In Southern Roots, Spring Council offers a brûléed riff on her late mother’s corn casserole and writes personal essays in a similar register: comforting, with a singed edge.
The cookbook-slash-memoir, out from W.W. Norton and Company this month, intersperses homey recipes with stories of Council’s upbringing in 1960s Chapel Hill as the youngest daughter of the legendary Mildred Council, AKA Mama Dip, whose namesake restaurant stood on Rosemary Street for half a century before closing last July.
As a food writer, Spring Council has chops: she grew up watching her mother cook not with recipes but by smell and sight and feel, and that sensory attention carries into her writing. Cornmeal-coated porgies hit a cast-iron skillet with a “snap, crackle, and pop.” Rock candy gets a “good chew to release the sugariness that had soaked into the string.”…