Contemporary Authors

1. Deep run roots : stories and recipes from my corner of the south https://lccn.loc.gov/2016931447 Howard, Vivian (Vivian S.), 1978- author. Deep run roots : stories and recipes from my corner of the south / Vivian Howard. 1st edition. New York, NY : Little, Brown and Co., 2016. pages cm ISBN: 9780316381109

• Vivian Howard - http://www.vivianhoward.com/vivian-ben/

  Vivian Howard
  Writing a description of yourself is really hard. But under instruction to list the things that make me, me - I’d have to say I’m a first time author whose young adult self dreamt of being a writer. I’m the mother of a twin boy and girl who once doubted her maternal instincts. I’m a chef who cooks for therapy. I’m a lucky daughter who counts her parents among her friends. I’m a strong-willed wife who loves her husband but often struggles to work with him. And I’m a television personality who can’t bear to look at herself in pictures. My greatest strengths are fearlessness, creativity, enthusiasm and humor. My most frustrating weaknesses are patience, organization and numbers.

  I always thought winning awards was for someone else and have been genuinely happy to be named a semifinalist 4 times in a row for James Beard Foundation Best Chef Southeast. But this past year, I won a JBF award for Best Television Personality and I have to say, winning made me happier than being nominated.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Howard

  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Vivian Howard at the 73rd Annual Peabody Awards
  Vivian Howard (born 1978) is an American chef and television personality. She is most famous for being the head chef and co-owner of the restaurant Chef & the Farmer in Kinston, North Carolina, and for starring in the award-winning PBS television series A Chef's Life.

  Contents [hide]
  1 Early life
  2 Restaurant career
  3 A Chef's Life
  4 Awards and accolades
  5 Personal life
  6 References
  Early life[edit]
  Howard grew up in Deep Run, North Carolina, a small community near the town of Kinston. Her parents were farmers who raised hogs and grew tobacco, cotton, soybeans, and corn.

  At age 14, Howard attended an all-female Moravian boarding school, Salem Academy, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and then spent two years at Virginia Episcopal School. In 2001, she earned her BA in English Language from North Carolina State University. During her time at NCSU, she would study abroad for a semester in Argentina, as part of a culinary-themed program.[1] After graduating, Howard moved to New York City and began working in advertising for Grey Worldwide. She quit after 18 months and started working as a waitress at Voyage restaurant. Scott Barton, the restaurant’s executive chef, became her early mentor.[2]

  Restaurant career[edit]
  Howard graduated from the Institute of Culinary Education in NYC in 2004.[3] She completed an internship at Wylie Dufresne's wd~50 and trained as Chef de Partie at Jean-Georges Vongerichten's Spice Market.[3]

  Howard married Ben Knight, one of her coworkers at Voyage, and the two started a soup delivery business out of their apartment in Harlem, an effort that included chilling soup in the bathtub.[4] Despite offers from investors to open a brick and mortar location in New York, the couple agreed to accept Howard’s parents' offer to buy a restaurant in Kinston.[5] Howard and Knight moved to North Carolina in 2005 and opened Chef & the Farmer in 2006 in a downtown building that had once been a mule stable.[4] More than 60% of the ingredients used in the restaurant come from within a 90-mile radius.[6]

  The restaurant strives to create modern interpretations of traditional regional dishes, as collected from members of the small Eastern North Carolina community. Howard says, "Older folks in our community teach me how to make something very simple. One of the things I like about A Chef's Life and dislike about modern media, in general, is that [our culture is] very young-person-new-ideas driven, and I don’t think people call on the wisdom of older folks very much. To learn from them and share has been wonderful."[7]

  In 2012, the Chef & the Farmer building caught fire and had to be rebuilt.[8] In 2013, Howard and Knight opened the Boiler Room, a casual spot that serves oysters and burgers across the street from Chef & the Farmer.[9]

  Howard has authored one cookbook, titled Deep Run Roots - Stories and Recipes from my Corner of the South, which was released in October 2016.[10] After the book was released, it remained on the New York Times Bestseller List for 3 weeks straight. In 2017, "Deep Run Roots - Stories and Recipes from my Corner of the South," won four IACP Cookbook Awards including: Cookbook of the Year, Julia Child First Book Award, Outstanding Restaurant Cookbook, and Outstanding Cookbook in the General Category. Howard plans to write another cookbook which will release in 2019.

