My two previous posts give a skewed idea of my usual food preoccupations, and this post is going to skew it even further. I’m going to talk about a controversial delicacy that inspires either rapture or revulsion: boiled peanuts.
There are a few reasons for my current fixation on Southern food: It’s summer, which means the Southern dish I crave the most—fried okra—is in season; I haven’t been home for a while; and I recently got The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook. The Lee brothers write for The New York Times, their cookbook won the James Beard Award, and their names pop up in food publications all the time. I knew they were from Charleston, South Carolina, but it wasn’t until I got the cookbook that I discovered they were not really Southerners. They are Yankee transplants, the children of academics. In other words, carpetbaggers.