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SFA Founding Members
Ann Abadie
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Louis Osteen
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Marion Sullivan
Van Sykes
John Martin Taylor
Toni Tipton-Martin
Jeanne Voltz
Charles Reagan Wilson

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Interviews by SFA Members and Friends

Project sponsored by Jim 'N Nick's Bar-B-Q

Karen Barker

I train people in my restaurant—my bakers—to uphold tradition and to try and do things the old-fashioned way, to learn about the place that you’re cooking in. And I think it’s important that people understand where it is that they’re coming from, you know. We’re not just, again, the bourbon and pecans and buttermilk and putting them into things. That stuff has a history, it has a place, and I want people to learn about that.

– Karen Barker

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Along with her husband, Ben, Karen Barker is co-proprietor of Magnolia Grill in Durham, North Carolina. Karen has been named the best party chef in America by a number of different organizations. But she isn’t wholly comfortable with the title. Karen prefers to be called a baker.

Her repertoire, honed over two decades in the kitchen, includes pink grapefruit soufflé tarts, key lime coconut pie, blackberry slump with sweet potato dumplings, and bourbon peach cobbler with cornmeal cream biscuits. She works in the American vernacular, resurrecting desserts that have fallen out of favor, gently reinventing sweets that have, through the years, become clichéd. Along with celebrating these dishes in her restaurant, she offers them in her book, Sweet Stuff: Karen Barker’s American Desserts.

Among her talents is a way with pie. She wields a rolling pin with authority. Karen’s model is crafted from oak and recalls, in girth and weight, the trunk from which it was hewn. She does not roll it across the dough until she has a crust of sufficient circumference to fit a pie plate. Karen beats that dough, cocking her body like a spring-loaded jackhammer built to mete out punishment, slamming the pin down with such force that the ball bearings within the pin chime and the table beneath the crust shudders.

Listen to this 3-minute audio clip of Karen Barker talking about how she has seen Southern food evolve and what is disappearing. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

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What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

Subject: Karen Barker
Date: January 19, 2007
Location: Magnolia Grill – Durham, NC
Interviewer: Dean McCord, SFA member

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Dean McCord: This is Dean McCord; it is January 19, 2007. This is the part of the SFA Founders Oral History Project, interviewing Karen Barker at Magnolia Grill at 11:42 a.m. Glad to have you here…Let’s just start that I’d like to know how you actually became involved in the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Karen Barker: I think, actually, Ben [Barker, my husband,] was a founding member of the group, and it was through him, since you know our lives have pretty much entwined, that I really got involved. And we got involved both as a couple and individually and as a business and it’s just for us, I think, one of the best groups that we’ve ever had any participation in.

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So why do you think that the SFA took off whereas the other organizations [centered around Southern food] did not?

I think a lot of it has to do with organization, as a matter of fact. [Also,] the fact that they’ve gotten so many really talented interesting people from different walks of life involved with it, the fact that it’s not purely cooking, it’s not purely educational; it’s a mix of music and culture and history and, of course, great food and beverage. So it’s, you know—it can't be beat. [Laughs]

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Did you have any like expectations or visions for this—for the SFA when it started?

I don’t think I did. I mean I was—I think I was hoping that it would be sort of a multi-purpose organization and not strictly food and wine—or food and beverage because I think a lot of times those sorts of organizations become sort of glorified social clubs in a way. This has meant a lot more to me, personally; I’ve learned a lot more through them than—than just some of the other food oriented organizations that we belong to. It’s not just a foodie thing and so—.

There’s an intellectual component?

Yeah, definitely.

And how does that appeal to you?

Well I was a history major in college, [Laughs] so I think that sort of appeals to me, certainly from that perspective. The fact that, too, I’ve just learned so much because I’m not from the South. I’m from Brooklyn, so it’s, in a way, given me a great deal of information and helped me sort of really understand where it is that I’m living now. I can almost call myself a Southerner these days; I’ve lived here for about 25—26 years now. So I’ve just about earned that right, I think. [Laughs] But it has certainly given me a better understanding just about the history, traditions, culture—all that sort of thing, which is—. You know, when I moved down here from Brooklyn I just—I had no idea—no idea at all.

Do you think it’s affected your cooking, the way you bake?

Definitely, yeah. You know, I think I’ve always been more of an American-style home-baker kind of thing. What this has done is it’s given me a little bit more understanding of certain ingredients that are native to the South, which is not to say that I wouldn’t have used them or didn’t use them before but I—I really understand sorghum now, you know, and that sort of thing. [Laughs] You know, bourbon has always played a big part in my baking but you know—

When you first thought of what the SFA might be or could be and had that vision and where it is today, I mean has your approach to the organization or your thoughts of the organization changed over the years?

