North Carolina People; Bill Smith, Chef, Crook's Corner, Chapel Hill

Good evening friends. You know, in the last quarter century, there's been a revolution in restaurants in North Carolina, particularly in Chapel Hill. Find new establishments where you can get good food. Tonight, North Carolina peoples in Crooks Corner, one of the pioneers in that movement, Gene Hamer, Bill Neil, and now Bill Smith. Shannon Ravanell and her friends at the Algonquin Press came up to see Bill, and this is a new cookbook that they've developed out of the recipes of this splendid establishment. We're going to meet and talk with Bill in just a few seconds. Funding for North Carolina people is provided by Wokovia, helping North Carolina people realize their financial goals since 1879. And by UNCTV members. Bill so many magazines of bragging on what's going on and the restaurants around here in southern cooking. And I really enjoyed the reference travel magazine to you

was this is country cooking going cool. Yes sir. You respect the French style of food preparation. What's that mean? Well, this is the way I started. I started at a restaurant color as it all stayed on the street. And that's how I learned. It means following the season, not overdoing it, figuring out what's enough, not adding too much, things like that. Yeah. When I eat green beans here that you prepared, they're almost crisp, is that what you mean? That's one of the things, yeah, they're just not overcooked. You don't really get food, not this malleable. Well, sometimes I'm a collard greens, we cook well, but in green beans we don't I guess. In your book here you start to say that you follow the seasons. Yes sir. Now, what do you mean by that? Say here, here we are in the late summer tomatoes right now. We're getting ready to have figs. What else is going on? Fresh herbs, watermelons, that kind of thing. See food? See food right now. We just finished all shell crabs and

all of a sudden I've got tuna. It comes from down down east. And the guy that I get fish from Tom Robinson calls me on Monday or Tuesday mornings. And then he says, well, this is what it looks like you're getting this week. And I say, okay, we have a repertoire of things, recipes to use, most seafood from North Carolina at this point. So we pull out a favorite recipe. Sometimes I come up with something new, but often I rely on something out of people like. But in the restaurant, don't you keep certain basic stocks that you use? Rawls or something? There's almost always a stock puddle in the kitchen. For the brown sauce we make, which we use on steaks, we use it with some liver and it has lots of use. But yeah, I've always got a pot of bones back there somewhere. I guess the most famous lead item on your menu is shrimp and grits. It is. That originated with Bill Neill. That's something I inherited and I wouldn't dream of changing. Yeah. People ask me all the time about this. And if you want to change that, Lord, I'd have to invent something to take its place. And I'm happy with that. How do you flavor

that menu? Why it goes into it? And distributing grits? Yes. It's got garlic and lemon juice and bacon. And then the grits have all kinds of cheese in it, cheddar and parm, Parmesan and butter. Tabasco. It's pretty simple. It's like a Chinese stir-fry honestly. It's like real fast. Is that the most popular item on the menu? Most of the time. Most of the time. When I made a list of things I've seen in here, I wanted to ask you about it. Fried green tomatoes and sweet corn. How'd that happen? Well, I've always liked fried green tomatoes and my mother also likes them. And we can talk about it from time to time. One time when I was home in Newborn, I had them for lunch at a restaurant there. And that reminded me that I had always meant to do them here. And so I just came up here and began experimenting with different ways of doing them. The sauce is a burble on which is French. And it's kind of salsa school and lots of things. And it seemed unnatural because it's tart in the limiting. And the corn, I don't remember honestly why I started putting corn in it because it was seasonal. Maybe corn was there. I had to use it up something.

I don't remember now. How that came to be good. The right sauces and the right, the right, all out of some vinegars and things and preparing food. Well, some things just go together. They belong. And you sort of know after a while, I think, like lemon with fish and sort of rabiest things with meats. I don't know. You just sort of figure it out and then it makes sense. And it's logical. If you think about it, I don't know. I read it here about the big biscuit putting raspberry sauce and whipped cream. Man, that sounds like a southern dish. That does a southern dish. And that came about by my trying to use up the letter was from brunch. We only have brunch once a week. So I have these biscuits and things that we don't use any other time. And it was sort of a challenge to myself to use. I used biscuits. I used the eggs that we would have beaten up for almonds that we didn't need. I used the jelly for the biscuits. I used the orange juice. What else is in that thing? Anyway, so yeah, it was sort of a point of honor to not waste food.

