A Salad from a Famous Southern Chef

Who defies both Southern and famous-chef stereotypes

Bill Smith’s delicious celery remoulade makes me want to write a musical, about celery remoulade

IS THERE A SIGNATURE SOUTHERN SALAD? I’ve wondered more frequently than is probably normal. Where is our Cobb, like California? Our Waldorf, like New York?

Where oh where is the salad that captures the complexity of Southern food, which, like the region, is perfectly used to bearing the weight of cliches and stereotypes—some good, some bad; some deserved, some not.

I consulted Bill Smith, a signature Southern chef who defies many of the stereotypes and cliches applied to both chefs and Southerners—and who embraces others that I love so much.

Bill Smith: Chef, Activist, Lover of Rock and Roll.

As I mentioned in our last communiqué, in which we made Smith’s fantastic garlic-lemon carrot slaw, Smith is the recently retired longtime chef at Crook’s Corner, the nationally acclaimed landmark institution in Chapel Hill, NC, which closed amid the pandemic this past June after a 40-year run that helped redefine and recreate Southern cuisine.

Smith, who refers to himself as a “gay, retired, troublemaking chef,” is also the sort of man for whom people in Chapel Hill have always felt a sort of ownership. In her introduction to Smith’s cookbook “Seasoned in the South: Recipes from Crook’s Corner and from Home,” which is my current cooking bible, the novelist Lee Smith recalled what Bill Smith has meant to the town, the region, and to her personally, including how he bounded up to her table at the restaurant, where she ate every Sunday night for 10 years with her late son (they always ordered the fried oysters with garlic mayonnaise)  to tell her about the first honeysuckle sorbet he’d ever made “after going out to gather their blossoms in the middle of the night, when their perfume is headiest,” she wrote.

But to Lee Smith, Bill Smith was also emblematic of the Chapel Hill of the early 70s: “A haven for artist, writers, and musicians, original thinkers and mavericks of all kinds. . . . When the North Carolina Legislature was discussing whether or not to fund a state zoo, Jesse Helms suggested ‘Just put a fence around Chapel Hill.’”

“I’ve always taken that remark as a compliment,” says Bill Smith, a lifelong social activist, who’s been arrested while defending human rights more than once, including in 2013, at the Moral Monday protests led by the Reverend William Barber. “I wore a suit,” he says.

Which is true to a certain kind of Southern form: being audacious and gracious at the same time. Smith can trace his activist roots to a relative, his great-grandmother’s great-grandmother, Czarena Inez Angel, an abolitionist who once rode a blood-soaked white stallion through the streets of Philadelphia, in 1858, to protest Bleeding Kansas. “My family didn’t bring her up because she was a social activist, though. They brought her up because they thought it was a crazy thing to do. ‘This family’s so crazy. This family’s so crazy.’

“But anyway, I always blame it on her,” Smith says, referring to his wide-ranging work to protect the rights of immigrants and support the gay community, help the poor and the hungry and farmers and fishermen, and to ensure affordable housing, among many other issues dear to him.

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In fact, part of the reason he retired when he did was to give full-time support to his Mexican friends, many of whom worked in his restaurant. “I’ve been working in gay rights and stuff for years, but I can look after myself,” he says. “I don’t sweat it. Then all of a sudden, oh my God. I didn’t like my job anymore. It was in the way, because it seemed dumb to fuss over raspberries when people are afraid to go to work or leave their homes.”

Smith put his energy into raising an enormous amount of money from locals in Chapel Hill to help the immigrant community, including getting passports for their children during an extremely scary time. With the help of Chef Edward Lee’s Lee Initiative, he also helped feed workers whose families were not eligible for assistance during the first long winter of the pandemic. “What else was I supposed to do? I didn't see that I had a choice. I had to get in there and do what I could do.”

Smith is also a lifelong music-lover (you can hear about his rock-and-roll T-shirt collection here). After a college career as a “bad student but a good hippie,” he ended up working in the kitchen of a serious French restaurant only because the night club he owned in Chapel Hill wasn’t making any money. “We all had to get day jobs,” he says, explaining his trajectory from parsley chopper at Moreton and Bill Neal’s first place (La Residence, which they started after a trip to France) to head chef at Crook’s Corner after owner Bill Neal’s death in 1991.  

Bill Smith’s 2021 Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award.

Smith has received plenty of accolades since taking over Crook’s Corner, including a James Beard Best Restaurant Award in 2010 and the 2021 Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southern Foodways Alliance. And unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know about the pie recipe heard around the world, the Atlantic Beach Pie, which harkens back to his memories of childhood vacations in coastal North Carolina.

Growing up in the 40s and 50s in New Bern, N.C., one of those gracious coastal towns that time has been very kind to, Smith got the sort of culinary education you rarely encounter any more, a relic of the post-Depression days in the South when people still wanted to eat well even if they weren’t rich, where sharing was the norm, and formality was good but fussy was not.

