The Blackberry Farm Cookbook: Four Seasons of Great Food and the Good Life

Synopsis

Nestled in the blue mists of Tennessee's Smoky Mountains, the 10,000-acre bucolic refuge of Blackberry Farm houses a top-rated small inn with one of the premier farm-to-table restaurants in the country.  This sumptuous cookbook offers a collection of recipes that are as inspired by the traditional rustic cooking of the mountainous south as they are by a fresh, contemporary, artistic sensibility. Some of the dishes are robust, others are astonishingly light, all are full of heart and surprise and flavor — and all are well within the reach of the home cook.

California has the French Laundry, Virginia has the Inn at Little Washington, and Tennessee has Blackberry Farm, where the indulgences of a luxury inn are woven together with odes to nature —  fly-fishing, hiking, foraging, bird watching, and heirloom gardening —  to create a new way of looking at the world, a way in which anything seems possible.

This is particularly true at the Inn's table and in its award-winning wine cellar. To the farm's master gardeners, food artisans and chefs, meals are an opportunity to express not only the earth and the culture of this remote spot, but also its spirit. On a spring day this might mean Rye Whiskey-Cured Trout with Fresh and Pickled Fennel, and the summer garden might inspire a Chilled Corn Soup with Garlic Custard, a papardelle of baby carrots, or a tomato terrine. In the cooler weather, game and traditionally preserved food —  cider-basted venison, a shell-bean and gamebird cassoulet, a dried apple stack cake or  Bourbon Apple Fried Pies —  keep conversation in front of the fire lively. For all its artfulness, however, Blackberry Farm's garden-to-table cooking tends to be an ode to a well-loved cast iron skillet, a backyard smoker or a wood-fired grill.

In the foothills, you don't eat to eat, you eat to talk, to remember and to imagine what you will eat tomorrow. In this book, the stories of the people who practice the traditional mountain food arts —  the bacon man, the heirloom gardener, the cheese maker and sausage man —  are woven together with the recipes, lore and regional history to reflect the spirit of the cooking at Blackberry Farm. Breathtaking photographs capture the magical world that surrounds the table —  the hills and rushing creeks, the lights and shadows of the forest, the moods and moments of the garden.

Publishers Weekly

Big, bold and beautiful, this oversized if pricey title is more than your typical cookbook. California-trained chef Beall (son of the founder of the restaurant-chain Ruby Tuesday, Sandy Beall) takes readers to the Great Smokey Mountains of Tennessee to his family's Blackberry Inn and farm-to-table restaurant. Through color photos, essays and over 100 recipes inspired by the South, the spirit of this special place and the people involved is conveyed through its well-designed pages. Organized by season and broken down by event, recipes reflect the inn's philosophy of “responsive cooking” and showcase produce grown in the five-acre garden (set on the property's 9,000 acres) including creamed chard; beef carpaccio with summer chanterelles and chives; and Sam's carrot soufflé. Animals raised on the property and caught in their creek are used for such dishes as herb-roasted spring chicken and oven-baked trout with ramps and morels. The stories behind the on-site cheese kitchen and curing house, as well as a celebration of local suppliers such Benton's Smokey Mountain Country Hams, are artisanal inspirations and reiterate the importance of how food is grown, raised and created. With a wine cellar of more than 160,000 bottles, it's no surprise that Beall's astute wine notes round out a title that is most certainly a reflection of “the good life.” (Oct.)