  Howard and Knight are opening a new restaurant in the up and coming Wilmington Warehouse District in Wilmington, NC called Benny's Big Time Pizzeria set to open in the summer of 2017. [11]

  A Chef's Life[edit]
  Storytelling is an essential piece of Howard's style as a chef: "I believe in cooking food that has a story behind it and integrity to it - food with a very specific sense of place and that people want to eat."[3]

  In 2011, after being concerned that certain food traditions would be lost without documentation, Howard contacted her friend Cynthia Hill, a filmmaker from Eastern North Carolina.[12] Together, Howard and Hill filmed a pilot. PBS and South Carolina Educational Television picked up the show, and Seasons 1 and 2 aired nationally from 2013 to 2015. Season 3 premiered in September 2015.[needs update]

  The show has attracted many fans to Chef & the Farmer, and has contributed to Kinston's increasing economic growth.[13]

  Awards and accolades[edit]
  A Chef's Life is a 2014 Peabody winner for Excellence in Broadcasting, a 2015 Daytime Emmy winner for Best Directing of a Lifestyle/Travel/Culinary program , and was a 2016 James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Culinary Host .[6]

  Howard in addition was nominated for James Beard Foundation Award for Television Program, On Location (2014, 2015, 2016), Visual and Technical Excellence (2015), Outstanding Personality Host (2015), and American Cooking: Deep Run Roots (2017).[14] Howard was named a James Beard Foundation Award semifinalist for Best Chef Southeast five consecutive times (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017).[9] She was also nominated for two other Daytime Emmy's including: Outstanding Single Camera Photography (2015) and Outstanding Culinary Host (2017)

  Chef & the Farmer has been given a AAA Four Diamond Award seven times (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016),[15] a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence (2009),[16] and was named an OpenTable Top 100 Restaurants in America (2011).[16]

  Restaurant reviewer Greg Cox of the News and Observer wrote, "Chef & the Farmer is much more than a stopover. It's a worthy destination in its own right, well worth the hour and a half drive from the Triangle."[16]

  Personal life[edit]
  Howard is married to Ben Knight. The couple met while working together at Voyage restaurant in NYC. They currently reside on Howard's homestead in Deep Run, North Carolina, with their twin children, Theo and Flo.[6][17]

• The New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/dining/vivian-howard-north-carolina-chef-and-the-farmer.html

  Vivian Howard, a TV Chef, Offers Hope for Her Rural Hometown
  By KIM SEVERSONJAN. 17, 2017
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  Vivian Howard, who spent her childhood plotting an escape from her rural eastern North Carolina county, has become an unlikely engine in its economic and cultural revival. Credit Dillon Deaton for The New York Times
  KINSTON, N.C. — Just before Christmas, in the soup kitchen that serves this small town built on tobacco, textiles and hogs, the chef and cooking show star Vivian Howard finished stirring a pot of pork and sweet potato stew and turned to a local television reporter.

  How does it feel, the reporter asked, to know that she had saved her hometown?

  “If I had saved Kinston,“ she replied, “we wouldn’t need a food bank, and all these people wouldn’t be waiting for lunch.”

  Ms. Howard, 38, has been called many things. Her mother calls her the life of the party. Her father calls her Big Time, a nickname from her childhood. A few of the 80 people she employs call her a control freak. But “hometown hero” may be the label that makes her most uncomfortable.

  “Saving a town was not what I was trying to do,” she said. “I’m just a storyteller. A storyteller who cooks.”

  Still, Ms. Howard, the girl who spent her childhood plotting an escape from this rural eastern North Carolina county, has become an unlikely engine in its economic and cultural revival.

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  JL January 23, 2017
  Come vist Eastern NC. Come explore a simpler existence where living serves its own purpose. Make a reservation at Chef and the Farmer or...
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  I am a fan of the show and a home cook and a sometimes blogger. I moved to NC from New England. I love learning about the food of Eastern...
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  Lets get real critics. You're being rather hypocritical. Before you criticize others, ask yourself why you haven't done more to help the...
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  Twelve years ago, when her family talked her into coming home to open a restaurant, she thought that somehow she had failed. Now, Ms. Howard is five seasons into “A Chef’s Life,” her popular public television show. Her restaurant, Chef & the Farmer, attracts talent from the best professional kitchens in the South; traveling food celebrities drop by to learn about the region. New restaurants, galleries and a brewery have come to town. The lady who taught her how to make biscuits can charge tourists $100 for a private lesson.

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  At first glance, the show seems an unlikely hit: a slow-rolling half-hour about running a restaurant, managing a family and how best to cook regional specialties like cabbage collards or flounder caught from the nearby Atlantic, or seasoning meat coaxed from the jowls and tails of pigs. Guests include the guy at the fish store, the neighbors who make collard kraut, and the farmer who sells the restaurant its vegetables.

