Down South: Bourbon, Pork, Gulf Shrimp & Second Helpings of Everything
Donald Link with Paula Disbrowe
Photographs by Chris Granger
2014
Purchased from Kitchen Witch, French Quarter, New Orleans
Dishes cooked: Creamy onion dip, shrimp rémoulade, smothered chicken, lamb shoulder stew with lemons and olives, pork neck bone stew
Dishes I want to cook: Chicken liver pâté, blue crab beignets with rémoulade sauce, parmesan bacon gougères, fried fish collars with chile vinegar, shrimp and crab spaghetti, orange cream cheese bars with shortbread crust
Difficulty to make: Easy
Difficulty to source: Easy to medium
Reading Down South will definitely put you in the mood to do something wild like buy live blue crabs, and you better have long tongs when you do because they are looking for a fight!
Boy do I hate mosquitoes, but boy do I love going to the same parties that they do. Take me to a Saturday night oyster roast and give me enough hunter-strength DEET and High Life so the bugs don’t mind me and I don’t mind the bugs, and I’m happy as a clam in camouflage. (A quick story’s next, or leap frog to the review!)
My parents are from the North Shore of Boston but raised my siblings and me in Fredericksburg, Virginia, with its four Civil War battlefields. My parents sent me to the University of Virginia, where, as they would expect, I wore sundresses to horse races that were about day-drinking and served mimosas from my hard-earned Lawn room at 41 West, but they would be none too happy to know that back in Fredericksburg, I also smoked in the kitchen of our local crab shack in the wee small hours and downed pineapple moonshine at a motorcycle repair shop. I didn’t fancy myself a southern girl but I kind of was when it fancied me the most—when the party sounded like either the fanciest or the un-fanciest kind of fun.
Great eating at chef Donald Link’s New Orleans restaurants in 2014
I first ate at Donald Link’s Cochon on a business trip to New Orleans in March, 2008, and it was there that I actually ate cow’s tongue for the first time. It was pickled and came with roasted beets. I wrote in my travel journal, “I liked it! And I am not surprised. For my second course, I had their roasted oysters. My God they were perfect. They were arranged on a plate of sea salt and spiced so well that I think the chef must have tried a hundred variations of seasoning before discovering that one.” Ten years later, I’m smiling at what I once considered adventurous and novel, and at my assessment of my server as “easy on the eyes.” I’m sure he was. I found the party, of course, going dancing with an indie film crew after dinner—strangers—before walking the seemingly forever-long walk from the club through the Harrah’s casino to get to my hotel on the other side of it. Six years later, I’d return to New Orleans for a ridiculously fun wedding, and I’d win around eighty bucks at the quarter slots at that Harrah’s early on a Sunday afternoon, shortly after tending to a richly deserved hangover with fried alligator tail, gumbo, and rabbit and dumplings at Cochon.
The south is a fun place, and Link takes you there in his second cookbook. You learn that the title Down South is taken from a line from a Kings of Leon song, that “Freebird” was the anthem to his high school parties, that nothing in life might quite ever compare to listening to the Eagles’ “Seven Bridges Road” while looking up at the stars, all in the first paragraph.
And you should really sit down, listen, and take it all in. After eating at two of his restaurants and reading one of his cookbooks cover to cover, if someone asked me to name any chef I’d like to have a beer with right now, it would be him. And I’d hope it would go well enough that he’d take my husband and me on one of his Gulf fishing trips. (Pssst, Chef Link, I’m lucky with fish. No kidding.)
Making pork neck bone stew
You get to learn a lot about the guy from his food. Link has a lot of friends, the kind of friends who don’t mind sharing sworn-secret kinds of recipes with him. Link has a sense of humor, where the jokes are told to you with a hand cupped over his mouth so not everyone can hear, but it’s not at anyone’s expense. Link has a knack for finding the best food in all of the south, like the red beans and rice at the Audubon Zoo cafe, where he brings his kids, quote, “to watch the alligators.” Link has pretty strong opinions about animals, especially bees, bullfrogs, chickens, pretty much every fish and shellfish in the Gulf, and a llama named Fritz. Link has a cousin named Billy, who you’d hope he would bring to wherever you’re meeting up for that bucket-list beer. I’m sure we’d need at least a bucket of beers, and keep ‘em comin.’
