The Happy Table Of Eugene Walter

A southern Renaissance man, Eugene Walter (1921-1998) was a pioneering food writer, a champion of southern foodways and culture, and a legendary personality among food lovers. The Happy Table of Eugene Walter, which introduces a new generation of readers to Walter's culinary legacy, is a revelation to anyone interested in today's booming scene in vintage and artisanal drinks--from bourbon and juleps to champagne and punch--and a southern twist on America's culinary heritage. Assembled and edited by Walter's literary executor, Donald Goodman, and food writer Thomas Head, this charming cookbook includes more than 300 recipes featuring the use of spirits in the food and drink of the South, as well as numerous asides, lovely short essays, and countless witticisms that make for great reading as well as good cooking. A wellspring of southern eating and drinking traditions lovingly collected by Walter over the years, the volume is also a celebration of Walter himself and his incomparable appetite and talent for life and its surprising pleasures. The Happy Table showcases Walter's remarkably contemporary gustatory sensibilities and the humorous and quirky yet incisive voice for which he has long been embraced.

Happy Table of Eugene Walter: Southern Spirits in Food and Drink

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD This sumptuous oral biography of Eugene Walter, the best-known man you’ve never heard of, is an eyewitness history of the heart of the last century—enlivened with personal glimpses of luminaries from William Faulkner and Martha Graham to Judy Garland and Leontyne Price—and a pitch-perfect addition to the Southern literary tradition that has critics cheering. In his 76 years, Eugene Walter ate of “the ripened heart of life,” to quote a letter from Isak Dinesen, one of his many illustrious friends. Walter savored the porch life of his native Mobile, Alabama, in the the l920s and ‘30s; stumbled into the Greenwich Village art scene in late-1940s New York; was a ubiquitous presence in Paris’s expatriate café society in the 1950s (where he was part of the Paris Review at its inception); and later, in 1960s Rome, participated in the golden age of Italian cinema. He was somehow everywhere, bringing with him a unique and contagious spirit, putting his inimitable stamp on the cultural life of the twentieth century. “Katherine Clark…has edited Eugene Walter’s oral history into a book as amazing as the man himself.” JONATHAN YARDLEY, WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD “Milking the Moon has perfect pitch and flawlessly captures Eugene’s pixilated wonderland of a life…. I love this book—and I couldn’t put it down.” PAT CONROY “Surprising and serendipitous.” NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “Anecdotes so frothy they ought to be served with a paper parasol over crushed ice.” PEOPLE “A rare literary treat…the temptation is to wolf it down all at once, but it’s much more satisfying to take your sweet time. The most unique oral history of the mid-twentieth century.” TIMES-PICAYUNE (NEW ORLEANS) “An exceptionally fun read.” ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

The Happy Table of Eugene Walter is a revelation to anyone interested in today's booming scene in vintage and artisanal drinks--from bourbon and juleps to champagne and punch--and a southern twist on America's culinary heritage. This cookbook includes more than 300 recipes featuring the use of spirits, as well as numerous asides, lovely short essays, and countless witticisms that make for great reading as well as good cooking.

Eugene Walter's first novel is about a young man from a small central Alabama town who goes south of the "salt line" to Mobile to work in a bank and study law. As soon as this unnamed pilgrim arrives, he realizes that--although he is still in Alabama—he has entered a separate physical kingdom of banana trees and palm fronds, subtropical heat and humidity, old houses and lacy wrought-iron balconies. In the "land of clowns" and the "kingdom of monkeys"—in the town that can claim the oldest Mardi Gras in America--there is no Puritan work ethic; the only ruling forces are those of chaos, craziness, and caprice. Such forces overtake the pilgrim, seduce him away from the beaten career path, and set him on a zigzag course through life. The Untidy Pilgrim celebrates the insularity as well as the eccentricity of southerners—and Mobilians, in particular—in the mid-20th century. Cut off from the national mainstream, they are portrayed as devoid of that particularly American angst over what to "do" and accomplish with one's life, and indulge instead in art, music, cooking, nature, and love. --Amazon.com.

Without corn, Tema Flanagan writes, the South would cease to taste like the South. Her treasury of fifty-one recipes demonstrates deliciously just how important the remarkable Zea mays is to southern culture and cuisine. Corn's recipes emphasize seasonality. High summer calls for fresh corn eaten on the cob or shaved into salads, sautes, and soups. When fall and winter come, it is time to make cornmeal biscuits, muffins, cobblers, and hotcakes, along with silky spoonbread and sausage-studded cornbread stuffing. And the heaviest hitters, cornbread and grits, are mainstays all year round. Flanagan also surveys corn's culinary history--its place in Native American culture, its traditional role on the southerner's table, and the new and exciting ways it is enjoyed in southern kitchens today. Appreciating how this oversized grass is capable of providing sustenance in an astonishing array of forms, Flanagan organizes the book to reflect corn's versatility. Sections feature corn in its full glory: fresh on and off the cob, dried and ground, nixtamalized (soaked in an alkaline solution and hulled to make hominy) and popped, and mashed and fermented. From Sweet Corn and Poblano Chowder to Southern Skillet Cornbread, from Fresh Corn Tortillas to Classic Cheese Grits, and from Molasses Caramel Corn with Candied Bacon, Peanuts, and Sesame to New Orleans Bourbon Milk Punch, the dishes range from classic southern to contemporary to globally influenced.

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Cakes have become an icon of American cultureand a window to understanding ourselves. Be they vanilla, lemon, ginger, chocolate, cinnamon, boozy, Bundt, layered, marbled, even checkerboard--they are etched in our psyche. Cakes relate to our lives, heritage, and hometowns. And as we look at the evolution of cakes in America, we see the evolution of our history: cakes changed with waves of immigrants landing on ourshores, with the availability (and scarcity) of ingredients, with cultural trends and with political developments. In her new book American Cake, Anne Byrn (creator of the New York Times bestselling series The Cake Mix Doctor) will explore this delicious evolution and teach us cake-making techniques from across the centuries, all modernized for today’s home cooks. Anne wonders (and answers for us) why devil’s food cake is not red in color, how the Southern delicacy known as Japanese Fruit Cake could be so-named when there appears to be nothing Japanese about the recipe, and how Depression-era cooks managed to bake cakes without eggs, milk, and butter. Who invented the flourless chocolate cake, the St. Louis gooey butter cake, the Tunnel of Fudge cake? Were these now-legendary recipes mishaps thanks to a lapse of memory, frugality, or being too lazy to run to the store for more flour? Join Anne for this delicious coast-to-coast journey and savor our nation's history of cake baking. From the dark, moist gingerbread and blueberry cakes of New England and the elegant English-style pound cake of Virginia to the hard-scrabble apple stack cake home to Appalachia and the slow-drawl, Deep South Lady Baltimore Cake, you will learn the stories behind your favorite cakes and how to bake them.