  But to many of the show’s three million fans, and to the guests who travel hundreds of miles to eat at her restaurant, Ms. Howard is a rural Princess Leia. In the wake of an election that laid bare the nation’s political, cultural and economic divisions, her life has a particular resonance with the kind of people who see her story as theirs.

  “What I came to realize was that much of rural America feels forgotten and misunderstood and, frankly, hopeless,” Ms. Howard said. “Urban folks are afraid of rural folks, and rural folks are afraid of urban folks. On our show, we try to bridge the gap.”

  She and her team paid for the first season, which aired in 2013, with a crowdsourcing campaign and a little money from organizations like the North Carolina Pork Council, Blue Cross Blue Shield and a group of civic leaders. The show was something of a Hail Mary pass for a region trying to find something to replace tobacco production and factory work.

  “I like to call it more like ‘Waiting for Guffman,’” said Ben Knight, 40, Ms. Howard’s husband and the restaurant’s manager, who enjoys his own celebrity status among fans.

  The show caught on, winning a Peabody Award and a daytime Emmy. Sponsorship is so robust that they can afford to pay some of the local residents who appear as guests.

  Photo

  Damage in Deep Run, N.C., from the floodwaters of Hurricane Matthew last October. Credit Dillon Deaton for The New York Times
  On about any weekend night, most of the 220 diners who land a seat at her restaurant will be from somewhere else. Her parents, John and Scarlett, are regulars. After they eat, they’ll take a spin through the parking to count the out-of-state license plates.

  “It’s the darn craziest thing I have ever seen,” John Howard said. “People will drive 300 miles for a meal.” (As one of the state’s largest commodity hog producers, he also can’t believe the price his daughter pays for local, pasture-raised pork.)

  On a recent night, Sarah Reichard, 35, arrived for dinner with her husband, Mitch MacDougall, 34. The vacationing Maryland couple had brought a copy of Ms. Howard’s best-selling new book, “Deep Run Roots,” neatly annotated, with sticky notes marking their favorite recipes. At 564 pages, the book is both an important catalog of the unique cooking style of coastal North Carolina and a record of the emotional journey of a young woman who grew up feeling disenfranchised and ashamed of her people.

  Ms. Reichard, who was raised in a small Pennsylvania town, trembled as she spoke with Ms. Howard. “She talks about things I feel all the time,” she said. “I hate where I’m from, too.”

  From as early as she can remember, Ms. Howard had wanted to get out of Deep Run, the slip of a community near Kinston where she was born. She was in boarding school by 14, then headed to North Carolina State, where she dreamed of becoming a journalist. She moved to New York, burned out at an advertising agency, and stumbled into a waitressing job at Voyage, a globally influenced Southern-style restaurant in the West Village.

  There, she fell in love with a co-worker, Mr. Knight, 40, an artist who paints large abstract works with glossy acrylics. She attended the Institute of Culinary Education, interned at Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50, and cooked on the line at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Spice Market.

  Photo

  Ms. Howard’s restaurant, Chef & the Farmer, attracts talent from the best professional kitchens in the South; traveling food celebrities drop by to learn about the region. Credit Dillon Deaton for The New York Times
  The couple were selling soup from their Harlem apartment when her brother-in-law asked them to come home to Kinston and open a restaurant in the building he had bought in the faded downtown district.

  They moved in 2005, happy to be out of New York, living rent-free and child-free in a little house on the river that her father calls his nap shack, and finding their way in the community.

  Still, the economic reality was grim. Hurricane Floyd had ravaged the region six years earlier. The tobacco warehouses and shirt factories had long been shut down, and the DuPont polyester plant was a shadow of its former self. “Everyone here had an excuse for why they hadn’t left yet,” Ms. Howard said. “I was like, ‘I should be ashamed of this place, too.’”

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  In what seemed to many a foolish move, they opened Chef & the Farmer. At first, they served fancy city food. She remembers the day her sister pointed out that three of the four desserts had vegetables in them, and that didn’t mean carrot cake.

  “I was cooking down to people,” Ms. Howard said. “I didn’t feel like these people had anything to teach me.”

  She decided to embrace the local dishes she had grown up eating. She could elevate the wild muscadine grapes, the slow-simmered butter beans and the “tom thumbs” — air-dried pork sausages whose casings are made from pig appendixes. In the process, she elevated herself. She came to consider the people in her town as guides to a stronger, simpler way of living.

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  Vivian Howard Makes a North Carolina Classic
  Vivian Howard Makes a North Carolina ClassicCreditDillon Deaton for The New York Times
  Buoyed by the increased interest in Southern cooking and a few good mentions in the regional press, she persuaded the documentary filmmaker Cynthia Hill to make a TV show. Ms. Hill had grown up seven miles away from Ms. Howard, and she understood the desire to leave a place and then come home again.

