplest. When the ingredients are first rate, a wise cook knows to do no more than is absolutely necessary to bring out their flavor. This is especially true in summer, when produce is at its peak and the heat, even when the air-conditioner is going full blast, makes spending time in the kitchen deeply unappealing.

And when we go back to Savannah and are lucky enough to come home with a pound cake from Mollie Stone Read More 

One of the loveliest dishes in all of French cooking and arguably the greatest of all summer salads is sliced boiled or steamed potatoes simply dressed with oil and vinegar and served at room temperature. Called "salade de pomme de terre à la Parisienne" or sometimes "pommes de terre à l'huile," it's lighter than its mayonnaise-dressed cousins, and is served both on its own or as one of the components of a composed salad.

But regardless of how it's dressed, the French secret to great potato salad is that before that dressing touches the cooked potatoes, Read More 

It's funny how our palates will sometimes latch onto something and stir a craving that often borders on obsession. This spring, what mine latched onto was the mild yet distinctive flavor and buttery texture of avocados. I've always liked them, but lately haven't been able to get enough of them—tossed in a salad, smashed into countless batches of guacamole, smeared on toast, sandwiched with bacon between slabs of sourdough bread, halved and used as a cup to hold scoops of chicken, ham, or tuna salad.

But while all of those things have their charms, arguably the most perfect mate for this unusual savory fruit is eggs, especially when the eggs have been poached. Though each is wonderful on its own, when they come together they're downright transcendent.

Far too many cooks are intimidated about poaching eggs, Read More 

My introduction to Savannah, where I spent four decades of my life, was a preservation internship in the summer of 1980. It was one of the hottest summers on record, and we met the heat with weekends on Tybee trying to catch a sea breeze, gallons of ice, chilled white wine and gin kept in the freezer, and windows that were perpetually frosted—on the outside. The heavy, damp air rang with a steady soundtrack of whirring air conditioner condensers and ceiling fans.

But of all the ways we dealt with the heat, the most memorable was Jean Soderlind's, who was my big-hearted landlady. I lived on the top floor of her grand Victorian house  Read More 

Early in April, a hacker got into my author's page on the popular social media platform Facebook, changed the profile and wallpaper pictures, and then changed the name to "We Added Suspended Issue See Why." After immediately resetting my password, I was able to block the person who hacked in (yup, they left fingerprints) and restored the pictures. Unhappily, I was stuck with that name for two months. Despite repeated attempts to report the hack and get help, Facebook not only never responded, its "help" tutorials were absolutely no help at all. Worst of all, it wouldn't allow me to change the name of the page back because the rule is that it can only be changed every sixty days—even if you weren't the one who changed it.

I'll still be using Facebook, but with the knowledge that a service that's offered as "free" rarely is: Usually it comes with a price of some kind. The price in that case is that it's all too easy for hackers to violate your space in that medium and it won't offer you any help when they do. Also, if you are "reported" for violating a community standard, even and especially when you haven't done any such thing, God help you.

But I digress (what else is new?):  Read More 

We're finally having autumnal weather in our corner of Virginia: chilly nights and mild days, enough rain to bring out the color of the leaves and holly berries in our garden, and lots of sunshine giving that golden light that only happens as the year winds its way to a close.

It's perfect weather for the hearty, warming soups that are made with dried beans and peas, especially split green peas. Split pea with ham is a long-time favorite cold weather comfort in our household, and yet I'd actually not made it since we moved.

It was past time to seek out a couple of meaty ham hocks, dig out my favorite bean soup pot, and stir up a batch. Read More 

When most of us use the words "comfort food" we usually mean something that warms us both inside and out, wrapping us up physically and emotionally. But during the dead heat of summer, when the humidity turns the air into hot mayonnaise, the sun turns the pavement into a short-order griddle, and we're all, as old-guard southern ladies persist in calling it, "glistening," comfort turns ice cold and is served in tall, frosted glasses and chilled bowls.

The irony is not lost on me that two of my own ultimate comfort foods are soups that are at their best in that dead heat, when their key ingredients are at their peak: my grandmother's vegetable beef soup Read More 

Easter dinner in our house always begins with a chilled soup. Even if the weather outside isn't exactly spring-like, it's a welcome reminder that warmer days are on the way. But mainly, it's because a cold first course can be made ahead and, as a bonus, is often the better for it.

My usual is a chilled carrot puree, but this year my spouse asked for vichyssoise, the cold soup that has become practically synonymous with the idea.

It may seem a bit old-fashioned, having been around for more than a century and unhappily, having been done to death (and all too often done badly) in the "gourmet" seventies and eighties of the last century. But when carefully and well made, vichyssoise is a deeply satisfying and delicious beginning for any meal (or as a meal in itself), and that should never be out of style. Read More