The cookbook is divided into chapters for cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, grilled meats, oven and stovetop cooked meats, off-cuts of meat and fish, seafood, side dishes, and desserts. While there are recipes with the “holy trinity” of Cajun cooking—onion, celery, and bell pepper—you should stock up on the onions mostly, then some garlic, shallots, flat-leaf parsley, mint, bay leaves, jalapeños, and paprika. Dried thyme, oregano, and chili flakes wouldn’t be a bad idea. Your citrus fruits, red wine vinegar, and cooking wine would help. Definitely a lot of flour. And then just your pig bellies, fish heads, and lamb’s legs. And you’ve got yourself feasts for weeks.
Making smothered chicken, which Link says combines the South Alabama and Louisiana cooking his grandparents proudly brought to the table
This is one of the friendliest cookbooks I’ve ever come across, in tone, inclusiveness, and ease. I’ve recommended it more times than I can remember and gifted it twice. The smothered chicken (page 97) takes twenty minutes to prep at most; once it starts to braise you can ignore it for an hour and a half until you serve it, making it pretty perfect for entertaining. It’s also wildly forgiving. The recipe calls for dredging bone-in, skin-on chicken (the only kind of chicken I like to buy) in flour and searing it in oil in a Dutch oven before building a roux from the remaining juices and fats. I made it for my parents at home in Virginia; my mom’s old pan was sticking and I knew it would start to burn right away, so I switched pans and started a new roux without the chicken juices—ugh!—to form the base. It was no less flavorful than the last time I’d made it in LA, though. My parents raved, going back for seconds and thirds of the gravy for the rice and roasted broccoli I served with it. The gravy was not even intended for the broccoli.
I also love the lamb shoulder stew with lemons and olives (page 102) and the pork neck bone stew (page 132) so much that I made them for my mother-in-law, whose Brunswick stew is a fixture at every gathering. With the lamb recipe, I substituted shanks for the shoulder both times I made it, to perfect results. The pork neck stew, which has smoked sausage and six kinds of pepper elements, is one of the five best pork dishes I’ve ever had in the world, with Scarpetta’s Thanksgiving porchetta, Ham Ji Park’s gamjatang, La Mariseca’s fried snout, and Proof on Main’s double chop. I’m naming these so you know I’m serious.
Shrimp rémoulade
I even love the design. Short introductions are boxed in beige over every recipe, the recipe titles and ingredients appear prominently in bold mustard and forest green type, and chapter names are printed beside page numbers on right-facing pages for easy flipping. (I would love a listing of all of the recipes upfront, but this is rarely done these days.)
But there’s more to the friendliness than that. My dad has always said that it’s better to be kind than right, and Link is kind—and fun—from beginning to end. Of the differences between regional barbecue styles, Link writes, “I like them all, depending on where I am and what I’m eating. It would be a boring world if all food tasted the same, so I embrace the differences” (page 66). He feels similarly about the best way to eat cold shrimp. “I guess, truth be told, it depends on whether I’m going to be standing or sitting (with a knife and fork) to eat!” (page 52). Country terrine on its own is “brilliant” but he went ahead and fried it, because “the Southerner in me needed to take the porky goodness to the next level, so I went for it” (page 126).
Lamb shoulder stew with lemons and olives
And just as often as he does something Southern, he does something South American, or Italian, or Pacific Northwestern. If you read really carefully, you’ll find out that Link has traveled and lived and cooked outside of Louisiana, but you will not get even a hint of an ego for what he’s been able to do as a chef, much less a mention of his multiple James Beard Awards. The international influences are many, and fun, as in the beef short rib sugo, Uruguayan spicy baked cheese, and chicken liver pâté.
Down South has been a blast to cook from—exactly the kind of party I want to have now that I’m in my mid-thirties. My horse-betting and hot-boxing days are behind me, but I got around a hundred more of these recipes ahead of me. That’s good living.
