How Sunday Supper May Help to Cure Some of the World’s Ills
Every week, we spotlight a different food blogger who’s shaking up the blogosphere with tempting recipes and knockout photography. Today, we speak with Erika Council of Southern Soufflé, whose love of Sunday supper goes way beyond the food on the table. Swing back all week for a new recipe from Council every day.
Photos courtesy of Erika Council
If Southern Soufflé blogger Erika Council had her way, every meal might be taken with loved ones at a long, crowded communal table, every inch of it covered with steaming platters of fried chicken, bacon-laced greens, and pillowy mountains of mashed potatoes. But such productions take time and effort, so Council settles for doing it just once a week, usually on a Sunday night.
“I have this obsessive compulsive feeling about Sunday supper,” Council told Yahoo Food. Raised in North Carolina, she was introduced early to the weekly tradition by her late maternal grandmother, who’d fix feasts for friends and family after church every week. “She would have it every Sunday, and I spent a lot of weekends with her, because my mom would work weekends,” she said. “I’m uncomfortable not having a large group of people eating with me on Sunday.”
Council’s low country boil.
For Council, Sunday supper isn’t just about the food. It’s about the conversations shared between bites, the common ground found in a shared admiration for a simple dish. “We can correct a lot of problems by sitting around a table and talking to each other,” Council explained. “We can become comfortable and familiar with each other. And if we’re comfortable with each other, we can do other things. I’m not saying food can cure everything, but I think it’s a huge connection.”
Food also offers a window into cultures in a way that words simply cannot. Council points out that in her younger days, her grandmother was active in the civil rights movement. Her role always hinged on food, handing out sandwiches and cake to churchgoers before they hopped on a bus to hear Martin Luther King speak, or cooking fried chicken spreads for community dinner leaders. Her stories “all center around food and how that can bring the community together,” Council said.
Council began hosting Sunday suppers herself in the family tradition back in 2010, two years after she moved to Atlanta. Back then it was an informal thing — she can’t recall exactly what she made, but the dishes might have ranged from the Southern classics she grew up with to fusion dishes like buttermilk chicken tacos or collard green potstickers. After a particularly successful meal, Council would always email her mom the recipe. After a few months of this routine, Council’s mother had an epiphany. “One day, she sent me a link to a food blog, and she said, ‘You should be doing this.’”
Southern Soufflé got off the ground in 2012, and Council has posted recipes diligently ever since. True to its name, it features a good amount of Southern-inflected fare: fried oyster and shrimp po’ boys, Cajun shrimp and chicken pot pie, and hummingbird cake to name a few.
Tarragon potato biscuits with honey bourbon butter.
But these days, the Sunday suppers featured have a bit more polish to them thanks to an underground supper club that Council has hosted for the last eight months. Tickets to the event series, dubbed South & Slocumb, have sold like wildfire as its fan base grows. Council described an average meal: “I always serve biscuits, whenever I can heirloom tomatoes, a salad with that, and coconut cake for dessert. Shrimp, potatoes Andouille sausage, corn.”
Council hopes to grow the supper club going forward, but most of all, she wants to instill the meaning of Sunday supper in her own two children, especially her daughter, now 14.
“That’s my hope. It is a struggle, there are lots of arguments, and I cave. But I hope that she looks back and sees the importance of food and community and the stories that I tell her and the value of sitting around the table together,” Council said. “There are people who don’t have anyone to share a meal with.”
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