5 Ingredients or Fewer

This recipe was born in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee where, as kids, we went camping with our parents. We caught fresh trout, and Mama cooked them right up on the grill in foil packs. It was the best-tasting fish we’d ever had. If we’re making this over a campfire, we serve it on its own. At home, it goes well with green beans.

Salmon is something so healthy that we just had to put mayonnaise on it. The lemon mayo gives it a great zesty flavor and oomph—it keeps the fish moist, too. Our lettuce and cucumber salad is a perfect match for this light dish.

This is our Granny Paul’s recipe for fried chicken, and it’s as simple a taste of Southern home cooking as there ever could be. Serve it with collard greens and some mashed potatoes, and before you know it you’ll be whistlin’ “Dixie.” And you don’t need to save this meal for Sunday suppers—if you’re short on time, just skip the refrigeration and season the chicken right before you fry it to have yourself a down-home after-work treat.

We perfected making honey mustard during the early days at The Lady & Sons, where it’s served mostly on the side as a condiment, or as a dipping sauce for the kids’ menu (see The Lady & Sons Honey Mustard Sauce, page 159). At home, we throw store-bought honey mustard in with chicken for this family-pleasing dish that’s a little sweet on the outside and nice and juicy inside. Warm macaroni and mozzarella salad is a nice complement to the chicken.

Southern cooks love to serve Swiss steak—a dish made with a tougher cut of beef that’s been pounded and braised with enough red sauce that it becomes so tender you can eat it without a knife. And that’s where the idea for this dish came from—pork chops cooked in marinara sauce and topped with cheese. We like to serve the chops with a bowl of egg noodles tossed with butter and chopped fresh parsley or with our Garlic Mashed Potatoes (page 21)—anything to soak up some of the delicious sauce.

As kids growing up, we always loved Mama’s tasty “hobo” dinners. Super easy to make—she would just throw everything together in an aluminum foil packet—and easy on the wallet, these complete meals in a pouch were on the table each and every week. To dress up these humble-as-a-hobo meals for company, try adding baby carrots, fennel, and other root vegetables, along with some nice ground sirloin. The aluminum foil seals in all the flavor of the ingredients and makes the sacks—fancy or simple—even more delicious than they ought to be. And though they are a whole meal in themselves, we love to serve them with our Moist-and-Easy Corn Bread (page 45).

I use this rib spritz on spareribs and baby back ribs. It’s easy to make, and it will change the way your ribs look and taste. You can make it up to a day in advance and store it in the spray bottle, unrefrigerated. Since I can’t do that at a contest, I prepare it right after I put my ribs in the smoker. After the ribs have smoked for about 45 minutes, I start spritzing the meat at 15-minute intervals.

Pimiento cheese is the bright orange spread that Southerners are crazy for because it’s comforting and delicious and traditional. It’s most often served as a dip or spread, but it’s also good in a sandwich all by itself or as a topping on burgers. I like to make up a big batch for family gatherings and barbecues, and if I have some left over, I’ll eat it in a sandwich the next day. I’m going to give you a big recipe, too, so you can do the same.

If I’m working, which is to say I’m not drinking anything strong because I’m focused on winning a competition, I don’t drink anything besides sweet tea. I love sweet tea, truly. It’s the drink of the South, the drink of my home. Here’s how we do it.

Cold fruit salads like this one are an old-fashioned piece of Americana. You can find recipes for stuffed canned peaches and pears and other so-called salads like this one in historic Southern cookbooks and of course in classics like the Joy of Cooking and The Settlement Cookbook. You don’t see them much around anymore, which is a shame because this salad is cool and refreshing—a great thing to serve for a summer lunch or as a first course for a dinner party. It may seem weird nowadays to serve canned pears with mayo, but would I waste my time with something that wasn’t good as hell? I didn’t think so.

If you think I’m talking about the haircut—“business in the front, recreation in the rear”—you best move on to the next recipe. If you know good food, you’ve probably heard about mullet, which is a fish found worldwide in tropical and coastal waters and abundantly on both coasts of Florida and into Georgia. Mullet is a bony fish with light meat and a stout body—and it’s oily, so it takes especially well to absorbing smoke. Any good fishmonger should be able to get you some.

I saw this on the menu at an Italian restaurant, and although I did not order it, I liked the idea of using a little of my own dark maple syrup to lend its flavor to the delicate, creamy custard. So I developed this recipe through trial and error. That’s another advantage of cooking something just for yourself: you’re the guinea pig, and you can work out all the nuances before you make the dish for company. This recipe makes enough for two, so either share it or treat yourself to a second helping later in the week.

I learned from Claudia Roden, who brought the secrets of Middle Eastern cooking to this country in the 1960s, how to make this invaluable preserve, which adds zest to so many dishes. I even find that you can use a little of it in place of fresh lemons to perk up a dish.

Another of the treats of summer was making ice cream, cracking up the big block of ice and taking turns with the crank—hard work that was rewarded by getting to lick the dasher when the ice cream was ready. Today we can buy convenient small ice cream makers that allow you to put the freezer bowl into the freezer so there’s no chopping of ice and the churning goes much faster. I particularly like making my own ice cream because I can use pure ripe seasonal fruits and berries and pure cream, without all the additives of candies and cookies that go into the commercial varieties today. Also, it’s a good way to preserve berries if I’ve been tempted to stop at a nearby farm where you can pick your own—and I inevitably pick more than I can eat up.

I can’t resist making this special tart for myself when my Duchess apple tree in Vermont is laden with the most flavorful apples I’ve ever tasted. I’ve never sprayed the tree, so, yes, there are what we call wormholes, but I peel around them or dig out the dark tunnels with the point of a knife. If you’re using a frozen portion of your own tart dough, remember to take it out in the morning and let it defrost at room temperature. If you’re making up a new batch, be sure to make extra to put away for a repeat performance.

Every summer, I get my share of the syrup from my maple trees in northern Vermont that my cousin John taps in the spring. I particularly like the dark syrup he produces, and I devise ways to use it in old-fashioned desserts like this one. I also use the tart apples from a Duchess tree that embraces the house. So I consider this dessert a gift of nature, and I hope you’ll find your own good sources for its ingredients.