Kitchen crew: La Rèsidence, circa 1978Photo:courtesy of Moreton Neal

Bill Neal once described the volume as "a small personal book that looked back over 300 years of pioneer settlement, native displacement, and enslaved importation that created a cuisine unique among the food cultures of the world." It is also useful for contemporary cooks. Well-thumbed copies live on the shelves of almost any chef whose food retains a Southern flavor. At the nationally renowned Magnolia Grill, located on Ninth Street, just a few blocks from East Campus, chef-owners Ben and Karen Barker consider Bill Neal's Southern Cooking so "fundamentally important for its historical perspective," as Ben Barker puts it, that they often give copies to their new cooks.

"He was the king daddy and remains the king daddy in his influence," Barker says of Neal's legacy for chefs inspired by Southern traditions.

Bill Neal began cooking at a time when Americans were tiring of can-opener casseroles. "Remember," says Moreton Neal, "this was back when anything topped with a can of mushroom soup was the height of fine dining in most of the South."

Restaurants like Alice Waters' Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, were making a name for themselves by reintroducing diners to the memorable flavors of fresh, local ingredients. Chez Panisse and other restaurants helped make California cuisine famous. Meanwhile, chefs elsewhere--Paul Prudhomme in New Orleans, Jasper White in Boston, and Larry Forgione in New York, among others--were demonstrating that regions around the country had their own traditions to build upon. As Neal's career developed, he became a standard-bearer for a fresh take on the foods that reflect the traditions of the American South.

La Rèsidence gained a devoted following for its flavorful, mostly traditional French cuisine. But it was in the 1980s at Crook's Corner, his next restaurant venture, where he elevated a low-country fisherman's breakfast, shrimp and grits, to dizzying heights as one of the signature dishes of the Southern culinary renaissance.

The original version was usually nothing more than shrimp, grits, and salt. He dressed up the shrimp with bacon, sautèed mushrooms, garlic, and scallions and served it over stone-ground cheese grits. The reinvented dish was worthy of a white tablecloth.

This culinary renaissance celebrated the foods of Southern grandmothers, dishes that formed the backbone of the "rural, indigenous, pork-based, corn-heavy, poor Southern cuisine" that sustained an impoverished region after the Civil War, says R.W. Apple, an associate editor of The New York Times who writes frequently on culinary matters. In 1993, Apple covered a tribute dinner to Bill Neal at the James Beard House in New York City, planned and cooked by admiring chefs, several of them former apprentices. Each chef contributed to the meal his take on a dish by Neal. "The stellar lineup," Apple wrote, "showed how widely Mr. Neal's ideas have percolated through the South."

As John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, observes, "Bill Neal was one of the first chefs who, by way of what he cooked in his restaurants and what he wrote in his books, said to eaters and readers, 'These foods are of merit.' We're a region with many foibles and deep-seated problems. Yet blacks and whites can take pride together in what we wrought at the stove and what we served on the plate."

Like music, food offers a shared experience, a context for coming together in ways that create a stronger sense of community. Just as good music thrives on talent cultivated with creativity and leavened with intellect, the new respect accorded to traditional Southern foods gained depth and breadth as much from Neal's insatiable curiosity and sound research skills as from his gifted palate.

For Neal, the kitchen became another form of classroom--for his own exploration of food or for his lifelong love of teaching others. Working in his kitchen entailed a lot more than chopping vegetables, searing meat, or washing dishes.

"He really inspired cooks to read and think and analyze, to look at [their work] from an intellectual point of view," says Ben Barker of the Magnolia Grill. The Barkers never worked for Neal. Ben, a Chapel Hill native, wanted to return to the area and applied for a job at La Rèsidence soon after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1981. Neal turned him down, saying that, as a self-taught chef himself, he preferred not to hire graduates of culinary schools.

In hindsight, Barker says he doesn't disagree with the decision. "Most culinary-school graduates come across as fairly arrogant," he says. "It was important in that kitchen dynamic that there be one leader and one source of information."