Kenny Gilbert had dozens of ideas for his first cookbook, but the Florida-based chef was behind it Silkie’s Chicken and Champagne Bar in Jacksonville kept coming back to one thing: a collection of recipes that could serve as an autobiography. So it would be a classic Southern cookbook, but not only that because that would ignore the global influences – the global flavors – that made him who he is.
Born in Ohio, Gilbert started scrambling eggs at age three and has been cooking ever since: working his way through the Betty Crocker cookbook as a child, flipping McDonald’s burgers as a teenager, running top-notch resort kitchens and opening restaurants of his own . He has spent most of his adult life in the South, but the South, he will be the first to point out, is not a monolith. Gilbert’s cooking has been shaped by the people and cultures he encountered along the way: his introduction to Korean barbecue, courtesy of a former colleague at the Amelia Island Ritz-Carlton; a lesson in the art of the Guyanese pepperpot from his time in Barbados.
The result is Southern cuisine, global flavors, which uses iconic Southern recipes—fish and grits, ribs and coleslaw—as a portal to the diversity of American cuisine. It’s not just the classics, but variations that tell a nation’s story, the riffs and substitutions that organically blend cultures. It’s a book, Gilbert writes, “intended to give you the confidence to cook authentic meals for friends of different ethnic backgrounds, use ingredients you may not be as familiar with, and spark an interest in the diversity of cultures that.” Make America up.” As he gears up to open a new project in Miami this summer — House of Birds and Drop Biscuits, which it’s going to sound like — I caught up with Gilbert to discuss the mix of cultures, misunderstandings of the South and the many, many ways to speak collards.
There are restaurants. There are spice mixes. you have oprah Why a cookbook?
I felt like I could tell a story about my journey as a chef growing up with a southern mother from St. Augustine, Florida and a midwestern father from Chicago. I’ve always looked for ways to incorporate them into dishes from other cultures because the South is a melting pot. For example, down in Jacksonville there is a large naval base and many Filipinos are stationed there. A husband who might be Filipino, a woman who might be white – say Irish and Italian background – and then her parents are deeply rooted in the south. I wanted to be able to honor the ingredients of the South but also respect the other cultures that live here and find ways to incorporate the ingredients of the South into the traditional things of their culture.
The format of the book is really cool, and I haven’t seen it very often: each chapter introduces a dish, and then you present it five different ways, each with different global influences.
I thought, let’s take 10 iconic, great Southern dishes and let’s take the traditional Southern version that I love first, and then we can create variations. How are these tastes and techniques changing to accommodate other cultures? If I want to make a chicken parmesan version with fried chicken and biscuits, what does it look like? Okay, well, you can take the buttermilk biscuit and add crushed red pepper flakes and some basil, some garlic, some Asiago cheese, and you have something that fits the Italian world. We let the chicken go through a standard breading process, but make a nice fresh Pomodoro tomato sauce with basil and fresh mozzarella, and now you have a Chicken Parmesan Cookie.
I love kale and cornbread – a great classic combo. But why not take the classic Thai green papaya salad and instead of green papaya add a chiffonade of kale and then make a little coconut cornbread crepe? Someone who is Southern might say, “Oh, I love kale, I love cornbread — wait a minute, that’s a crepe? I’ve never had Thai flavors before!” Suddenly we are merging two cultures in a very respectful way. With the book, I wanted to be able to tell a story about how I encountered different cultures, whether it was at a friend’s restaurant or at my friends’ house, Lake and Russell Pattaya Thai in Jacksonville, or if it was because of my travels to that country.
One of the things that struck me was how much you learned about different cultures just by working in restaurant kitchens.
Absolutely. My best friend is Filipino, and the first time I heard about Chicken Adobo was that he was cooking a family dinner on a Saturday. I was just blown away by how delicious the flavors were. We stayed at the Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island and worked in the grill room. I was the chef. He was the sous chef. And the hotel’s chef was always looking from afar to see how we could do even better and he had suggested that one of the best ways to do it was to prepare everyone for a family dinner something that reflects their cultural background. Back then, the kitchen was like the United Nations. I had a chef who was from Israel, so I learned about shakshuka and sumac, a lot of these different Israeli dishes. All the great things Michael Solomonov did with Zahav and K’Far and all those different concepts? I learned a lot about this food just at the family dinner on a Saturday.
What misconceptions do you encounter about Southern cuisine? What do people outside the South often do wrong?
Not everything is fried chicken and cookies, macaroni and cheese, kale and cornbread. Ultimately, it’s the ingredients that are native to Africa and brought here by the slave trade that make up the food of the South. Just like preparing black-eyed peas, it doesn’t always have to be a big pot of braised black-eyed peas. You can take these black-eyed peas as an ingredient. Is it an ingredient native to Africa? Yes. But if you love hummus, you can make hummus with black-eyed peas. They still celebrate South African ingredients.
The food we actually had during slavery was mostly leftover food – we had to learn how to preserve produce. We didn’t get top-notch plays. They said, “Here’s the ham shanks, find out,” so they cured them and then smoked them and then had to braise them to make them tasty. And they put them in a big old pot with beans to flavor them, and so we could eat. You took some corn, dried it, ground it up, mixed it with some hot water and put it in a pan over the fire and that was our supper. That would basically fill you up with going to the fields and picking cotton. That’s what we survived on, because that’s all we’ve been given. But now it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t all have to be heavy and prepared with lots of animal fats. We still need to celebrate this food because that’s what built America. But it can also be easy; it can be aromatic; it can be increased.