Eat in and save: The shrimp-filled song of the South

For those of us who live in the Northeast, March is the month when we hear the song of the South. Not the Disney movie, but the call of a screen door banging, the creak of a porch swing and the clink of ice cubes in a glass of sweet tea. Up north, the calendar has declared that spring is on the way, but we want more. We want spring on steroids — in other words, we want summer. We want what the South has (well, our idealized South, before it started snowing regularly there). And if we can’t GET to the South, the next best thing is to bring the South to us.

Fortunately, we can do this easily with “Tupelo Honey Cafe” (2011 Andrews McMeel), a new cookbook from the eponymous restaurant in Asheville, N.C., by food writer Elizabeth Sims and cafe chef Brian Sonoskus. Asheville, according to this cookbook, celebrates a “foodtopian culture” reflected in the “farm to table movement that has become a way of life.” It also embraces a hybrid mix of commerce and creativity, with, increasingly, farmers, cheese makers, microbrewers and other artisan food producers in the mix.

In addition to food and drink, the cookbook also serves up old and new photos evocative of Asheville’s spirit. A picture taken in the late 1800s shows two men in tights — one piggybacked on the other — balanced on a high-wire high above the city. Somehow, it seems to say it all.

Shrimp and grits was, for years, the breakfast of Carolina shrimpers; a resident of Charleston, S.C., once told me that it was simply called “breakfast shrimp” (the grits, I assumed, being a given). According to the “Tupelo Honey Cafe” cookbook, the dish came to national attention years ago when then New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne (himself a Southerner) was served a plate in a Chapel Hill, N.C., restaurant. Nowadays, you don’t have to look too hard to find a passable iteration of the dish in places like New York, Chicago or Santa Fe. But at the Tupelo Honey Cafe, they take their “sacred heritage ... very, very seriously.”

Shrimp and grits, a plate of fried chicken with smashed sweet potatoes and milk gravy, a scoop of peach cobbler with candied almonds — these will set you right. Spring is in the air, and summer is on the way. You can taste it.

Ÿ Marialisa Calta is the author of “Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the American Family” (2005 Perigee 2005). More at marialisacalta.com.