  “Initially, I think she was just trying to save herself,” Ms. Hill said. “In the process, she is saving a lot of people.”

  The show has started a sort of renaissance in the town, where a local investor has opened a boutique hotel and the well-regarded Mother Earth brewing company and taproom. Storefronts are being refurbished. The couple has opened an oyster bar and burger joint called the Boiler Room across the alley, and are planning a bakery.

  “I don’t think she realized this was all going to happen, but right now she’s the hometown girl that made good and came back, which gives her some cachet,” said Bill Smith, a chef and Southern food authority who grew up in the area. Mr. Smith appeared on a recent holiday special, helping Ms. Howard and her neighbors kill a pig and make corned ham from it.

  Not everyone, however, is entirely enamored of the food. Grayson Haver Currin, until recently a longtime editor at Indy Week, an alternative paper published in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle, thinks chefs like Sean Brock in Charleston, S.C., and Ashley Christensen in Raleigh do a better job interpreting the traditional Southern culinary canon for modern eaters.

  “That said, in Kinston it’s kind of eye-popping that food like that exists,” Mr. Currin said. “The story of that family and what they’ve accomplished in small-town, postindustrial America is fascinating. But it’s a slow process and it’s a limited process. No matter how many $20-a-plate restaurants you put in that town, you can’t change the economics and racial realities.”

  Photo

  Ms. Howard on her father’s farm in Deep Run, where she spent her young childhood. Credit Dillon Deaton for The New York Times
  The average annual income in Lenoir County, which has about 58,000 people, is $20,191. In Kinston, the county’s most populous community, almost 70 percent of the residents are black, while most of its elected leadership is white. At the fish store and the Piggly Wiggly, black customers didn’t seem to know about Ms. Howard’s show or her restaurant. The managers, who were white, did.

  The region’s troubles only got worse in October, when floodwaters brought on by Hurricane Matthew devastated the community. Four died, bridges were washed away, and roads were closed for weeks. Four of the six hotels in the town flooded, and more than 3,200 people applied for help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

  Ms. Howard was on her book tour when the hurricane hit Kinston. Her marketing plan was to tour 24 cities in a tricked-out food truck. For $50, people got a book and a simple supper, like a bowl of eastern North Carolina fish stew and eggs, built from chunks of fish layered with potatoes and onions and flavored with onions, tomato paste and chile flakes.

  All but one event sold out. Fans lined up to tell Ms. Howard about their mothers who, like hers, suffer from rheumatoid arthritis. Ms. Howard’s young twins are sometimes on the show, which led to a parade of parents eager to discuss their own twins. Chelsie and Jono Brymer, a young couple from Trenton, Mich., drove to Chicago just to see her. They, too, had moved back home, to a struggling former steel town, to open a little French cafe called Promenade Artisan Foods.

  “We watched the show and realized we were not the only ones who ask ourselves if we were crazy to do it,” Ms. Brymer said.

  By the time she returned home, Ms. Howard was exhausted. From the road, she had organized a statewide fish stew fund-raiser for flood victims that raised more than $30,000. She had shaken hands with so many strangers that she felt like a politician. She had seen her 5-year-old twins, Florence and Theodore, maybe four times during the tour.

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  Ms. Howard vowed to stay home more, tending both to the children and to the restaurant in a more balanced way. There would be no more T-shirts with her face on them, and less energy spent on expanding her line of sauces and rubs. And Ms. Howard is changing the show, now shooting its fifth season. It will still be set in eastern North Carolina, but it will shift the focus to the people in her life who cook food from other cultures.

  “There’s only one of me,” she said, “and I have to decide what I want to do.”

• PBS - http://www.pbs.org/food/chefs/vivian-howard/

  Vivian Howard is the star of the new PBS show, "A Chef's Life." The program will premiere in September 2013. Check your local listings.

  Born in Deep Run, NC, to tobacco and hog farming parents, Vivian Howard learned early on to appreciate the ebb and flow of eating with the seasons. Still, it took 23 years and a start in the advertising business to convince her a career in food was feasible. After college, Vivian moved to New York for work, but found the City’s food and restaurant scene far more intriguing. A server position at the Voyage in Greenwich Village made it possible for her to begin trailing under Scott Barton, the restaurant’s chef. She later went on to learn from creative, cutting edge chefs Wylie Dufresne and Sam Mason at WD-50 and later, as a member of the opening team at Jean Georges Vongericten’s Spice Market.