So it's, I just assembled it. If I have enough stuff left after brunch on Sunday, then biscuit putting will appear a couple of days later. It has to sit. Biscuits have so much butter in them. They don't absorb the custard straight away. So you have to like assemble it, put it in the custard, put it in the refrigerator with a weight on it for a couple of days, and then bake it. So there's, every one of us has to have dessert at a meal. Our big variety is that required that you put on the menu. We have a fair amount. I always like, we have two chocolate things that never change. There's a mout area. It's a flake egg. And then there's a hot flake brownie. It's a flake egg. It's sort of old fancy chocolate cake with whipped cream. The brownies are basically hot flake brownie with ice cream. So those don't change. In recent years, banana pudding has become something that doesn't change because people like the recipe here a lot. I put it east of it all from time to time. Now people yell at me if it's not all. So that pretty much stays on all the time. But had you invent honey stuff called sorbet? That was, there was a big honey sucker bush out back in the parking beside the parking lot. In every summer, it would smell really, you know, it was a good one too. It was covered.

And so you would really smell it. And my boss kept asking me, can't you make some to eat out of this? And I got a lot of that. So after a couple years of prompting, I found a recipe, an old Italian cookbook for a jasmine ice that the Arabs had brought to Sicily. And I went from there and took a couple of years of experimenting to get it right and remembering to write down what you had done, and which I didn't do at first for some reason. And after about three or four years, I had standardized it. And it just was experimentation and prompting, I guess. Where did you develop this great like on your part of the soft shell crab? I hear you in the up country. I grew up in Newburn and we went to the beach every single Sunday when I was a little, my, one of my grandmothers would drive us to beach after church on Sunday. My whole childhood. But the soft shell crab was actually an accidental discovery for me. And I was about five or six. I don't recall exactly a little. And I went with my aunt high to a seafood restaurant. And we ordered our lunch and I said, I saw soft shell crabs on the menu. I guess I was able to read if I could

do that. So I saw soft shell crabs. And she said, I don't know, no, no, you mean double crabs, because I did love double crabs. And I wouldn't be proved wrong. I said, no, I won't soft shell crabs. And so she said, okay. And they came and I looked out. I'm there. They were the whole crab in the plate. And I thought, well, you got to eat it now. She said, you've wanted them. So I ate them and it was the best thing I've ever had. And I, you put lemon on it now. Lemon and garlic. That's about it. And a little bit of basil. Fish is an expendable commodity. You do a rapid turnover. Yeah, I don't order much of the time. I get it almost every day. Um, fresh. And, you know, it'll keep it day at least. I'm about to the oyster season. You're famous for fried oysters here. These oysters actually keep better than fish, but I get them all the time too. Um, they, they start them in the fall and September. It depends on the season a little bit. Sometimes they're, they're a little too small at the beginning. And so we might wait a little bit. But, um, we started in September and run pretty much all through the winter until spring and hot weather. I think that I don't find them appetizing in the heat of the summer. I think they sort of alter the ability. Do you ever have a customer come in here and start

quarreling about the menu? I want to challenge you about how you've fixed it. I want to say you ought to do it this way. Um, I don't remember anything real confrontational. Yeah. People will give you their opinions, but most people happily are, or, or please with what they get here. People, I'll, I'll, I'll, if you suggestions, I don't remember ever having to fight with anyone, ever something. I, you know, when President Carter walked in the front door that night as for supper, what do you have? Well, his wife had chicken livers, and he as I recall had barbecue and cornbread, and I can't remember there was a little, there was a fairly large party in secret service and everybody. So he had barbecue and cornbread in his wife had chicken livers. And then when the meal was over, he asked you for a glass of butter. He asked me for a glass of butter, which I had. And you have had a lifetime of not being able to touch butter. Don't care for it honestly. I like it in things. I like it in things a lot, but I just, I'm sorry. But he's gigging out all he wants. He's

like, and there are other people who asked for it too, but either they're just sort of, and I'll eat anything really. I mean, I'm like, almost everything, but for some reason, I can't do bar meal. When you're a youngster, you heard a lot about collards, what the collards do? We ate them all. Do you cook collards here? Yes, we do. Actually, I don't end turning a little bit, it's cooked collards from Mexico. He's been here longer than me. But we cook them here. We cook them almost every day, and I eat them almost every day, at least a little spoonful or a trick. I love them. That's one of my favorite foods. There again, what seasoning do you use? We use some kind of pork. We cook a lot of country hands here, so often I've got a bone, a hamlet, and that's the best. And then when your slice country ham, you have big chunks you can't use. So that can be thrown in the collards too, like pieces of the break off, it will slice pretty well. And if we don't have any of those things, which is occasionally, we just bake them, we'll do. We use a little onion, some hot pepper flakes, and that's about it, water. It's all. You make, you really have a reputation for freshness here. Now, there are lots of farmers

