5.7.2017  Join us for Breakfast in Texas with veteran chef and cookbook author Terry Thompson-Anderson

To read Terry Thompson-Anderson describe a meal is like listening to Maya Angelou recite a poem: the reader is transformed with depictions of spices, flavors, and aromas. Texas’s most awarded and prolific cookbook author took time from her busy schedule last week to talk about cooking, writing and her most favorite dinner in this week’s Lone Star Listens.

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: Terry, you're a professional chef, cookbook author, culinary instructor, and restaurant consultant. But I understand that you grew up in a household that didn’t emphasize cooking, and when you married and set up housekeeping, you had to learn a lot about cooking from your mother-in-law. What was one of the first dishes/meals that inspired you to take your cooking to the next level?

To be sure that I don’t paint a picture of my mother as having had an uneducated palate, she very much enjoyed fine food. She just wasn’t an enthusiastic cook and didn’t know a great many kitchen techniques. Both of my parents loved to dine out and we did often as a family, exploring all types of food from diner delights to steakhouses, to seafood, and upscale fine dining. So I developed a palate for good food at an early age. She did not teach me how to cook. My one attempt at [learning] came from a desire to bake some kind of chocolate cookies for my father. The recipe involved melting chocolate in a double boiler. I knew what a double boiler was and that mother had one, but I had never seen her use it and didn’t know that you had to put water in the bottom pan. The result was that I melted the pan onto the burner of the brand new stove that had been delivered the week before. I was never allowed near the stove again. During college I ate things from cans.

But from my first mother-in-law I learned that great food could be prepared in the home kitchen too. She was a fine cook from Macon, Georgia, and everything she prepared in her kitchen inspired me — from learning that mayonnaise could actually be made by mere mortals, when I had always thought that it came to the supermarket from the mayonnaise gods, to the fact that she could pan sear two-and-a-half-inch-thick beef tenderloin steaks in her cast iron skillet, then make a simple mushroom sauce in the pan drippings and make it taste like my memories of the best steakhouses!

What made you decide to attend culinary school?

After having my eyes opened to the satisfaction generated by preparing fine food, my desire to learn more became insatiable and I made the decision to go back to school, but not in the halls of academics, but rather to the culinary school kitchen.

I understand that you had the privilege, along with five other women culinary professionals, to spend two weeks of intensive study with James Beard at the Stanford Court Hotel kitchens in San Francisco shortly before his death. What was that like?

The opportunity of learning from James Beard was an incredible major event in my professional life. Not necessarily from a “techniques” angle, since I already had good kitchen skills, but in learning how to taste — really taste — and to learn how to appreciate the ways that cooking methods (or no cooking, but rather marinating or just seasoning raw ingredients) could result in so many different taste and texture results using the same ingredient. I learned the critical importance of preciseness in cooking methods and timing in achieving results that were superlatively perfect dishes.

You’ve lived in several parts of the southern U.S. Which of each state’s food traditions have influenced your cooking?

I feel blessed to have lived in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi — three states that have such diverse culinary traditions. From my home state of Texas I have been influenced by the art of grilling all types of meat, but particularly the fine beef available in the state and game meats and birds, which are wildly popular and easy to source in Texas. Then, of course, no serious cook in Texas could not be influenced by the strong Tex-Mex presence. Just about every recipe I create has some Mexican ingredients lurking in there somewhere, and I have developed the use of dozens of varieties of fresh and dried chiles — even to the point of growing them myself. I also love to incorporate many of the wonderful Mexican cheeses in my cooking style. Then there’s the whole aura of goat — both meat and cheese.

I will venture to say that Louisiana has the most vibrant food in America. I was deeply influenced by the techniques and ingredients used in both rustic Cajun foods (many of them marshland critters like frogs and turtles) and the more refined Creole food of New Orleans. I developed a love for Louisiana’s beloved cayenne pepper so strong that one of my mentors, Nathalie Dupree, used to accuse me of carrying a tiny shaker of it in my back pocket. Cayenne has become a signature flavor in my cooking. From Louisiana I also gained a great respect for rice as a key ingredient.

From Mississippi I developed a passion for down-home comfort foods from the Delta region and the passed-down cooking traditions, many of which would appear to be simple, but often involve long cooking times and several cooking methods to prepare just one dish! I learned to love greens of every description, and they became an important part of my culinary repertoire, especially in the old, slow-simmered, cooked-to-death versions seasoned with smoked pork jowl. Living on the Mississippi Coast I learned oceans about Gulf seafood — not only the most popular varieties, but also the by-catch (often called “trash fish”) that are plentiful and underutilized, but equally as tasty as red snapper and flounder.

