Slimming Down Southern food

“So much Southern cooking gets a bad rap because people think of lots of butter, bacon fat and sugar, but that’s not real, good, Southern cookin’,” said Atlanta dietician and author Carolyn O’Neil.

O’Neil’s new, Southern Living book, “The Slim Down South Cookbook: Eating Well and Living Healthy in the Land of Biscuits and Bacon,” is if anything, a plea for a more nuanced way of considering and preparing Southern classics. The Atlanta freelance writer also writes a weekly nutrition column for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Over the last decade, especially in foodie circles, the region’s cuisine has ascended nationally. But as with other high-calorie/high-flavor regional and ethnic cuisines that have gained foot-holds on tables and in pantries, it was inevitable that a counter trend would rise to make the food seem less decadent. (Lite-Italian, low-fat Tex Mex, anyone?). We’re obsessed with flavor but riven with guilt over our ever expanding waistlines. With that in mind, O’Neil, a former CNN food and health correspondent, joins many who have tried to lighten up heavy, Deep South signature dishes. In her hands, okra and tomatoes are not stewed in a rich base of bacon fat and chopped onions, but grilled in olive oil. Her thick, country chicken soup is made of non-fat buttermilk rather than heavy cream. There’s pound cake, but it’s made in bite-sized muffin tins. They are Southern-centric recipes that remind you of the cousin who to the West Coast, then moved back to the South bringing with them the lighter style of cooking they took up while they were away.

And sprinkled throughout the book are Southern-lite, farm-to-table testimonials from heavy-hitters such as Frank Stitt, Hugh Acheson and Matt and Ted Lee.

“As an American regional cuisine that sprung onto the culinary scene maybe 20 years ago, these recipes are like getting back to the way recipes were even before that,” said O’Neil.

And by before that she means back to the agrarian South when people grew a good deal of their own food and cooked it fresh from the garden; a time when a plate was truly a meat and heaping servings of vegetables, because meat wasn’t always easy to catch or raise but a plot of collard greens or tomatoes was.

That’s the principle the book aspires to said, Southern Living executive editor Hunter Lewis.

“This book is not a compilation of lightened up faves or even a strict diet plan, though,” said Lewis in an email message. “It’s an extension of our philosophy about a balanced way of eating in the new South. What’s different and new about Slim Down South is that it reinforces the notion that Southern cooking is and has always been inherently healthy if you eat seasonally, responsibly, and follow a few guiding principles.”

So there are recipes for grits— baked, shrimped and otherwise— macaroni and cheese, buttermilk biscuits, even a fried green tomato slider. And there’s plenty of bacon, but used sparingly. The emphasis is on using just enough of the high calorie stuff to give the dish flavor, or in many cases leaving those ingredients out all together in favor of high impact spices such as ginger or hot paprika.

“It’s not about boiling green beans and sitting down to eat and being sad,” O’Neil said. “Nutrition is not just a list of what you take way. It’s about what you add.”

There are, however, a number of recipes in the book that don’t immediately scream Southern, such as ones for frittatas, blueberry smoothies or almond biscotti. O’Neil says every recipe has at least one ingredient native to the region. And there are a significant number of recipes that use prepared items, which she says was done with working parents and couples in mind.

Even so, it all boils down to a simple message about embracing the culinary legacy of the region, but acknowledging contemporary health concerns, the author said.

As for skinless, fried chicken, she has a recipe for that, too. But when it comes cooking pole beans to death, there’s a simple nutritional anecdote to that, she said: drink the broth remaining in the pan, better known in these parts as pot likker.