around here who primarily grow for restaurants. They do have a relationship with some of these people. I do, and some of these people I've known for a long time. I've known Ken Dawson, Maple Springs Gardens. I've known him since, oh gosh, it's the late 60s, early 70s. What does he call you and say, hey, Bill, I've got him? He says, right now we're getting most, a lot of my tomatoes from him. I'll get other stuff too. We've got flowers from him, sometimes too, from the bar. I've gotten cantaloupes this year from him. He grows peppers, you know, so you really want to be an overnight kind of thing. You use it today, you get it. He delivers twice a week, and a third time if I need to. Cathy Jones and Michael Perry at Perry & Winkle Farms, I've been getting salad stuff from her for years and years. I'm sure I'm not in her 20 years. So, you know, it keeps the money in the community. It's always fresh. You know, it's just, I don't know, it's striking us out of business, I guess. You have a standard cornbread recipe that you make

every day. Pretty much every day, yeah. Find people really want cornbread. Is that the one with the black pepper? I bet they eat a lot of it. We get through a lot. The recipe makes eight wheels, and I don't know if I have to make it every single day, but almost every day. Now, when people come to dinner, what role does wine play in your clientele? Well, we have a fairly sophisticated clientele, honestly. Those sorts of people just generally drink wine with dinner out of habit, I think, but it's, you know, it enhances food certainly and food enhances wine, and I think it's healthy, honestly. It makes for a pleasant evening, and like I say, they complement one another. You don't have to, you know, sometimes the glass of grease and the glass of water, too, you know, but I enjoy what my favorite. It's really nice to see if you like. Cleaning this has to be your first concern here. Put a lot of effort into this, and it's the self-discipline of the process.

Yeah, you have to stay on top of things, and it's actually easy, easier to do if you do it all the time. A lot of it is common sense. Wash your hands, scrub up after things, clean up after you've cut meat, scrub the table down with chlorox, and that kind of thing. Keep things cold. It needs to be cold. Cool things quickly that need to cool down. If you're like a pot of beans on the stove, you try to get it to the school cold quickly so that it doesn't have time to spoil. Just a few fundamental rules, really. It's not hard to do. You just need to know what you're doing and never let up, you know, you just... When you sat down to write this book, you're such an externalizing person. I know it's hard to make yourself sit down and write one word after the other. I was a terrible student anyway, and this was like being always having a term paper do for years. It took me such a long time. I couldn't believe how long it took, and every time I'd sit down, I think you'd really ought to be at the computer for years. I don't sit

down there. Get over there. It was difficult for me. I enjoyed it, sort of, but it was also difficult. Now you organize this book on the season, too. How did you choose a particular recipe? Are they the one people most want to eat? It's the stuff we do here, pretty much. We do more than that here, obviously, but that's the way I run my kitchen anyway. That's the way I do it year after year, and it follows the logic. I know what's going to be here about when. One thing leads to the next. If you're cooking all the time in large quantities, it's hard to explain, but one thing leads to the next. It just sort of follows, and you get used to it after a few years. It's just the way it works. I don't know if I can, it's not very good explanation, but things just lead to the next thing. Now that you've done it, do you have a second thought and say, oh gee, where's I should have put this recipe in there? I wish that I had had more time to maybe refine it a little bit, and probably I will think of things, occasionally I do think of things that I wish

had put in there, but you just have to stop at some point. It was really hard fitting it in and around a full-time job. I gave it all the time. I could, that's all I'm saying. I have often to people when they've had dinner just say, may I have that recipe, the top and John or whatever. Right on the back of the dessert menu, because we've changed those all the time, so it's on the back of the black sheet of paper, and sit down if I have time to write it. People call me all the time, particularly at dinner time, the phone will ring. I'm trying to get things ready to go, and sometimes I'm standing at the stove and I'm making shrimp and grits. What am I supposed to do now? You should call me this morning. That's the morning. Yeah, and I just sort of talk them through and I'm still waiting. That just happened more times than you can imagine. Really? Yeah. All right, you put in 15 hour days here, and you have some days away. No, six days away. I actually do take a day off, but as Bill Smith do when he wants to close the door. He reads, he writes his bicycle. He sits on his porch and drinks beer. He traveled. I do like the travel. Once a year, at least I try