You ran your own restaurant in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, for a while. What advice would you have for aspiring restaurateurs?

My restaurant in Bay St. Louis was a great joy to me, but I had to give it up because life dumped some seriously bad happenings on my personal life. My advice for aspiring restaurateurs would be to have enough capital behind your venture to carry both the restaurant and your personal life for three years. It will take that long for it to become sustainable. (If everything goes right.) Study your competition — even those that failed. Learn why they failed and why the successful ones continue to thrive. Don’t copy them, of course, but rather incorporate their savvy into your operation. Hire good, knowledgeable people, treat them well, and certainly pay them well. Pay attention to every detail, both front and back of the house. Never serve a dish that is not perfect, even if it means scratching it from the menu that day!

In the early 1980’s a feature on you in Bon Appetit resulted in the first of many offers for you to write a cookbook. What was that like?

The Bon Appetit December 1983 feature on me was a game changer in my professional life. Yes, I had gone to culinary school and opened a cooking school in Lafayette, Louisiana, that I loved and that was popular, but I never dreamed it was popular enough that so many people would write to Bon Appetit about it! The article generated not only bags of mail, but requests to write cookbooks, as you mentioned, but requests for restaurant consulting — and I didn’t even know what that entailed. I had to confer with people who did consulting before I could respond to the requests! But the cookbook requests knocked me over. I thought of people who wrote cookbooks as very special people, way beyond my skill set (even though I had a degree in English). But that first cookbook for HP Books launched my twenty-five-year-plus cookbook writing career and led to my friendship with the late, great Bert Greene, who held my hand through the arduous process of writing and editing it.

You've been publishing cookbooks for a quarter of a century. How has publishing changed since you started?

In the early days of my cookbook writing there were nice advances out there, which allowed enough funds for the best ingredients for recipe testing, travel for research, and a bit to live on while writing the book. And each author had a publicist who worked tirelessly to generate book tours, TV and radio experiences, newspaper and magazine articles, and much more to promote your book. Those advances have pretty much gone away. Writing cookbooks is still a very rewarding experience, especially if they are nominated for or win awards, but much of the promotion is now in the hands of the author. (But UT Press does a nice job of getting the word out on its lineup of books.) I think most of us now look at cookbooks as giving us credentials for other opportunities in the culinary field.

How long does it take you to publish a cookbook--from concept to book launch?

I am a deep researcher and a perfectionist in recipe testing, so typically my cookbooks take about three years from concept to my author’s copies arriving in the mail.

How have readers' tastes and culinary choices changed over the years?

Readers’ tastes and culinary choices have changed drastically over the years of my career. Most people who buy cookbooks today attend cooking classes, subscribe to several cooking magazines, and are savvy home cooks. Many travel, even culinary-specific travel, so you’d better know your subject matter.

Last, and most important, question!: If you could wave a magic wand and have the world's most perfect dinner — for you —what would be on the menu?

What a question! The perfect meal for me would have to be a multi-course tasting menu of small portions because it would contain so many, many dishes! But the ingredients that would have to be present in my perfect meal would be: oysters on the half shell, a couple of baked oyster half-shell dishes (perhaps perfect Rockefeller and my Browned Butter Oysters); boiled shrimp and crab in a nice, spicy remoulade sauce; seared Grade A Moulard Foie Gras; Louisiana-style Turtle Soup with Madeira; Crab Bisque; a little ramekin of perfect crab au gratin; Speckled Gulf Trout Meuniere; Eggs Benedict with a crab cake and poached egg on a crispy fried green tomato with Orange-Ginger Hollandaise Sauce; a ramekin of mixed greens with smoked pork jowl; a nice heavily seared, but rare beef tenderloin steak with a simple demi-glace sauce and some sautéed chanterelles on the side; a slice of grilled venison tenderloin with an ancho chile and honey sauce; a few slices of seared rare duck breast. All served with great French bread with French butter, and tiny slices of Key Lime Pie and Buttermilk Coconut Cream Pie, along with a slice of Nathalie Dupree’s Chocolate Roulade. And, of course, each selection would have a tiny portion of perfectly matched Texas wine to savor with it!

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