Fall

Make one of these sauces in the hot skillet after you have cooked chicken breasts or pork chops.

Make one of these sauces in the hot skillet after you have cooked chicken breasts or pork chops.

In the Depression years, it was not uncommon to see little Sara Ruth Gibson haul a pillowcase loaded with fresh sliced apples onto the barn roof. Sara Ruth was the smallest and most agile of the Gibson children, so the job of drying apples was assigned to her. She would spread the pillowcase flat on the tin roof and spread the apples in a single layer inside her makeshift white tote bag. For five days she would put the apples out in the morning and fetch them at sundown, a ritual that could only mean one thing: Big Mama would be baking Apple Rolls with Vanilla Sauce that week. Dried apples make a great snack by themselves, or they can be stored and refreshed for use in cakes, pies, cobblers, and applesauce. Any type of apple can be dried as long as it is firm and not overripe. If a tin-roofed barn is not available at your home for drying, the oven can be used successfully.

The first time I made Coal-Fired Sweet Potatoes was at the Middleton Place plantation near Charleston, South Carolina, when Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q catered a food conference sponsored by Johnson & Wales University called “Cuisines of the Lowcountry and the Caribbean.” On the day of the dinner, every member of the Big Bob Gibson team was enlisted to do a cooking demonstration of the Caribbean fare. I am not sure whether my father-in-law, Don McLemore, drew the short straw or got the last pick, but somehow he was assigned the sweet potato ground pit. Imagine working at ground level in the dark over hot coals generating temperatures close to 1,000°F, all to cook an edible offering that looks like a smoldering meteorite. Under the sweat that dripped from his chin, Don wore a scowl all day—right up until dinner, when his sweet potatoes were the talk of the party. He was happy in the end, but I don’t know if he’ll ever let me live that one down. For that event we served the potatoes with a Caribbean butter sauce, but here I suggest subbing a maple pecan butter. This is my favorite way to eat sweet potatoes, whether they are cooked in coals or baked in the oven. It is also a fantastic topping for sweet potato pancakes—but that is a different cookbook.