Turnip greens and tortillas: Chef tests ‘authentic.’
Eddie Hernandez, who runs a string of counter-service Mexican restaurants in Tennessee and Georgia, likes his chili con carne over vermicelli. He puts cream and sugar in his shrimp and grits to counter the heat of jalapenos, a move that will get you kicked out of a lot of Southern kitchens, and makes his chilaquiles with Fritos because they don’t get as soggy as tortilla chips.
And his popular jalapeno cheese dip? It’s based on whole milk and a specific brand of processed American cheese: Land O’ Lakes Extra Melt.
“I am not food correct,” he says in his new cookbook, “Turnip Greens & Tortillas: A Mexican Chef Spices Up the Southern Kitchen,” which he wrote with the former Atlanta Journal-Constitution food editor Susan Puckett for Rux Martin, the cookbook editor who has her own imprint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “If the food police don’t like it, they can sue me!”
Hernandez, 63, is part of a generation of immigrants from many countries who moved to the American South and found success exploiting the similarities between their culinary roots and the bounty of the ingredients they found in their new home.
For Hernandez, it wasn’t much of a leap. Mexicans have corn tortillas; Southerners eat cornbread. Mexicans render pork fat and save the lard; Southerners cook bacon and save the grease. Mexicans make barbacoa; Southerners call it barbecue.
“The country is irrelevant to me,” he said over a bowl of shrimp soup with pasta and peppers at an Atlanta branch of his restaurant, Taqueria del Sol. “It’s what’s available and what you can do with it.”
Too much emphasis is placed these days on culinary authenticity, he continued. “In Mexico, we eat what we like and don’t worry about what is authentic to this cuisine or that,” he said. “You make do, and you make it taste good.”
Hernandez, who learned to cook from his grandmother, first came to America when he was a teenager with his rock band Fascinación. They tried to land a recording contract in Houston. It didn’t go so well.
After a decade of working in factories and Tex-Mex restaurants while trying to break into the music business, he moved to Atlanta. He said that despite his chunky gold jewelry, pierced ear and long rocker hair, he got a job at a restaurant owned by Mike Klank, a low-key son of the South.
He and Klank, to whom the book is dedicated, are now partners in the seven-restaurant Taqueria del Sol chain. Hernandez sells plenty of carnitas folded into flour tortillas, and bowls of green pork chili. But the menu also has his own Southern-Mexican mash-ups like tacos stuffed with fried chicken and lime jalapeño mayonnaise, or Memphis-style smoked pork with spicy cabbage slaw.
Klank has helped Hernandez understand the Southern palate. They toured Atlanta’s meat-and-three restaurants, and sampled the dry-rub barbecue from Memphis, Tenn., Klank’s hometown.
Some of Hernandez’s education was simple experimentation. Early on, a customer gave him a bag of turnip greens. He didn’t know what to do with them. Klank explained that Southerners simmer them for a long time with a ham hock to make a smoky, almost murky broth called potlikker.
Instead, Hernandez approached them the way his family used to cook lamb’s quarters, the greens called quelites in Spanish. He put them in a pot with chicken stock, tomatoes and garlic, and added a hit of chile de arbol. The dish is a mainstay at the restaurants, and the recipe is in his book.
So is his take on pork roast, a Southern Sunday supper staple. A pork loin with a little cap of fat is rubbed with onion and garlic, both in granulated form, then roasted fast in a very hot oven whose residual heat is used to roast a couple of jalapenos. The chopped peppers are then folded into gravy made from a classic French roux and homemade stock.
The result is a decidedly Southern dish, punched up with the flavors he grew up eating in his hometown, Monterrey. Like most of his recipes, it’s thrifty, practical and delicious.
“My food doesn’t require an arm and a leg, and you don’t have to spend six hours in the kitchen,” he said.
That’s not to say they aren’t specific. Hernandez is, if nothing else, very specific. He prefers lemon juice to lime juice in his guacamole because lime is too acidic and “cooks” the avocado. And he blisters jalapeno in oil for the dip because it takes away the green taste of the pepper, which he thinks interferes with the flavor of the avocado — which, by the way, has to be Hass.
“This is the way I cook,” he said. “Either you like it or not. I don’t care.”
The point is to not fuss too much. “If you have something good and you want to make it better,” he advised, “be careful. You can ruin the good you’ve got already.”