Damon Lee Fowler

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 

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 

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 

I'd like to tell you that my grandmother's pumpkin pie recipe was an old family one that has been passed down for generations, but I can't. She got it right off a can of pumpkin puree, varying it only in the spice and liquid she used, since I was allergic to cloves and my father to nutmeg, and she but rarely had cream in the house but always had evaporated milk.

You can make the filling completely from scratch with a pumpkin you've roasted and pureed yourself if you have nothing better to do; but Read More 

One of the great ironies of summer is that it's the very time of year when vegetable soups are at their best, since all the ingredients are at peak season, just when the last thing one wants to do is stand over a hot stove.

Luckily, these soups really don't require the cook to stand over them for more than a few minutes. You put it together before the kitchen is heated up, hang around only as long as it takes for it to come to a simmer, then just walk away Read More 

That hackneyed saw about old dogs and new tricks has never felt more depressingly true than it has in my kitchen over the last few months.

The pandemic lockdown might, for some, have been a challenging adventure into previously unexplored culinary avenues. But let's face it, most of us are really not all that adventurous. For every undauntable wanderer there are probably a dozen or more of us who'd just as soon stay in with a good book and cup of tea.

This tired old dog is one of the latter. I settled into a nest lined with an endless cycle of repeated comfort food favorites, emerging only when forced into dipping my toes into new territory out of necessity to keep my newspaper column interesting.

The end of the column brought with it an end to any motivation to go exploring. Read More 

The lingering isolation and economic uncertainty of the pandemic have been difficult enough for all of us. But add in a contentious national election and our need for Comfort with a capital C has hit an all-time high.

And when we're craving that comfort, nothing quite satisfies like those things that comforted us as children. For me, the ultimate such comfort is my grandmother's dumplings, not just eating them, but the process of making them as well.

Throughout my childhood, MaMa was my best friend.  Read More 

My mother is descended from generations of gardeners, and fresh produce from our family garden counts among the fondest memories and greatest comforts of my childhood.

From late spring when the red clay of the Carolina hills was turned over for new planting until the frost nipped the last of the tomatoes and sweetened the fall greens, our gardens were both a place of deep comfort and a source for even deeper comforts at the table.

Of all the things that came from them, the one that resonates with the best of those childhood memories and characterized our summer table is yellow crookneck squash.  Read More 

More on the skillet steamed squash from the last essay of that name.

The method was the one my maternal grandmother, known to us as MaMa, used to cook the sweet, young yellow crooknecks from my grandfather's garden throughout the summer, although she did it in a deeper saucepan rather than the skillet I use nowadays.

But while she did sometimes bring them to the table whole, she more often took them one step further and creamed them. Read More 

Summer squash of all kinds are a staple in my kitchen throughout the season. There are almost always a few yellow crooknecks or zucchini (or both) in the refrigerator's vegetable bin and often a tub of cooked leftovers right next to the tub of pimiento cheese.

More often than not, they're simply cooked by steaming them in their own juices, a method I included in a recent column for the newspaper. It's basically how my grandmother used to cook them, with a few touches of my own added through the years, and is very simple, requiring next to no skill and only a very little attention from the cook. And it works for any summer squash, though it's especially nice for our sweet yellow crooknecks. Read More 

If my entire life as a cook could be summed in one thing, it would be a lifelong—and so far—failed quest to reproduce my maternal grandmother’s summer vegetable soup. Her kitchen was where I first cooked, and we made many a pot of vegetable soup together during my summer visits. The memory of its taste remains vivid more than half a century later. But somehow, I’ve never been able to get my own to taste and look exactly like hers.

When I was trying to construct a recipe for my first cookbook, in her typical way, MaMa said, “I never measured anything for soup, so just guess.” Well, of course, she measured— Read More 

Coconut cake is a traditional Christmas cake in the part of Carolina where I grew up, and both my grandmother’s made it, using basically the same recipe. But my maternal grandmother, known to us as “MaMa” (we pronounced it Maw-Maw) had a special touch that no one else could match.

Hers was one the most extraordinarily moist cakes I’ve ever had. The great secret for its moistness is also the reason it tasted more intensely of coconut than any other.  Read More 

Nostalgia does odd things to us, at times when we’re least expecting it. Last week, while ambling down an aisle at the market, minding my own business and looking for something completely different, nostalgia, in the form of a large can of wild-caught “Traditional Style” salmon, jumped right off the shelf and accosted me.

“Traditional” means it was packed whole, skin, bones, and all. And standing there looking at that neat stack of pink-labeled cans, what my mind’s eye saw was a gray-striped pink cylinder of fish standing tall in a chipped and grazed creamware bowl of my grandmother’s. Suddenly, she was right there beside me, murmuring excitedly, “They’re on sale! Let’s get some!” Read More 

Some of the most welcome sprouts of spring in my backyard are not the wild violets or bulb flowers, but a pair of wild poke sallet plants that have taken over two big terracotta pots by the back door stoop. Even if I didn’t love these greens, I’d still fertilize and nurture them: their bright new leaves bring a smile to my heart every day by reminding me of my grandmother. Read More