to go to Mexico to visit old staff members. And then in January, I go to Montreal, believe it or not, because that's my birthday. And you can say, I think I'll take my birthday. We can often everybody says, okay, that sounds all right. So you can get away with it and I like co-weather, you know, Canada and everywhere in the better winter. Montreal and Quebec City have wonderful restaurants. They're really beautiful. People are friendly, and I just go there and take a book, and often I go by myself, and I just eat big French dinners and watch it snow. It's really nice. Yeah, it's very nice. But when you first started at La Residantes with Bill Neal, how did that happen? Well, my friend Susan Perry was the head waitress, he's not recall. He might miss Susan. Yeah. And she said that they needed someone to sort of peel potatoes and stuff. I was going to Europe to join some friends and needed a little more cash, and I took that job, and that's how it started. When I came back from Europe, the job was still there, and the next thing I knew about five or six years later, I was the chef. That was probably the

most famous of the local restaurants. It was the only one for a long time, really, yeah. And you had a heavy orientation toward French preparation, and I learned a whole lot there from Bill and from Wharton. Well, when you came here, you then moved over to the southern recipe, so to speak. Well, this is what I grew up with. Yeah, and I found that French term cooking in southern cooking is not that different, honestly. French grandmothers and old southern grandmothers cooked a lot alike in more ways than you would think. And I sort of talked about a little bit in the book, but yeah, there's just a certain, there's an economy that comes into play with not wasting things. All right, it's supposed to be good, you know, even if you're poor, he's still supposed to taste good sort of thing, and using the season certainly. And so I didn't, it wasn't that big of a shift. What about breads? The bread, you bake your own bread here. No, no, we got it from the branch on bread, corn bread. Corn bread, I bake. But our dinner bread comes from the branch, nothing fits for. If I had to make bread too, I don't know

what I'd do. You'd do it one way or the other way. I would figure out, I guess, I'd have to have somebody here in the middle of the night I guess. That kitchen is real little. I don't know if you've ever stuck your head back in there, but it is a little. And there's always so much you can do at a time back there. You ever have the impulse, you've been so successful here to broaden out a little more, open up a little more, bring in more people. This is about all I can handle, I think, at the stage of the game, 20 years ago maybe, but I'm content right now, I have enough work, thanks. People who they want to come here for dinner, they should call crooks, corn. We take reservations, we take walk-ins as well, but it's always better to get a reservation because sometimes we're really full, you know, otherwise nobody knows, you know. Four of these last ten years, how much have you seen food preferences change? How much have you seen sophistication get in the menu selection? The public is constantly becoming more sophisticated, but honestly, the biggest change I saw was that carb thing a few years ago. Really? Yeah, and that was startling. That was

overnight. People went from sauce on the side and know this and know that to extra mashed potatoes with butter and not mashed potatoes with carbs, but rutabagas with butter and vegetarians vanished and it was a remarkable thing. That seems to be going away. I hear that Atkins is going out of business or something, but that was the most startling change I've ever seen, and it was overnight. Unbelievable. But people, when they you notice, they're very conscious of weight, what they're eating, why they're eating it. They are, and they are. There's so many different theories about what's good and bad for you, but I think some people, I don't know, they just latch on to one rather than another, but I think that sort of evens out. I think what people really want to do is they want to come in and they want to look at something and say, oh God, I can't eat this too much, and then they want to eat the whole thing, and then they want to push back and say, oh Lord, I shouldn't have done that, you know, but I'm glad that they did. I think that's really what you like.

Sunday brunch is the only time you serve other than at another time. Yes, you are accommodating the Chapel Hill clientele there, and others, but does that mean you that different? Well, it's breakfast for you, basically, with a few sandwiches starting, and we don't have those things at night or nearly. So it is a ship, which is why I have to make the biscuit pudding, because I don't want to use for all that stuff in the evening. So yeah, I mean, it is. I like, sometimes I'm jerking like coldest, like the drawing room, the Chapel Hill on Sunday morning, sometimes you look at it, and you know, everybody here sort of thinks it's fun. Well, I'm here at the large biscuit in that cream butter and that raspberry jam. I don't want anything else. There you go. There you go. You went to work on the hunt you just said. Uh-huh. You take an intern in you, you let a young man learn unto you. Well, I'm in theory, yes, I would, but we're so busy and the kitchen's so small, it's less, it's harder to do than you think. I'm taking kids in here from special programs, cooking programs at the Methodist Church ran for a while. And it was okay, but I had to be real careful to bring it on a day when it wasn't crowded and I had