 “The person I think of most is my great-grandmother, who was a fabulous cook. She lived in a big house right downtown. Anybody that was nearby at lunchtime could come have lunch with her, Monday through Friday. They just had to put their name in the pot. There were always 8, 10, 12 people at lunch. When I was in junior high, my school was a block away. So I was among those people.

“Sometimes she’d have the priest over or a neighbor would come. A mysterious, wealthy bachelor. A couple of aunts worked downtown. You never knew.

Thick and mustardy: Bill Smith’s remoulade sauce whips up easily in a blender.

“She made all kinds of pot roast things. We were Catholic, so we had seafood every Friday. Lots of fried fish. I learned to eat spot and croaker. Crab, devilled crabs, crab cakes. In the summer, she was big on vegetables. We could only have white corn. Yellow corn was horse corn! Her greens were delicious. She made spinach with chopped up deviled eggs and bacon crumbled in it. She would make blackberry pies if I picked the berries.

“I had good training without really realizing I was getting it,” Smith says. But he was never her student. “She’d say, ‘Get out of my kitchen!’ I would watch from a distance, just to hang out with her. But she made me used to it—made me not think of good cooking as something unusual. This was the way cooking ought to be.”

And while memories of dishes Smith ate growing up became part of the Crook’s Corner repertoire, the welcoming generosity he grew up with became a defining characteristic of his personal style. And so did the sharing, which, as a recipe developer, I find especially big-hearted.  

“People are always asking me if they can use my recipes and I always say yes. So things will continue. ‘Do you mind if I use that pie?’—even other restaurants ask. I’ll say, ‘Yeah, take it.’”

I’ll say it again: Smith definitely defies the stereotype of the famous chef.

“I’ve become very suspicious of celebrity later in my career,” he says. “First of all, it flatters you into acting stupid. And: it goes away. So my thing was always just make everybody a good dinner and they’ll keep coming back and just don’t sweat the other stuff.”

Did we get around to salads? Yes. And I was gratified to hear that Smith didn’t really think the South had—or needed—a signature salad. We’ve done enough for you people!

Jolie laide celery root makes a perfectly beautiful salad.

We both agreed that we probably deserve the assumption that any Southern salad that ends up in a food-history museum will probably include mayonnaise. “When I was growing up, my mother would do iceberg lettuce with ketchup and mayonnaise mixed together, shaken up. I think maybe it had a cap full of vinegar to make it runnier.”

And we’re both resigned to the fact that most non-Southerners are always going to try to pin molded gelatin salads on us—especially the despicable ones that show up in old magazines, looking like a tawdry carnival ride full of nuts and cabbage or an exploded can of fruit cocktail. (Never mind that molded gelatin, both savory and sweet, has been around since the 18th century in the form of aspics and charlottes, and record of suspending food in gelatin traces back to the 1300s, in Europe.)

But none of that means that Chef Bill Smith was obligated to give me something mayonnaise- or gelatin-based when I finally asked for a salad. “Well, actually what I was thinking about, because my French days, I love celery root remoulade, which is not Southern at all. I’d never heard of celery root or remoulade when I first went to work at Crook’s Corner. The very first time I ever went to France it was the first thing I had to eat because they were serving it on the train from Spain.”

Sold, sold, sold! Here you go:

*RECIPE: Bill Smith’s Celery Remoulade (verbatim)

I used my mandoline on the celery root, then cut the slices into matchsticks.

Makes 3 or 4 servings

This is now one of my all-time favorite dishes, and I’ve come up with many variations of it since. It’s hard to make a small amount of the sauce, but if you have leftover, it’s an excellent all-purpose vinaigrette.

• 1 large celery root (they usually weigh about a pound)

• 1 small carrot

• 1 tablespoon lemon juice

• A sprinkling of salt

• ½ cup Dijon mustard

• A scant ½ cup boiling water

• 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

• 1 cup +/- good olive oil (you have to watch)

• Salt and pepper

• Chopped fresh herbs [Note from Emily: I used a combination of thyme, parsley, and basil; the thyme was especially good.]

1. Wash and peel the celery root and the carrot. Julienne them both into matchsticks (more or less—I’ve never been very picky about this). Toss them with the lemon juice and salt and let them sit for half an hour.

2. Put the mustard, water, and vinegar in a food processor. With it running, slowly feed in the oil, watching for emulsification. Unhappily, for lots of reasons, the amount you need will vary from batch to batch. You want a thick, creamy, yellow sauce. Add too much oil and it separates.

3. Dump the vegetable in a strainer and shake off some of their moisture. Put them in a clean bowl and fold in enough of the sauce to thoroughly coat them. It’s best if this can sit for an hour or so before serving. Taste for salt, add pepper and fold in the herbs.

I’ve served this as is, with boiled shrimp and with lump crab meat. I’ve used the remoulade sauce with just lump crab meat and omitted the celery root entirely. I’ve also used Durkee’s Sauce in place of the remoulade. The sky seems to be the limit.

Bill Smith’s Celery Remoulade (verbatim)

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