  In 2005, Vivian, and her now husband Ben Knight decided to return to Vivian’s roots to open a farm to fork restaurant in the small town of Kinston, NC. They opened Chef & the Farmer in the summer of 2006 serving local, seasonal, creative cuisine. Over the past four years, Chef Howard has developed strong relationships with local farmers making it possible to source over 70% of the restaurant’s foodstuffs from within 60 miles. Chef & the Farmer has become beloved by locals and a destination for diners all over the state.

Howard, Vivian. Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from
My Corner of the South
Lisa Campbell
Library Journal.
141.17 (Oct. 15, 2016): p109.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text: 
* Howard, Vivian. Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South. Little, Brown. Oct. 2016. 576p. photos, index. ISBN
9780316381109. $40; ebk. ISBN 9780316381093. COOKING
Cocreator of the award-winning PBS series A Chef's Life, Howard left the grueling kitchens of New York to open a restaurant near her hometown
in rural North Carolina. Her first cookbook presents an intriguing story of reconnecting with family and rediscovering ingredients such as turnips,
tomatoes, sweet potatoes, peaches, and collards. Home cooks of all skill levels will devour Howard's recipes (e.g., sweet corn boiled in a big pot
with coconut ginger butter, sausage-stuffed honey buns, fried green tomatoes with curried peach preserves and whipped feta), whose appeal goes
far beyond that of typical Southern fare. VERDICT A standout collection of regional Southern foods, both simple and restaurant-worthy.
By Lisa Campbell, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Campbell, Lisa. "Howard, Vivian. Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 109.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466413065&it=r&asid=359d5148dbaa40b7268be89f679fdaf7. Accessed 1 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466413065

---

6/1/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1496350386833 2/2
Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of
the South
Publishers Weekly.
263.40 (Oct. 3, 2016): p114.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
* Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South
Vivian Howard, photos by Rex Miller. Little, Brown, $40 (576p) ISBN 978-0-316-38110-9
On the heels of her Peabody award--winning PBS show, A Chef's Life, restaurateur Howard (Chef and The Farmer) shares personal stories and
240 recipes inspired by fare from her hometown of Deep Run, N.C., in this outstanding debut. Returning home following a Manhattan culinary
career, Howard reacquaints herself with regional dishes and ingredients of her youth, discovering a vibrant, multi-generational farm-to-table
world. In odes to 25 local ingredients such as dried corn, watermelon, pecans, peanuts, beans and peas, sausage, and collards, recipes combine
Howard's food memories with "modern sensibilities" and wisdom gained in professional kitchens. Fans of Southern cooking will find plenty of
catfish, corn cakes, cast-iron skillet dishes, and cooking-with-Grandma stories--but it's not all biscuits and gravy. Recipes elevate fried green
tomatoes with curried peach preserves and buttermilk whipped feta; okra gets tempura batter and tangy ranch dressing ice cream; oysters are
transformed into a citrusy apple and scallion ceviche; and marinated turnips are dressed with orange, pumpkin seeds, and ginger-orange
vinaigrette. Going beyond the glories of grits, Howard's text is storytelling at its best, rich in mouthwatering detail and reminiscences, though at
times her lively anecdotes obscure the recipe directions. This tribute to her family roots is destined to become an enduring classic. (Oct.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South." Publishers Weekly, 3 Oct. 2016, p. 114. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466166640&it=r&asid=45981d0c4e2961f78b2ca90222943646. Accessed 1 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466166640

Campbell, Lisa. "Howard, Vivian. Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 109. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466413065&it=r. Accessed 1 June 2017. "Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South." Publishers Weekly, 3 Oct. 2016, p. 114. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466166640&it=r. Accessed 1 June 2017.

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/deep-run-roots-reviewed-a-southern-chef-and-tv-star-brings-on-the-charm/2016/11/07/562bab5e-a1db-11e6-8832-23a007c77bb4_story.html?utm_term=.83b9a94f5a9d
  Word count: 1278

  ‘Deep Run Roots,’ reviewed: A Southern chef and TV star brings on the charm
  By Jane Black November 7, 2016
  "Deep Run Roots" by Vivian Howard (Little, Brown, 2016) (Little, Brown)

  One of my favorite recipes in Vivian Howard’s new cookbook, “Deep Run Roots” (Little Brown), is one I will probably never make. The list of ingredients for Hoarded Corn includes: an afternoon, trash bags, the biggest pot you have and at least 200 ears of sweet corn. “This is a process,” Howard writes, “so make sure you hoard enough corn for it to matter. . . . With several sets of hands and lots of life to discuss, the work goes fast.”

  The result is some 20 quarts of frozen corn kernels that you can use all winter. But it’s more than that. It’s a tradition in recipe form. Howard is striving to deliver a cookbook version of what she has done so improbably and successfully before: Open a restaurant that showcases the food of eastern North Carolina. Then turn that story into an award-winning PBS reality TV show, “A Chef’s Life.” For Howard, the 200-plus recipes in “Deep Run Roots” are one more way to introduce people to what she calls her “corner of the South.”

