Damon Lee Fowler

A sure sign of summer in a Southern kitchen is a bowl or window ledge full of vine-ripened tomatoes from the garden. But an even surer one in mine is a jug of cold soup in the refrigerator. From early June (May when we lived in Savannah) until well into September, there's at least one such jug or bowl of a soup that's as good cold as warm. Though it can be heated to warm us on the odd cool evening, it's mainly there to have cold, to soothe and stir heat-blunted appetites.

At the moment, there are actually two: this summer's first batch of vegetable soup (still not quite like my grandmother's, but getting there) and a summer squash puree with leeks and thyme.

I don't really follow a recipe anymore. It's the same basic formula Read More 

As the intense heat of summer blasts its way through Virginia, temperatures here are already hovering on the edge of record-breaking three digits and it's not even July. This is the very kind of heat we moved away from South Georgia to escape. But contrary to what some of our friends back in Savannah seem to think, The Old Dominion is still The South, and we were well aware that it never has been immune to that infamous Deep South summer heat.

One lovely way that old Virginians once dealt with that heat at the table was Salmagundi, an elegant composed salad that was as beautiful to look at as it was delicious.

Composed salads like this one seem quite modern, and yet people are often surprised to learn that it was old when English Colonials first settled in this place and decided to call it "Virginia." The reason for that surprise is the popular supposition that the progress of cooking through history has been linear, advancing in a straight trajectory Read More 

The way each of us meets summer is often wrapped in nostalgia. No matter what our age, we anticipate it as we did in childhood, as if we can play our way through its long days in carefree, barefoot abandon, refreshed from the heat by endless wedges of cold watermelon and dripping cones of ice cream. It's a bit odd, then, that for most of my adult life, I've welcomed summer by making something I never had in my childhood: a classic French salade niçoise.

In a convoluted way it does go back: As a boy I loved canned tuna and olives, and this is both—with a French accent, no less. But that's a real stretch.

After all these years of making it, like most who love it, I've of course developed some very definite ideas about what belongs in a good salade niçoise—and doesn't. But Read More