I don’t think so. I mean I think I’m surprised at how it’s grown and I think grown fairly rapidly, and yet has still maintained it’s intimacy, which is a really, really hard thing to do—the fact that they do have people from all over the country, not just the South who—who come in for events and participate. The fact that they can put together these, you know, large-scale events and, yet again, it’s—and still an intimate setting where people are just out there, you know, conversing and having a good time and getting to know each other. I love the social-ness of it so—.

Do you think that’s what has led to the growth or—?

I think so. That and the fact that, you know, Southern is sort of in these days, you know. You know the magazines glam onto those sorts of things. John T. has been a great promoter of the organization. There’s a lot of extremely entertaining people—you know, fabulous writers—who really get out there and promote the organization who were sort of—their names are tied to it. To me, that’s always a big draw. So it—there’s just always something interesting and different going on; it’s never repetitive.

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The SFA you know focuses upon food as culture. and what does that mean to you I mean intellectually, personally, professionally?

Food is culture. You know, food is just—not for everybody, but for a lot of food so much of who they are, where they came from, just their entire personality. My family, I came from a nice Jewish family in Brooklyn that was just totally food-obsessed. I mean it’s—maybe that’s one of the reasons why I—I love that focus of SFA so much is it’s all about sitting around the table. My grandmother used to tell me, you know, the one thing that you never skimp on in life is food. So for me it’s—it’s about my whole life—it’s my working life, it’s my social life, it’s what I do with friends, it’s what I do every day professionally, it’s what I like to read about, and certainly, it’s more than just sustenance. You know, again, I love the history of it; I love to—I love everything about it; it connects people in—in a really good and special way.

What do you see as the future of SFA short and long-term?

I think I’d like to spread the gospel a little bit and see even more people involved with it. I’d like to see maybe some more things done in local levels. We’re really starting to get into that now; we’re actually in the process a planning a Triangle Day Camp, which I have just been in touch this week with [current SFA Board President] Marcie Ferris about. So that sort of thing—I’d like more localized events. I’m not sure if it necessarily has to be something that’s, you know, on a calendar, where you’re absolutely doing regular things all the time. Sometimes I think spontaneity is great, although certainly with events, you know, you do need to plan—at least on the level that we try and do them. But I would like more people to find out about the organization, support it, all the great things that it does in terms of scholarships, you know everything we did for [Hurricane] Katrina relief—that stuff is really important, and it’s done in such a good way and it’s managed so well through this organization that, again, I’d like to just—I would like to see it continue doing exactly what it’s doing and just perhaps maybe get, you know, a few more people involved with it.

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Let’s switch gears a little bit and start learning a little bit more about you and your background and the question that everybody hates but they all have to answer it is you know where were you born and what’s your birth date?

I was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957—June 7, 1957.

Now can you tell us a little bit about the food of your childhood?

It was, I would say, typically New York, in that we ate ethnically a lot, although my grandmother was the main cook in the family. My mother worked ever since I was probably about five or six years old, and so my grandmother, who lived upstairs from us, actually did a great deal of the cooking and that tended to be Eastern European. She was Russian—pretty simple, pretty hearty, lots of old-fashioned Jewish-style cooking. My mother was Queen of the Broilers, so [Laughs] dinner to her when she would, you know, cook was broiled something with some sort of steamed vegetable, usually—pretty simple. What we did do a lot was go out to eat, which was wonderful to be exposed to, you know, great Italian food and Chinese food from a very early age, you know—lots of different, you know—go to Chinatown—Asian food, travel a little bit, which, you know, nothing too exotic but, you know, my parents did believe in taking the kids traveling when they went, so that was wonderful to just be exposed to a lot of different things.

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You described a little bit—the style of cooking but do you have any specific meals, I mean, that you can think back and go boy, that was my mother’s and my grandmother’s meal?

Yeah, I do—everybody does. [Laughs] You know everybody does. Stuffed cabbage—and the cabbage part was great, but the really good part was the lamb meat that went around with it kind of thing. They always did braised lamb, and I think it was neck and shoulder, I’m sure, were the pieces kind of thing, and they were boney and succulent and delicious—you know sometimes shanks, so that was you know—again, the cabbage part was great, but it was the lamb that was the star to us. My grandmother made phenomenal potato knishes…I had a big family, and we did do big group meals a lot—lots of extended, you know, aunts and uncles, cousins running around. We all lived within maybe two or three blocks of each other. So that was a big deal—potato latkes, of course. You know the holiday meals—Hanukkah meals and Passover meals, where you’d get together with a big family. Lots of good baking—and baking on both a home-baked level—my grandmother was a big baker, but also we had great bakeries in Brooklyn.

When you sat down—your nuclear family and just sat down for dinner, was there a protocol or a ceremony or just the way—the way it worked—did certain people sit in certain places?

