Southern chef shares culinary identity shaped by terroir

It’s been decades since a small group of Southern chefs broke through the deep-fried, fatback-seasoned, achingly sweet cliches to present a more nuanced portrait of their region’s cooking to the world. They elevated farm-fresh ingredients and family traditions with refined techniques, and shared recipes bolstered by personal stories and historical research. And they inspired new generations to carry on that mission.

Ashleigh Shanti is among the latest of those chroniclers. She offers a refreshing perspective in her debut book, “Our South: Black Food Through My Lens” (Union Square, $40). Raised in Virginia Beach, Virginia, she began working in restaurants in her teens and earned culinary and marketing degrees before becoming chef de cuisine at John Fleer’s Benne on Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina. Her sophisticated takes on the food of her Black heritage made her a James Beard Rising Star Chef finalist in 2020, and last January she opened Good Hot Fish, a counter-service, chef-driven fish fry concept in Asheville, her adopted home.

In her book’s introduction, we meet the family matriarchs from the mountains of Appalachia to the coastlines of the Lowcountry who taught her the “essential skills” of living off the land and aroused her curiosity about the varied food customs from one locale to the next. After high school, she spent a year in Kenya, where “unexpectedly, the food of my ancestors found me.” And while working in high-end restaurant kitchens, she found kinship in the writings of Malinda Russell, a Tennessean who in 1866 became the first known Black American to publish a cookbook.