Cookbook sings song of the south Favorites fill paperback

HOPPIN’ JOHN’S LOWCOUNTRY COOKING, by John Martin Taylor, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, 2000, 345 pages, $18.

Every New Year’s Day, southerners eat Hoppin’ John – a dish of black-eyed peas and rice – for good luck. Sometimes the dish is served with a plate of greens, cooked with ham hock, and plenty of corn bread to sop up the “pot likker.”

So, naturally, a cookbook by the title of “Hoppin’ John’s Lowcountry Cooking” caught my fancy the other day when I was scraping away the leftovers from New Year’s Day.

John Martin Taylor’s paperback is chock-full of recipes and ruminations from Charleston and the Carolina coastal plain. In fact, the book offers such a glimpse into “Lowcountry” living that it prompted a quote on the cover from Pat Conroy, author of “Prince of Tides,” who calls Taylor’s book “a treasure to delight all cooks.”

I agree that such a regional cookbook is a treasure, for it offers the flavors of Carolina’s history and culture in its collection of more than 150 recipes of the region’s native dishes. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say it will delight all cooks.

Not everyone wants to sample scuppernong jam, let alone squirrel burgoo or cooter soup.

But if anyone could convince you to try a plate of fried wild turkey or stewed raccoon, it would probably be Hoppin’ John Taylor himself. Ever since the hardback version of the cookbook was published in 1992, critics have said Taylor writes “so provocatively and gives such a strong sense of place” that folks want to go and taste for themselves. Gourmet magazine wrote of Taylor, “No one has done more for Charleston’s culinary resurgence.”

Taylor, the author of four cookbooks, makes and sells his own line of traditional southern dishes and food products. Many of his recipes feature the gifts from the sea: crab, shrimp, shad, sturgeon and oysters

– eaten during the colder “r” months. Just listen to the lyrical description of Taylor’s fondness for the 8-to-10-inch oysters taken from the salt marsh banks near his home:

“Garnished only by the glint of a January sun, May River oysters were then close to perfection – and better than any I’ve had since. Yankees talk about cold-water oysters being the best, but I have eaten American oysters in Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, and Washington state; abroad, I’ve eaten oysters in England, France, Portugal and Spain. And nowhere have I tasted a meaty, juicy, salty oyster to compare with our uncultivated varieties here in the South Carolina Lowcountry, where they are continually washed by the incredible flow of our eight-foot tide, one of the largest on the East Coast of America.”

Thus begins Taylor’s smorgasbord: Bessie’s Crab Cakes, Benne-Oyster Soup, Crawfish Gumbo, Quail Wrapped in Vine Leaves, and Duck Breasts on the Grill.

Not to mention Country Ham, dry-cured in salt, the most internationally famous southern food for which a neighboring state, Virginia, is legend. No wonder, Taylor says. “The recipes for curing have not changed in 350 years. Harriott Pinckney Horry wrote down curing receipts from Virginia in her late 18th-century journal.” Now, “curers” in Smithfield, Va., ship more than 10 million country hams each year.

Hoppin’ John Taylor and I have a few things in common, one of them being our childhood memories of frog gigging, one of the favorite summertime sports for southern youngsters who went to sleep each night to a chorus of bullfrogs. Taylor gives his own version of Fried Frog Legs.

Fried Frog Legs

24 (about 4 pounds) individual frog legs

1 lemon

Unbleached all-purpose flour for dusting

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

A little salt and freshly ground black pepper

Dry white wine (optional)

Drained capers (optional)

Put the frog legs in a shallow nonreactive baking dish and squeeze the juice of the lemon all over them. Allow to marinate for about 30 minutes at room temperature. Remove the legs from the pan, pat dry, and dust lightly with flour. Melt the butter in a saute pan, shake off any excess flour from the legs and saute them over fairly high heat in the butter until golden brown, You may deglaze the pan with a little dry white wine, and you may add some capers, as my father recommends before pouring the now browned butter over the legs and serving them hot.

Or try one recipe to taste the sweetness of the southland itself: Mint Juleps.

“Pound ice in a towel against bricks, then make a simple sugar syrup by mashing several fresh mint leaves in a teaspoon of sugar with the back of a spoon in each silver mint julep cup. Add, a little at a time, some bourbon or sour mash whiskey and a little of the finely crushed ice to each glass, stirring all the while and alternating the liquor and the ice until the julep cup is filled and heavily frosted on the outside. Garnish each julep with a sprig of fresh mint and serve with a white cloth napkin folded around the base of the cup.”

John Taylor and I would agree: Y’all surely will enjoy that.