Everybody had a place and we lived in a small apartment, so it was an eat-in kitchen, and pretty much everybody had their own place. And we had a small family—it was just my sister and I, my parents and—and a lot of times my grandmother. And no, it was pretty basic. It was, you know, when—just for a regular meal it was—it was pretty much sit down and would eat fairly early, as I recall. Dinner was usually just one course; it wasn’t a multi-course kind of thing. Occasionally, you know, there might be dessert afterwards; we were big believers in ice cream. There was always ice cream in the freezer kind of thing…But relaxed, pretty casual—just all about good fresh food—always fresh food. I mean we shopped, if not every day, every other day. And you know again, there was always—the fruit market was right down the block, you know. There was a butcher shop pretty close; there was you know—you take your cart out and you’d wheel it around from place to place, and I have really you know great memories of going shopping with my grandmother that way.

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You said that you know you’re a Jewish girl growing up in Brooklyn and you know, one of the things people talk about with Jewish culinary traditions is—I mean it’s very much a tradition-based type of cuisine, and a lot of people say the same thing about Southern food.

I think there are an awful lot of parallels. The fact that you do get together for the certain special holidays kind of thing—the fact that there’s very much—my father’s family came from upstate, and they were farmers and so again, for me, it was also that agrarian connection. I always equate Southern cuisine, Southern cooking, you know, it’s farm to table—it’s farm-based cooking, very agrarian and that’s, you know, what I got from his side of the family. The fact that they raised their own chickens. They had dairy cows; they grew their own crops. You know, they pretty much sustained themselves out of their garden kind of things and just that whole seasonal again—seasonal nature of things, the fact that you—fresh fruit and vegetables, you know, as often as possible. So I see that parallel to traditional to Southern cooking, which was again very, very seasonal and the fact that, you know, sometimes I—I wasn’t exposed to what, you know—what I say as a lot of Southern stuff, as putting up stuff by canning and pickles and relishes and that sort of thing and that we didn’t do that much of but the—the rhythms of seasonality in terms of cooking, I think, were very similar.

You said your family was food-obsessed, and so this next question may be self-evident, but when did you first cultivate an interest in food? I mean did have that defining moment where things clicked?

Oh, goodness. I think it was really from about the age of maybe three or four on. I remember sitting in restaurants, like I mean I can go back in my mind now and think about the little Italian restaurant that we used to go to or the Chinese restaurant that we used to go to and have very vivid memories of sitting there and eating this great food and, you know, hanging out with my parents on a Sunday because that’s often what we did on Sunday is go out to dinner. And so in terms of professionally, you know, that didn’t get going until I was—I think I became interested as a teenager but didn’t really consider doing it professionally until I was in college—again being that history major and not knowing what in the world I wanted to do and not wanting to go to law school. [Laughs]…And I had worked in restaurants and had enjoyed the restaurant lifestyle, I think, and had always done a fair amount of cooking. I started cooking a lot and baking, in particular, when I was a teenager…So it was something that I did for enjoyment, and then when I got to college, I realized you can make a lot of friends by, you know, making cookies in your toaster oven, kind of thing…And again waitressing turned me on to the restaurant lifestyle. I managed a student café; it got me thinking about, “I really like food and I like to cook and is there something that I can do to do this to make money?” And the Culinary Institute was putting on—kind of a big push to increase their enrollment of women applicants, I think, at the time and this was back in, I guess, the late ‘70s—the very end of the ‘70s and women chefs were just coming into their own in New York…So I found out about the Culinary Institute, and I talked my parents to sending me there instead of grad school, which they very, very graciously supported me in.

Did they resist it?

They didn’t quite understand it, I think. Again, my uncle owned restaurants, so it’s not like they didn’t know anything about the professional world of cooking but not on that level. They couldn’t understand cooking on that level, I don’t think. But my father took me up there to take a look at the place, and it was pretty amazing you know—hundreds of kids walking around in big white toques, carrying their knife kits, looking terribly serious and directed, kind of thing. And I was just, you know—I said, “I’m going to try this; this looks great.” And it was great. And I wound up meeting my husband, Ben [Barker], my first day of class—cooking together ever since.

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When did you decide you wanted to go into the dessert side of things?

Pretty much from the beginning. [The Culinary institute of America] didn’t—they now have a specialty baking program where you can go in and just do the baking program. At that point they didn’t, so everybody went through the general program, but I loved the baking classes and I did take some extra—extra-curricular stuff, and I think I was always attracted to the world of sweets. I mean part of that is I’m a real sugar hound; I mean I’ve always loved dessert, and I think it’s just—it’s—it’s—I love cooking, I like cooking a lot and I think being a good cook makes you a much better baker, so the two play off of each other. But it’s the sweet world that’s always attracted me. [Laughs]

What would you say was your first introduction to Southern food?