  [Vivian Howard lives ‘A Chef’s Life,’ her attempt to show the real North Carolina]

  It’s a compelling proposition, if the fans lining up are anything to judge by. Howard hit the road Oct. 4 in a food truck for book sales and signings and plans to make 41 stops for events across the eastern United States before Thanksgiving. (She will be in Arlington and Bethesda on Nov. 13 and 14, respectively.) The events, which include a book and a meal made up of such Howard specialties as pimento-cheese grits, Eastern North Carolina fish stew and banana pudding, were limited to 200 people and have sold out in many cities.

  Howard is indisputably charismatic. She’s beautiful, talented, hard-working and, contrary to most reality-TV stars, utterly real. She stresses about which dishes go on the menu, about her staff, about her twins, Theo and Flo. Viewers of Season 3 of “A Chef’s Life” even watched Howard beat herself up for missing her deadline for this book.

  Vivian Howard, right, talks with Lillie Hardy during a visit to Brothers Farm in Howard’s home town of Kinston, N.C. (Ted Richardson/For The Washington Post)

  The delay was surely attributable in part to the fact that books always take longer than writers imagine — especially if you are a chef running two restaurants and filming a TV show, and the final product clocks in at 576 pages. But it was also because Howard was determined to write the book herself rather than delegate to a ghost- or co-writer, as so many TV chefs do.

  Good decision. A chef by training, Howard is first and foremost a storyteller. Her essays contain both deep thoughts and passages that make you chuckle. Consider the first line of an essay on okra: “If the South had a mascot, it would be okra. Loved, hated, misunderstood, defended, and worn like a badge that defines you, both okra and my region’s people go out into the world pridefully carrying the same baggage.”

  Howard’s personality is also visible in the recipe headnotes, which, sadly, are becoming a lost art. In so many books, these short introductions are obligatory, offering only make-ahead tips or a syrupy story. But Howard makes every one count. Take this summary of her Blueberry-Rosemary Breakfast Pudding: “Dear Blueberry Muffins and Pancakes, I’m sorry,” she writes. “This bread pudding brings everything you do to the breakfast table and it can be assembled the night before.” In 26 words, Howard tells you how the dish tastes and reassures you that you don’t have to whip up a batch of muffins on a Sunday morning.

  Apple and Scallion Oyster Ceviche. (Dixie D. Vereen/For The Washington Post)
  Blueberry-Rosemary Breakfast Pudding. (Dixie D. Vereen/For The Washington Post)

  [Make the recipes: Apple, Scallion and Oyster Ceviche; Blueberry-Rosemary Breakfast Pudding]

  Sandwiched amid the fine culinary writing are many delicious recipes. Like the TV show, each of the book’s 24 chapters focuses on a different ingredient (peaches, pecans, collards, etc.). That makes sense for storytelling, but, as Howard acknowledges, it is tricky for cooks looking for inspiration for soup or dessert. And so she has added a front-of-the-book index that makes it easy to find recipes you need.

  That bread pudding, with its crunchy sugary topping, was a hit with tasters. A ceviche made with oysters, diced apple and charred scallions was a reminder that oysters can, and should, be eaten other ways besides simply freshly shucked. Howard is also happily unafraid to offer her readers shortcuts, such as already-shelled raw peanuts or Uncle Ben’s rice.

  Of all the dishes I made, my favorite was Scarlett’s Chicken and Rice, named for Howard’s mother. Also called a “bog” in parts of the South, it involves simmering a whole chicken — preferably an older stewing hen — until it’s falling to pieces, then adding rice to make a rich and starchy stew that could be bottled and sold as a cure for winter colds. It was, in my mind, perfect in its simplicity. But my husband used it as a blank canvas, adding peas, mushrooms and a dash of hot sauce. (That, too, was delicious. Just don’t tell Scarlett.)

  Scarlett’s Chicken and Rice. (Dixie D. Vereen/For The Washington Post)

  The problem is, it could have been a disaster. The recipe encourages cooks to find a stewing hen but neglects to instruct us to skim off the fat before adding the rice. I took nearly 10 ounces of fat out of the pot; leaving it in would have resulted in a greasy mess.

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  According to the publisher, Howard tested the recipes by watching as a home cook made them. Apparently, that led to some oversights. For example, for a surprisingly lovely sliced-turnip and orange salad, Howard assumes you are getting big bunches of greens atop the roots, which is not the case at most farmers markets and certainly not true at the grocery store. An indication of just how many turnip greens you need — and what to substitute if you don’t have them — would have been welcome.