to be real strict about when they could be here and that kind of stuff. It's, you really don't need anybody that doesn't know what they're doing in a place that's this busy and this small. So in theory, yes, I'd love to, but it's not always practical. Um, but yeah, I'd like to do that if I could, but it's just the logistics sometimes. Well, yeah, when you do a book like this, you have to go around the neighborhood, the state tell it people. I do have to look at that book side if you're all this. You're getting ready. I guess I am. I'm so nervous. I don't really, I'm not really, um, interested in being famous or anything. And I don't know. I feel sort of funny promoting myself in a way, but yeah, it's just I've gone this far. It'd be dumb not to do that. So, well, they've set up a schedule for me. I'll be traveling a great deal and I guess October and November it looks like here it is now in the late summer. Uh-huh. You go in to Mexico this year. I don't know if I can. I don't think I can. I was there in October. This is hilarious. I went down for them. I was taking his truck back. He was scared to go by himself. He was ready. Couldn't navigate Houston. There's actually was the thing I said, all right,

all right, great. So I wrote in the pickup truck from here in to the middle of Mexico and had the time of my life. It would be a pickup truck in a pickup truck. But we've been traveling with Charlie Lake, John Steinbeck, and the back was full of televisions and clothes for, you know, and Barbie swings that and presents for everybody who's families were down there. And all we went when we had a great time, we had some of the most fun. When I'm in here, I noticed these people, they've been here good while. So they, you're, you're staff for a react to each other, work to each other. You don't have much of a turnover, do you? Not, not very much. And it's, it's, it's, it's great. Because people do, they've been hit by. They all feel like they're a member of your team here. I think so. And, and, um, I think that the, the people who come here as, as customers enjoy seeing the same people's time after time, it makes you feel like you know what you're doing maybe or something like that. You know, you're in good hands because that, these people have been here a while and they know how the things work. I think we, we have a great four-step on it. Well, every cylinder would ask you this question, how many ways do you fix chicken? Right now we're doing coal fried chicken, when everybody gets coal fried chicken. And that's like my favorite thing is to open the fridge and find fried chicken in

there from the day before. So I thought, all right, I'm just going to start out with coal fried chicken. So that's what I'm doing right now. We have a roast chicken I do in the winter time with green tobacco on it, which sounds hot, but actually in this real good. We do chicken and dumplings. We do a coal chicken salad with like a soy dressing. Um, what else do we do? It's all I can think of right now. No, do you have, if I came in here from barbecue, would I get the sun, the southern barbecue that you would, you got, you got these two North Carolina vinegar barbecue. Then a good barbecue. That's a real point of contention, as you know, in North Carolina. So you don't dare. Yeah. You're East, did you? Yeah. You can't even bring it up in some place. Hop and John. Is that on your menu? It is. What is it? It's blackhead peas served with rice. And here we chop tomatoes and onions and put some cheese on top. But I think basically it's blackhead peas and rice. How do you prepare? Well rice. No, no, it's, um, again, it's Antonio Lopez. Uh, we dice a little bit of carrot and onion and we started off

in butter. And it has a little bit of garlic. And so you sizzle all that in the bottom of your pan. You've what rinsed and soaked in washer beans. Um, bacon goes in again. If I've got a ham bone, that'll go in, but I don't always have those. Um, and you go to the beans and water. Uh, beans, you can't salt until toward the end because they don't, they'll soften up like they're supposed to. Um, and it's a meal. It's a meal. It's a meal like a lot of people get that from you. I mean, it's fine. You know, it's a good meal. The ability is to say, you know, what a man had passed away, take hop and John and go by twice and if he didn't rise up, he's gone. He was gone. But that's true. You have a favorite dish? Well, social cramps as we talked about already. Uh, Lord, I think it changes. There's something's favorite for a while and you eat too much of it and it goes away. Right now it's called fried chicken, I guess. Yeah. Um, I don't know. I'd be hard to say. But everything's your favorite. I like everything but buttermilk. So, do you taste

as you go along? Oh, all day long. They say you're not supposed to what you have to. Uh, oh. How do you know what you're doing if you don't do that? Yeah. Yeah. Like say, I've some people consider that I'm professional, but I got spoons all day long. You know, clean spoons, but, you know, you got to. You don't know what you're doing. Well, I want to hold this up one more time. You see the title, season in the South. This is Bill Smith's collection of his own recipes that you can enjoy when you come to visit Crook's Corners, call for your reservation ahead of time, open every night, but Monday, Monday night, but Bill's her. Thank you for letting us come and visit and it's great to see you again. Thank you ladies and gentlemen for letting us be in your home this weekend. Till next week, good day. Funding for North Carolina people is provided by Wokovia, helping North Carolina people realize their financial goals since 1879. And by UNC TV members. Thank you.