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Damon Lee Fowler

Food * History * Words

Recipes and Stories

30 July 2020: A Summer Tradition with an Old Favorite

July 30, 2020
Tags: Classic Southern Cooking, Essentials of Southern Cooking, Classic American Cooking, Creole Cooking, Shrimp Creole, shrimp, Summer Cooking, Charleston Receipts
My Shrimp Creole, a dish I've made every summer for at least half a century.

 

Tradition has been defined as "how it was done when you were a child." Whether that's a general truth or just a jaded observation of how lifelong behavior patterns form at a very early age, we do tend to hold onto things, both good and bad, from our childhoods.

 

Regardless of when and how they begin, as so many personal and family traditions have been laid waste in this time of pandemic isolation, never have the ones that we can still keep seemed more important.

 

One of mine, which began when I was about ten, is making shrimp creole every summer. Even at that age, cooking and cookbooks were already a source of endless fascination. Read More 

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24 July 2020: Tomato Sandwiches

July 24, 2020
Tags: Tomato Sandwiches, Tea Sandwiches, BLT Sandwiches, Homemade Mayonnaise, Classic Southern Cooking, Classic English Cooking, Classic American Cooking, mayonnaise
English-style tomato sandwiches for afternoon tea, the kind one can enjoy without straining ones social graces or staining one's good clothes.

 

This time of year, there's an awful lot of deeply opinionated nonsense written about one of summer's simplest and greatest pleasures: tomato sandwiches.

 

Among the silliest are the "we're just plain folks" types who claim that it must be made with gummy white loaf bread that sticks to the roof of one's mouth and is so insubstantial that a slice of it will compress to a peanut-sized nugget, and that it must squirt and run all over one's arms and shirt.

 

That's just about all that they seem to agree upon: Some authoritatively insist that the crust may never be trimmed off, others that it must always be removed, some that the tomato must be the size of a rib-steak and hang out the edges while others allow nothing thicker or larger than the bread itself. There are proponents of the dictum that the tomato must be peeled, others that it should never, ever be peeled.

 

And then there's the mayonnaise (which is taken for granted): Read More 

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2 July 2020: Old Home Week and Pimiento Cheese

July 2, 2020
Tags: Anderson SC, Classic Southern Cooking, Ma-Ma, Granddaddy, Emma Holmes, Levis Holmes, Granny Fowler, Paw-Paw Fowler, Gluck Mill Village, Cheddar Cheese, Pimiento Cheese, Pimientos
The Arts and Crafts Cottage where my maternal grandparents lived, which we all knew as "Ma-Ma's House."

 

Last week I went back to Anderson, South Carolina, my parents' home town and the site for some of my best childhood memories and earliest cooking experiences. It was the first time I'd been back in at least twenty-three years, and was bittersweet.

 

It was surprising how much was just was it had been when I last drove away from it, as if the ensuing decades had passed without touching it. But so much had changed—and a good bit of it for the better. By the time I was in college, the old downtown was rapidly going to seed. But it has since experienced a Renaissance. The courthouse square, which had been paved over as a parking lot in the fifties, has been reclaimed as a small park and the site of a new courthouse annex. Trees lined the center median of Main Street, and new shops, restaurants, and hopping night spots have filled the old storefronts that line its edges.

 

But. While all the places that had meant a lot to me were still standing, many of them were in peril. Read More 

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