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A Master Chef’s Guide to Cooking Local

by Vicky Dickson

It took a trip to Italy to make Sheri Castle appreciate her own culinary heritage. The discovery the Chapel Hill cookbook author and cooking teacher made in that country was, she says, a real epiphany: Though she’d put Italian cooking on something of a pedestal and had come to Italy to learn how to be a better Mediterranean cook, Castle began to realize that the cooking she’d grown up with in the Blue Ridge Mountains was just as worthy, just as important a reflection of heritage and culture, as anything she encountered overseas. The best Italian meals she ate echoed Castle’s grandmother’s insistence on using only the freshest locally grown produce, as well as the Southern cook’s use of meat as a condiment rather than as a main dish. So Castle returned home a better Southern cook as well as a Mediterranean one.

Sheri Castle Photo by Stewart Waller

Castle didn’t originally set her sights on a cookbook-writing career. As the first person in her family to go to college, she was regarded as the one “who wouldn’t have to cook.” But even though she majored in journalism and went on to jobs where she wrote legal briefs and conducted computer-based training, Castle was always “the one who cooked” in her workplace. So it’s not too surprising that after her daughter was born, Castle decided to take a break from the corporate world to teach cooking.

Her cooking classes led to a column for the Triangle’s now-defunct Spectator, and then to other food columns, as well as ghostwriting and recipe-testing jobs for cookbook writers like Crook’s Corner’s Bill Smith and Foster’s Market’s Sara Foster. That experience probably made it inevitable that Castle would eventually dedicate herself and her kitchen to the year’s worth of shopping, prepping, cooking and cleaning demanded by the recipes that would become The New Southern Garden Cookbook.

It was a process that involved winnowing somewhere between 1,250 and 1,500 different recipes down to 350. Working in her kitchen with two computers, a notepad and different-colored pens, and full sets of both English and metric measuring tools, Castle tested as many as eight different versions of each recipe. (Sometimes those eight versions made up her family’s dinner that night.)
The result is a cookbook that’s a true pleasure to read and to cook from. The way it’s organized, in chapters that are centered on ingredients rather than dish types (with titles from “Apples” to “Zucchini”), makes it perfect for cooks who want to base their meals on what they find at the farmers’ market or in their CSA boxes – who want to cook with the freshest, locally grown produce.

If you’re beginning to suspect that Castle is something of an evangelist for locally grown food, you’re right. “We can’t continue to live on the opposite side of the country from where our food is grown,” she says.
She’s not rigid in that philosophy: “Eating local isn’t all-or-nothing.” (And who out there wants to give up banana pudding?) But being a person who “can’t walk through a market without grinning like a fool,” she wants to help people share her love of good, healthy food.

With The New Southern Garden Cookbook, Castle wants to remedy the fact that “a lot of people have given up on certain foods because they’ve never had a good version.” Her succotash recipe will do just that, so give it a try.

Lit Notes
Local Clyde Edgerton fans have a great opportunity coming up this weekend, with the acclaimed North Carolina writer, artist and musician scheduled to make four Triangle appearances to read from his new novel, The Night Train. He’ll be at Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books at 7:30 p.m. July 28, Durham’s Regulator Bookshop at 7 p.m. July 29, McIntyre’s at 11 a.m. July 30 and Flyleaf at 6 p.m. July 30. Since Edgerton is just as entertaining to listen to as his books are to read, you won’t want to miss the chance to see him.

Young-adult author and musician John Claude Bemis will be at Flyleaf at 2 p.m. on Aug. 28 to present The White City, the conclusion to his thrilling Clockwork Dark trilogy. The event, which is open to all, is the wrap-up to Flyleaf’s Summer Readers club, and is sure to include music and other fun.