Lucy Buffett's Love Of Southern Food | Southern Living

Well I'm real proud to be Southern.

There's such a warmth.

And I'm not only Southern, but coastal Southern.

The South has a vibrant food culture, but the coastal South has so much seafood.

I love the recreation piece of being, we work really hard and then we play pretty hard.

And when we recreate, we're recreating out on boats and we're catching shrimp or we're lying out on the pier.

It's a lifestyle that is really rich with, it's colorful characters and delicious food.

I just wouldn't know how else to be but Southern.

The coast has Southern food and it has Cajun Creole food.

And then it has so much, like I said, the seafood, the shrimp and the oysters, and the fishing.

We actually go out and catch those.

We make that part of our hobbies and part of our weekend activities.

People gather, they gather, friends and family gather.

My family growing up, we had to go to my grandparents on the Mississippi Gulf Coast once a month and then it was always a big feast.

And so that sort of gathering of community and family I think is really special, and that happens a lot along the Gulf Coast.

I got started cooking because I was a very, very, very young bride with two children.

And I had to feed my family.

And it was a daunting task! And what I didn't realize until I started to cook, having to learn to cook, I taught myself how to cook out of a Junior League cookbook, a Mobile Alabama Junior League cookbook.

And what I realized is that I picked up a lot more in my grandmothers' kitchens.

And they are my culinary influences.

And once I started cooking, I realized I loved it and it became a hobby for me.

I kept trying harder and harder recipes and then I became in the family, everybody has kinda their role of what they are and I was the cook.

And then in my group of friends, I loved entertaining and I loved cooking.

And it just evolved as I wanted to learn more.

If my family's coming to town, I do a gumbo or a I do a West Indies salad, I really do.

If I'm having a dinner party, I do this sauteed crab over cheese grits.

My comfort food is, well let me put it this way, when I put chips and salsa on the menu at LuLu's, I gained a little bit of weight.

I love to make a pasta, and if I have homegrown tomatoes, I love homegrown tomatoes in the summertime, and I do this raw pasta salad that you chop all the onions and garlic and parsley in a big bowl, and you put a really good olive oil in there and you set it outside.

And you let the sun kinda just cook it, that's my comfort food.

Gumbo, I had to try to define that in writing the book and it became a slogan that I used.

Over the years it became evident that as I was writing about making gumbo, and I had decided I would call it Gumbo Love and I really needed it to reveal itself to me.

I realized that as, within cooking a pot of gumbo, all of those character building traits, having to have perseverance and having to have patience and having to have courage, things that you need to build character, all of that's in a pot of gumbo.

You have to do the preparation, and there's a lot of it.

You have to do the rue, that is kinda scary.

And it takes practice.

And then correlate that to the fact that cooking a pot of gumbo in my first little pot I ever cooked for my LuLu's Restaurants, I feel like the success of those restaurants are all built on that pot of gumbo.

And when I reflected on it, it's not the first food I learned to cook, but it's the first dish that I learned to master.

And that became very meaningful to me.

So it had all those lessons in there, but it also, for me, is about family, and sharing love.

My passion for cooking came from just sharing, sharing my love with my family and my friends.

And so that's all wrapped up in Gumbo Love, and there's a respect level, I have the greatest work family, I've created those businesses as businesses where I would want to work and that the people that chose to be there would be valued and respected, supported, and then they'd have to show up in integrity and do their work.

And so all of that's in the Gumbo Love too.

So it's a philosophy, it's my book, and it's just, I think it's a really sweet Southern kinda, my coastal expression, basically.