by Joanne O’Sullivan

photo by Brent FleuryIf you’ve never had vegan biscuits and gravy in downtown Asheville or grits made by a mother-daughter team of Italian-French-Caribbean chefs in Valle Crucis, you really don’t know what you’re missing. Certain images spring to mind in any discussion of Southern food: fried chicken, barbecue, collard greens. Or more exotic fare: pig’s feet, chicken gizzards, fried Twinkies. There are countless cookbooks, essay anthologies and even institutes devoted to the subject of genuine Southern food. But while there may only be one correct way to prepare a proper sauce velouté, Southern food is a welcoming cuisine. Anyone who wants to come up with their own interpretation can basically have at it.

At least a few WNC chefs would argue that their variations are improvements. Danielle Deschamps whips up Southern comfort specialties with her mother Marie at Simplicity, their restaurant at the Mast Farm Inn in Valle Crucis, and promises that their version of grits—cooked for over an hour with loads of butter and cream cheese—will be the best you’ve ever tasted. And Rosetta Star of Rosetta’s Kitchen in Asheville says folks tell her she packs as much flavor into a little toasted nutritional yeast, flour and olive oil than you could get from a whole tin can of fatback.

Vegetables have always played prominently in Southern cooking, but the idea of leaving meat completely out of the picture isn’t one most Southerners are rushing to embrace. “I’m pretty sure my sister and I were the first vegetarians they had to deal with at Old Fort Elementary School,” jokes Star. Her parents were 1970s back-to-the-landers who settled in the area after the blue van they drove up from South Florida broke down in Marion and they used the money they’d saved to repair it to buy farmland instead. Her mom taught her to make “hippie bread” and vegetarian gravy, and she could make cornbread in a cast-iron skillet by the time she was 11. Her sister managed the family garden in her early teens.

Rosetta Star of Rosetta’s Kitchen in Asheville makes a mean plate of pinto beans, cornbread and grits. photo by Brent FleuryThe menu at Rosetta’s Kitchen, open since 2002, isn’t strictly Southern, but her pinto beans, grits, cornbread and greens would fit right in at any homestyle restaurant. She’s not a vegan, but she was happy to incorporate the vegan recipes suggested by a few of her chefs—vegan mac and cheese, and chocolate cake, for example. “Growing up a vegetarian in Western North Carolina, I could really empathize with not being able to find stuff you can eat,” she says. The outsider take on an insider favorite is one of those innovations that keeps Southern cooking interesting.

When it comes to Southern cooking, it’s hard to imagine people coming from further outside the usual circles than the Deschamps family. Originally from Haiti, the clan (which includes Danielle’s sister Sandra and her husband and son, their father Henri and an aunt and uncle who own the nearby Taylor House Inn) had owned a vacation home in the mountains for years when they bought the nineteenth-century Mast Farm Inn in 2006. It offered the perfect opportunity for them to reunite after years of separation due to such cosmopolitan circumstances as boarding school in Switzerland and college in London. But while Danielle Deschamps’ culinary memories may take her back to Sunday afternoons in the suburbs outside Port-au-Prince, with her mother cooking a big feast for aunts, uncles and cousins, she says it’s not really such a leap to work in the Southern idiom.

Aside from the decadent buttery grits, she and her mother have their own version of a chicken pot pie (something of a chicken Provençal with lavender, served atop a biscuit) and various kinds of dumplings. Henri, a witty and relentlessly entrepreneurial fellow who sold 19 businesses in order to focus on the Inn, may not be present in the kitchen, but he definitely puts his stamp on the menu, coming up with poetic titles for each entrée, such as: Slow Chicken NASCAR Style but Mighty Low on Points & Ashe County Cheese trucked over by Junior Johnson; or Barnie’s Drunk On Red Wine Marinated Beef Walked Over from Mayberry on Friday Morning. (For a guy who spent much of his life in Haiti, he sure knows his Southern cultural references).

Just like the innkeepers who preceded them in the nineteenth century, the Deschamps create one menu for every meal, choosing dishes that are easy to make in big portions and easy to divide up. It’s a European way of doing things, but it’s also just Southern hospitality. “It’s not like going out to eat. You’re coming to our house for dinner,” Danielle says. The family relies so much on the food in their own organic garden that, in the summer, they don’t order produce. Big fans of Alice Waters and her philosophy, Danielle and Marie offer cooking workshops and vacation packages and are considering writing their own cookbook (relentlessly entrepreneurial seems to run in the family).

Different ingredients, different influences, very different stories. It seems the thing that links these chefs most strongly to the Southern cooking tradition is a direct, even familial, connection between the food and the people doing the cooking and eating. “I love working with my mom,” says Deschamps. “And I really think that makes the food taste better.”

Star conveys the same sentiment. At Rosetta’s, “the staff are my friends, and I think that really comes through,” she says. “People leave feeling happy and content, and they’re not aware that it’s just as much because of the atmosphere as because of the food.”
Maybe that’s what he was getting at when famed Southern food writer John Edgerton said one of the cuisine’s defining characteristics is that everyone is welcome at the table. “It’s not about how you fry a vegetable, it’s whether or not you say hi to your neighbor and invite them in to sit down for a while,” says Star. “The only thing you can do wrong in Southern food is not have enough for everyone.”  

COMFORT FOOD
To learn more about Rosetta’s Kitchen in downtown Asheville, call 828-232-0738 or go to www.rosettaskitchen.com. For more about the Mast Farm Inn in Valle Crucis, call 828-963-5857 or go to www.mastfarminn.com