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Carla Hall knows what you’re thinking when you hear “soul food.”
Smothered pork chops. Macaroni and cheese. Caramel cake.
That’s what she calls “celebration food.” Every cuisine has its share of rich dishes meant for special occasions.
“No one can eat like that every day,” Hall says. Besides, “soul food isn’t always the fattening things you think.”
So she decided she would reach back into her African-American heritage and demonstrate how one can eat soulfully — and more healthfully — year-round, as her ancestors did. The result is her latest cookbook, “Carla Hall’s Soul Food: Everyday and Celebration” (Harper Wave, 322 pages).
The celebrity chef and TV personality “hooty-hooed” into San Jose recently for a culinary demonstration at Macy’s, where she is the newest member of the Macy’s Culinary Council. (The Valley Fair event sold out before the store even had a chance to promote it broadly.) She’s currently appearing on the “Strahan and Sara” show and has just taped “The Ultimate Thanksgiving Challenge” for the Food Network for the upcoming holiday season.
Right now, however, she’s all about summer produce. Her vegetable and fruit recipes — there are dozens of them in the cookbook — are perfect for California, where most years we’re eating tomatoes, corn and peaches clear through October.
“You are blessed with so many farmers markets,” she told the crowd as she whipped up a horseradish-spiked buttermilk dressing for a salad with Little Gems, cherry tomatoes, fresh corn, radishes and herbs. It’s a dressing you can use all year long; just sub in fall, winter or spring veggies, she says.
Oh, and Hall is big on kitchen shortcuts. In fact, she has the home cook in mind when she’s developing recipes, reasoning that “if I make little work of the prep, they would cook more.”
(Here’s a Hall hint: Place those little tomatoes between two plastic lids and you can slice all of them in one swipe. Just remember: “Sharp knives are safe knives.”)
For this soul food brunch, Hall followed that summer salad with two options, a savory but light entree of Hot Smoked Salmon (made on the grill or in the oven) and Grilled Salmon with Mustard Sauce. If you’re making a marinade for smoking, she says, mimic the ingredients you used in your salad dressing for the first course.
(Hall hint: Use a microplane to grate that garlic. It’s much faster and easier than cleaning a garlic press.)
After those two healthy courses, there’s room for a little indulgence. “What time is it?” Hall hollers at the audience. “It’s biscuit time!” they holler back.
She’s devoted much attention over the years to the baking of biscuits, starting with learning her Granny’s time-tested techniques. “She cut the butter evenly into the dry ingredients fast enough to keep it cold, so that it could steam in the oven to create all those flaky layers,” she writes in the cookbook.
Hall had to devise a way to teach novices how to do that. “The trick? Grating frozen butter. You can use the large holes of a box grater or the lightning-speed shredder of a food processor. … Even if you’ve never made biscuits before, you’ll end up with perfect ones with this technique.”
(Hall hint: Aerate your flour by sifting or whisking it, then measure it, and don’t tap it down in the measuring cup. Doing so throws off the ratio of liquid to dry ingredients.)
By the way, she’s a fan of using shortening in her biscuits, and she always butters the pan instead of using parchment — you’ll get nice crispy bottoms on your biscuits.
She’ll serve these with a Blueberry Compote made of both fresh blueberries and blueberry jam, with fresh lemon juice, lemon zest and cinnamon. And top them with whipped cream.
(Hall hint: Want a tangy whipped cream? Combine equal parts heavy cream and sour cream.)
Her summer recipes flow nicely into her suggestions for tailgates and game-day parties at home.
Even though she hails from Nashville, home of the Tennessee Titans, when it comes to the grueling game of football, she’s a soft touch: “I’m always for the team with the ball.”
For that halftime main course, consider Slow Cooker Pulled Pork, which she admits in the cookbook “isn’t true pulled pork” — seeing as how it won’t be smoked for 14 hours — but still stands out as a great way to feed a crowd. It’s a favorite of her 23-year-old stepson, Noah.
Serve something light, like Pickled Cucumber Salad, on the side. “This is exactly what you need in a parade of rich dishes,” she writes.
Or introduce the West Coast football fans to the soulful version of Brunswick Stew made by Hall’s great-aunt Lucille’s husband. Whatever was growing in abundance in the garden, she says, from lima beans to cabbage, helped stretch what little chicken or pork they had on the farm.
“But it didn’t taste like deprivation,” Hall writes. “It tasted of bounty.”
And that, Hall says, is how to reclaim soul food.