  Still, anyone with a little experience in the kitchen can work through those issues. That leaves me with one major complaint: the photos. Rex Miller, the director of photography for “A Chef’s Life,” shot the pictures. The ones of Howard and the scenery of eastern North Carolina are, like the show, charming or downright stunning. But food photos — a foundation of any cookbook — look amateurish. That delicious chicken and rice looks gray and unappetizing. In too many cases, you have to trust that the food will taste better than it looks.

  The good news is that you can trust Howard. For 10 years, her honesty and authenticity have been on display at her restaurants and on TV. Her new book shows them off, too.

  Marinated Turnips With Orange and Pumpkin Seeds. (Dixie D. Vereen/For The Washington Post)

  Recipes:

  Apple, Scallion and Oyster Ceviche

  Blueberry-Rosemary Breakfast Pudding

  Marinated Turnips With Orange and Pumpkin Seeds

  Scarlett’s Chicken and Rice

• Saveur
  http://www.saveur.com/vivian-howard-deep-run
  Word count: 1783

  The First Lady of Carolina Cooking

  How 500 pounds of blueberries—and returning home to the South—gave new life to chef Vivian Howard
  By Vivian Howard July 21, 2016
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  vivian howard

  Vivian Howard, North Carolina native and former New York chef, preps for dinner service in the kitchen at her restaurant, Chef & the Farmer.

  Tim Robison

  This is how the blueberry helped me find my voice.

  When we opened Chef & the Farmer in Kinston, North Carolina, Kinstonians made a lot out of my pedigree. A small group of people were thrilled that a local girl, trained in New York, came home to open a restaurant, but most people were a little suspicious. Both groups believed I brought back with me a different notion of how to cook, a revised palate, and a penchant for the sophisticated. What I brought back, unfortunately, were just other people's recipes. I had no sense of the type of food I wanted to cook. And I certainly had no idea how to use food, particularly the food of my childhood, to connect with people.
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  I didn't grow up at my mother's hip making biscuits or elaborate Sunday lunches. I was instead busy plotting my grand exit from the middle of nowhere, Deep Run, a tiny farming community about halfway between Raleigh and the Atlantic Ocean. If you call Deep Run home, you either live on or adjacent to a farm. No stoplights, no strip malls. And I had big dreams, the kind I believed you could never realize in a community that housed more pigs than people.
  deep run

  Howard's home in Deep Run (right), where the blueberries abound

  Tim Robison & Matt Taylor-Gross

  I moved away for school and ultimately landed a job in New York City. After a stint in advertising, I began to work in restaurant kitchens, where I met my husband, Ben Knight, a painter who dressed in leather and chains and worked at the restaurant as a server to pay the bills. From our apartment in Harlem, the two of us opened a soup business, delivering to our customers on days off from our other jobs.

  One winter during a visit to Deep Run, my family suggested we move back home to give our soup business a North Carolina storefront. Upon our return to a frigid New York, Ben and I trudged through the snow and up four flights of stairs only to discover our heat was broken—and decided it was time for a change.

  I live now on the same winding rural road where I grew up and go to work each day 15 miles away in Kinston, where we opened our restaurant in 2006. The first year, we did fine. I made seasonal, tweaked versions of other people's food, and it was pretty good. Did James Beard rise from the dead to give me a medal? No. But at the time, I wasn't embarrassed by any of it.
  vivian howard

  Howard swaps out saltines for pork rinds in this riff on an oyster bar classic.

  Tim Robison

  Well into the next year, my dad called to say he had a blueberry connection who was ready to make a deal.

  A note about my dad: John Currin Howard, like a lot of men, loves a good project. But when most men would settle for fixing up an old car or building a fence around the property, my dad would move two dilapidated homes from opposite ends of the county to our family farm, connect them with a hallway, and make it his nap shack, which Ben and I moved into when we came back home. That's my dad's type of project.

  So when John Currin told me he had a source for blueberries, I knew one thing: I was going to be buying a lot of blueberries. That Saturday, just before dinner service—the absolute worst time to receive a massive produce delivery—my dad showed up with 500 pounds of them.

  By raising our food traditions up, shining a light on them, and validating them, we've been able to give people a pride in the place they come from.

  Even if I had a crew of five people dedicated only to those berries, there wasn't enough working refrigeration in all of downtown Kinston to store them. So the berries sat out in the heat, boxes stacked on top of one another. The next day, Ben and I woke up to a quarter ton of blueberries past their prime.

