It’s nice to live in an area where ingredients for any given recipe are rarely more than a short drive away. Vivian Howard doesn’t have that luxury.
The award-winning chef, bestselling author, and PBS star is accustomed to making meals out of whatever’s available at the Piggly Wiggly nearest to Deep Run, North Carolina, the tiny farming community where she grew up and lives today.
“I am at my most creative when my purpose meets constraints,” she explains in “This Will Make It Taste Good: A New Path to Simple Cooking” (Voracious/Little, Brown, $35).
Howard’s 2016 opus, “Deep Run Roots,” led readers through the backroads of her Eastern Carolina heritage. Her latest literary endeavor takes them behind the doors of her home pantry, and shows them how to make the homemade staples that “brighten, deepen, and define the food I cook.”
Each chapter centers around a “flavor hero,” with stories and recipes that reveal their superpowers and the roles they play in her life. A freezer tray filled with cubes of caramelized onions punches up pedestrian dips, lackluster soups and pots of beans. A handful of V’s Nuts — savory-sweet spiced pecans —instantly modernizes a Waldorf salad, elevates banana bread, and joins forces with sun-dried tomatoes in a romesco-like sauce that turns any dull protein or vegetable into a dazzler.
Little Green Dress, a potent herbal sauce infused with olives and other briny things, keeps excess herbs from going to waste while offering Howard’s personality-plus signature to everything from baked potatoes to deviled eggs. She shares the story of how, during the peak of pandemic lockdown orders, she and her team sent out jars of the versatile stuff in quarantine kits. Armed with purpose and new possibilities, they could move forward toward hope.
“Maybe it’s a stretch to suggest that Little Green Dress and this pain-in-the-ass of a book saved my business as well as my sanity,” she writes, “but I don’t think so.”
Susan Puckett is a cookbook author and former food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her at susanpuckett.com.
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