Lowcountry cuisine gets the spotlight on ‘Delicious Miss Brown’
Fans of Food Network’s “Delicious Miss Brown” have not only gotten a primer on Lowcountry cuisine across its two-plus seasons, but also been treated to the beautiful vistas seen from the kitchen of host Kardea Brown’s waterfront South Carolina home.
As it turns out, the chef catches her own seafood there, too, with crab, trout and crappie being the most common quarry.
“My great grandfather for a living made shrimp nets,” the Charleston native explains, “so from a young girl I knew how to kind of catch fish and bait fish from a young (age). And shrimp as well. So it’s something that if you grow up in the Lowcountry, it’s just something that you learn automatically, like walking.”
Now in its third season on Saturdays, the half-hour series returns Brown to share more of her cherished family recipes and Southern traditions. With the help of her food-loving family of Gullah/Geechee descent, she’ll show how prepare such dishes as a grilled mahi sandwich, a grilled shrimp macaroni salad, blueberry ricotta pancakes with blueberryhoney sauce and cheesy baked eggs with potatoes and mustard greens.
And for the first time, there will be holiday episodes.
“I’m really looking forward to that,” she says. “Since it’s going to be in the fall, we’ll have a Thanksgiving and a Christmas holiday show, so viewers have to look forward to that as well as seeing my family and just getting more into the Gullah/ Geechee culture. We talk a lot about that this season.
And that’s basically the big points. But I mean, of course, the same good cooking and lots of fun and excitement.”
Cooking has been a part of Brown’s life from a very young age. Learning at the side of her mother and grandmother, the former New Jersey social worker turned her passion into a career in adulthood, first with a catering business and then with pop-up supper clubs. While the former has fallen by the wayside as she began doing the show, the latter persists. Both have served to sharpen the skills she uses on “Delicious Miss Brown” today.
“I believe that cooking always should be approachable,” she says. “In my opinion, cooking should be something that if you love to do it, it should be one of those things that – like I always say, when you’re not in a good mood, just don’t cook. Because it comes out. You know, however you feel, that mood that you’re in, translates into your finished product. So I always say, you know, cook with love and always cook with the best intention.”