Probably well, of course, through Ben. I mean his family—great cooks in his family and his grandmother was a wonderful cook, his mother is a fabulous quintessential Southern hostess type cook, so certainly dinners with his family, family reunions with his family, which is something that I had never really experienced before, was amazing you know just you know Alamance County, you know, church kind of luncheon kind of things—covered dish. Everybody would bring their stuff, you know, and great food.

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How have you seen Southern food evolve over the years, since from the time when you first came and actually, what I’d like you to do, is describe you know, those initial impressions of—of Southern food both in the home and in restaurants then—and now where it is today.

I would say I think—I think people—first of all there were more people from the South living around here when I first came down here. It seems to me that—that is almost a rarity these days and that he is, you know, a born and bred native Chapel Hill-ian kind of thing. And it just seems like at least every other person that you talk is from someplace else these days. And so that—that’s a big difference; it’s a big difference in terms of the food. I think the food here to some extent has become slightly Americanized in the sense of just rather than being particularly Southern it’s—there are so many people from other places that I’m—I’m not sure if—if a lot of people even recognize Southern cooking anymore. Although there’s also a vanguard of folks who want to preserve that, and that’s a good thing. The markets have changed; what’s growing down here has changed a lot. The vegetables that are available then as opposed to now—it used to be if you went to the Farmers Market there was tons of corn and peas and tomatoes, but you didn’t see that much in the way chilies and torpedo onions and, you know, broccoli raab and that sort of thing, and so now all of that stuff is available to us, so that’s—the supply line has changed.

Do those have a place in Southern cuisine?

I think they do with some modern interpretation, and that’s what you get a lot of these days, I think, is Southern food updated. It certainly has been lightened a little bit. I mean even what we do here, which has, you know, firm roots, I think, in tradition has certainly been lightened up slightly. We don’t cook with quite the heavy hand maybe; for us it means you know using lots of fresh herbs and—and we cook with a lot of acidity here, which is a little bit, you know, unusual but the roots of the food, the flavors I think are familiar still. We use maybe pork as more of a seasoning than a center of the plate—that kind of thing. You know it—on some levels I think it’s gotten better, and on some levels I think we’ve also lost a lot.

How so?

Some of those traditions people that don’t bake as much at home I think as they used to, people don’t seem to have the time to put into it; good food takes time sometimes. It’s not about convenience, necessarily, and I just think that not as many people have quite the devotion to doing it at least on a daily basis. I think people still get together, you know, for those family reunions and—and family suppers and that sort of thing but it doesn’t happen as often. It tends to happen around holidays, maybe; I mean, you know, so many people my age love that holiday season because it means going back home and getting the food that they grew up with, and you don’t get it the rest of the year a lot of times.

One of the terms that I think you used in one of your books, I mean I think it’s your Sweet Stuff book was “cooking with a Southern sensibility.” What does that mean to you?

That means layers of flavors in a lot of ways—the sweet, the salty, the acidic, the—you know, the pickled flavors, it’s punchy flavors. It’s, again, seasonal above all else. It’s that farm to the table as fresh as possible; it’s that—just mingling of flavors, where I almost feel like every plate of food should be like Thanksgiving in a way, you know. [Laughs] It’s just like that—that stuff just is really interesting to eat texturally, you know, from the—a temperature standpoint and again it’s not shy; it’s definitely not shy.

Why do you think Southern food is celebrated across this country more than just about any other—I would say any other region’s cuisine?

It’s comfort, you know. It’s familiarity and comfort and we do it really, really well down here. It’s not to say that you can't find similar things in other places; if you go to New England there’s a lot of parallels between New England cooking and Southern cooking or Heartland cooking and Southern cooking. And I just think we do it particularly well. [Laughs]

And a lot of the talk about Southern food is talk of continuity of tradition; do you think this is really romantic talk or is it reality?

I think there’s a lot of reality in it—things that have been handed down—and it’s one of the things that I think we have to work really hard on is to not lose that. I think, at least people of my generation, my husband’s generation, I mean he made sure that he cooked with his grandmother to find out exactly how she did things because she did them really well, and he wanted to be able to do that and not let that cease at any point. There’s so many things that if you don’t pass them on or write them down they’re gone and once they’re gone they’re gone. And so I worry about that sometimes—that whole tradition of pickles and preserving kind of thing—the whole baking tradition. It’s one of the things that we have been thinking about as to what role can we play in trying to preserve that because I think it’s really important.

Describe a meal that you would characterize as the iconic Southern meal and something that really binds us all together.

It would probably have to be fried chicken—homemade. There would definitely be biscuits; there were definitely be a slew of vegetables—probably butter beans, maybe mashed potatoes, an array of pickles and relishes—green beans, chow-chow, perhaps, especially if you were serving some sort of peas, you know, maybe some watermelon pickles or pickled peaches or that sort of thing—whatever was seasonal and canned up and, you know, tasted good kind of thing. There might even be cornbread and biscuits, if I had might have my druthers.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.