  This was before you could go to the Internet and learn how to pickle a pine tree, so I put my nose in The Inn at Little Washington Cookbook by Patrick O'Connell and stumbled upon a recipe for blueberry vinegar. It sounded good, so that's what I made. Then we had to figure out what to do with 30 gallons of blueberry vinegar. Neither my New York training nor my cookbook obsession pointed me anywhere useful, so I looked around me.

  Eastern North Carolina may be known to outsiders for whole-hog barbecue sauced with seasoned vinegar, but a whole-hog pig pickin' is not an everyday event. What I actually ate once a week as a kid was chicken done the same way—split in half, then slowly smoked until the skin crackles and the meat falls apart before being dressed with cider vinegar and spices.
  boiler room

  Howard's other restaurant, Boiler Room, in nearby Kinston, puts a modern twist on the classic Carolina oyster bar.

  Tim Robison

  A man named Tom Heath, a fixture from my childhood whose connection to my family I can't really explain, used to bring us three barbecued chickens every Saturday morning. Like the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee, the smell of vinegar and smoke pulled me out of my bed to our kitchen, the promise of chicken still warm from the coals much greater than the comfort of sleep. Tom's chicken, cooked in smoke and bathed in a mildly sweet vinegar sauce—that's how my blueberry barbecue chicken was born. A few days later, it hit our menu. Our guests loved the way it looked: crispy, crackly, caramelized purple. They responded to the way it smelled: sweet, smoky, intoxicating. But most of all, people loved that it made them remember something they had eaten many times before, and somehow it complemented rather than competed with those memories.

  No one was more surprised than I was. The blueberry chicken was familiar, but different. And I pulled it off because I tapped into a deep personal connection to my hometown. I had found my voice in those blueberries, and together we sang about this place.

  —Vivian Howard's Deep Run Roots (Little, Brown), from which this essay is adapted, will be released in October.
  Get Vivian Howard's Recipes
  tomato pie

  Roasted and Fresh Tomato Pie

  As soon as the first tomato blossom turns into a tiny green orb, people start calling Chef & the Farmer to find out if tomato pie is on the menu. In a restaurant where we sell more big hunks of meat than I'd like to admit, tomato pie outsells everything all summer. If you have access to two different colors of tomatoes, combine them here—one for the roasted portion and another for the fresh. It's a nice visual touch. Get the recipe for Roasted and Fresh Tomato Pie »

  Tim Robison
  cornbread coffee cake

  Cornbread Coffee Cake with Fresh Figs and Walnut Streusel

  I developed this cake with breakfast in mind, maybe something to share with family over coffee. But when I first made it, my kids named it corn-candy cake and called for it after supper. I obliged and put some whipped cream on top. Whenever you choose to eat it, feel good about baking it a day ahead. It keeps beautifully and is as satisfying at room temperature as it is warm. Get the recipe for Cornbread Coffee Cake with Fresh Figs and Walnut Streusel »

  Tim Robison
  peanut float

  Peanut, Pepsi, and Bourbon Float

  Peanuts in Pepsi, once a common tobacco field snack, is now a tall glass of fabulous. This foaming spectacle of sweet, salty, creamy, crunchy, and boozy is the gold standard of ice cream floats. The ice cream will keep in the freezer for up to three weeks. Get the recipe for Peanut, Pepsi, and Bourbon Float »

  Tim Robison
  watermelon rind pickles

  Watermelon Rind Pickles

  Even when summer gets away from us at the restaurant and we're not able to pickle and preserve the heck out of everything in our path, we somehow find a way to make these pickles: It feels good to make something translucent and crispy out of stuff that's potentially trash. That's one reason we go to the trouble. The other is that they're a pork chop's soul mate. Use a vegetable peeler to peel a whole watermelon—it's easier than slicing it up first. Get the recipe for Watermelon Rind Pickles »

  Tim Robison
  pork rind roosters

  Pork Rind Roosters

  Roosters are an oyster bar standard made up of a single saltine topped with an oyster, horseradish, and several slices of jalapeño. The tradition: You shoot one back, grimace, chase it with a beer, and before you know it, you've eaten a dozen and got a T-shirt to prove it. This is not that. This tastes good. Instead of something you'd eat only after partying a bit, this version is an adept way to start a party. Get the recipe for Pork Rind Roosters »

  Tim Robison
  blueberry bbq chicken

  Blueberry BBQ Chicken

  Similar to a shrub—a fruit syrup punctuated by vinegar—my Blue Q sauce makes a bracing drink when mixed with club soda or booze. It's also the first step in a fruity vinaigrette. And as much as it loves smoke, this sauce sees my oven more than my grill. Keep in mind this is not a marinade. Brush it on toward the end of cooking and let the chicken soak up more of the sauce before serving. The final soak is key. Get the recipe for Blueberry Barbecue Chicken »

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