Confessions of a dangerous mind: Sean Brock's cookbook collection

If you know anything about Sean Brock, of McCrady's and Husk in Charleston, you know he's one of the most talented chefs working in the South these days. He's also got a demented way with discovering things that taste crazy-good, like fried chicken skin dipped in Tabasco and honey.

In a fascinating interview on Eater.com, Brock goes into depth about his obsession with cookbook collecting. Sure, he likes the modern, cutting-edge stuff - cheffy books like French Laundy and Eleven Madison Park and edgy Thai cookbooks. But what he really goes for are the very old Southern cookbooks, and books written long before he was born.

This is Brock on the Time-Life "Foods of the World" series: "Going back, looking at these books, people weren't afraid to cook then. You go to the Good Cook pork book and they're like deboning whole pigs and stuffing them and sewing them back up and cooking them and why are we scared to do that in books now? Because we want to sell books and we're afraid people aren't going to do that now. You look back on these books, though, and there's really complex stuff in there intended for home cooks. So I just love those books to death. Those are really inspiring and the photography is so cool in them."

Read about here. It's good thinking from a young man who is turning out seriously good food in a city not very far from our own. (One warning: Like a lot of young chefs, he doesn't always edit his language. C'est la vie.)

Photo: Husk.com.

Best food picture ever

I'm not ashamed to give praise where it's due: Food staff at the New York Times, that's just a classic.

The picture is the work of photographer Tony Cenicola. The story it illustrates isn't a slouch in the interesting department, either: Sarah DiGregorio's article on chefs who are cooking chicken skin, including Sean Brock at Husk and McCardy's in Charleston. (I'll be in Charleston next week, and already had Brock's buttermilk-marinated, deep-fried chicken skin on my list.)

You can read the Times chicken skin story here. You can read some of the background on how Cenicola got the picture here. Or you can just admire that picture. Up there.

Bravo, Times People. Nicely played.

The Times says: Go to Charleston, diners

New York Times reviewer Sam Sifton has always had an uncommon respect for the food of our Southland. When the Panthers were in the Super Bowl (seems so long ago now, doesn't it?), then-food editor Sifty was one of the few journalists who called me about Carolina food who had looked beyond the usual it's-all-barbecue cliches. He called about chicken bog -- how many people outside the Carolinas have ever even heard of it?

So I'm happy to see his report on a dining visit to Charleston: "Charleston, with fewer than 125,000 residents, is one of the great eating towns of the American South, on par with New Orleans for quality if nowhere near it for size or variety." Hear, hear, Mr. Sifton. I'll raise a julep cup to that.

For his review, he went specifically to look at the work of Sean Brock at the new restaurant Husk, and looked in at Brock's other post, McCrady's. I've been to McCrady's, where Brock was originally playing with applying molecular gastronomy to Southern ingredients, turning out things like nitrogen-frozen peanut ice cream and country ham cotton candy. At Huck, he's settled down but gone all-Southern and all-local, with a lot of ingredients grown on his own farm.

If you're heading down toward Charleston for the spring, take a look at Sifton's piece. Really, you'd have to work at it to find a bad meal in Charleston these days.