October is Rebecca’s birthday month, affectionately known as Bextober! And what better way to celebrate than with some great food, art, and a little history?

Rebecca came across an event she wanted us to attend at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art called Recipe Revival, part of the museum’s 100th anniversary celebration. It sounded interesting, so she got us tickets, and it turned out to be a lovely evening together.

The concept was pretty cool. Back in the 1980s, the High Museum’s volunteer guild created a cookbook called Recipe Collection as a fundraising project. It was so successful that it eventually sold more than 40,000 copies! For the museum’s centennial, they brought the cookbook back to life with a special reprint and invited four Atlanta chefs to select recipes and give them their own modern interpretations.

One of the coolest moments came right at the beginning. The woman who originally spearheaded the cookbook project more than 40 years ago was actually in attendance! She received a well-deserved round of applause. How neat is that? Something she helped create decades ago was being celebrated by a whole new generation.

Four Chefs, Four Different Interpretations

The evening began with a moderated discussion featuring four accomplished Atlanta chefs:

• Ji Hyun Lee — Heirloom Market BBQ
• J. Trent Harris — MUJO and Koshu Club
• Steven Satterfield — Miller Union and Madeira Park
• Craig Richards — Lyla Lila and Elise

Each chef selected a recipe from the original cookbook and explained how they approached recreating or reimagining it.

Steven Satterfield chose two appetizers, including an egg salad topped with caviar and a Norwegian-inspired cucumber appetizer featuring anchovies, cream cheese, and preserved lemon. He joked that even people who think they don’t like anchovies needed to try his version.

Craig Richards selected gingerbread with warm lemon sauce. Interestingly, he said his first attempt following the original recipe didn’t turn out particularly well. After a little tweaking, including adding more lemon to balance the sweetness, he had something he was excited about potentially serving at his restaurant.

Ji Hyun Lee took traditional Southern Brunswick stew and gave it a Korean twist by incorporating kimchi. She explained the similarities between Korean stews and Southern comfort food, particularly their resourcefulness and use of available ingredients. She also prepared homemade cornbread.

J. Trent Harris chose green beans and walnuts, transforming the simple dish into something much more sophisticated with Hokkaido scallops, walnut miso sauce, and green beans marinated in sesame dashi.

Talk about taking some old-school recipes to another level!

More Than Just Cooking

What I really enjoyed about the discussion was hearing the chefs talk about the relationship between food, family, culture, and memories.

Several shared stories about their grandmothers’ recipes, often handwritten on scraps of paper, with measurements that weren’t exactly precise. Others talked about recipes that were never written down at all, passed from one generation to the next simply by watching and learning.

Ji Hyun Lee shared a particularly touching story about growing up in Korea during the 1970s, when food and resources were limited. Her grandmother would gather vegetables and herbs and somehow create incredible meals for the family. Those flavors and memories still influence her cooking today.

Another interesting discussion was about consistency in professional kitchens. These chefs don’t simply create a great dish once. They have to document every step, teach their teams, and make sure the food tastes the same every time someone orders it. As one chef explained, they taste everything, every single day.

There was also some good humor throughout the conversation, especially when the moderator pointed out that the original cookbook contained 11 gelatin mold recipes! Apparently, Jell-O salads were quite the thing back then. The chefs had some fun debating whether gelatin molds deserved a comeback.

After the discussion, the audience had an opportunity to ask questions about everything from favorite cookbooks and Atlanta restaurants to what keeps the chefs passionate about cooking after decades in the business.

Now for the Best Part: The Food!

Once the discussion and Q&A wrapped up, we were invited to sample each chef’s creation.

And this was where the evening really came together.

Steven Satterfield’s appetizers were fantastic. The egg salad with caviar was delicious, but the cucumber appetizer with anchovies was surprisingly good. Rebecca absolutely loved it, and we both agreed it was worth going back for seconds. The anchovy flavor was much more subtle than you might expect.

J. Trent Harris’s scallops with walnut miso and green beans were probably my favorite dish of the evening. The scallops were delicious, and the walnut sauce added an interesting flavor and texture. I enjoyed this one so much that I went back for more.

Ji Hyun Lee’s kimchi Brunswick stew was where Rebecca and I had a difference of opinion. She absolutely loved it! In fact, she said she could have eaten an entire bowl, which is saying something because she’s not normally a big Brunswick stew fan.

Me? Well, I’ve tried to develop a taste for kimchi, but I just can’t get past that tangy fermented flavor. Rebecca thought the kimchi made the stew even better. I thought it would have been better without it. Different palates, I suppose!

However, we both agreed that the cornbread was excellent. I even had a chance to ask about how it was made and learned that combining regular cornmeal with a finer stone-ground cornmeal helped create its wonderful texture.

Craig Richards’s gingerbread with warm lemon sauce was another winner. Rich, flavorful, and perfect for the season. I enjoyed it enough to have seconds! We also had a chance to chat briefly about Lyla Lila, where I’d taken Rebecca for her 40th birthday. We had such a great experience there, especially sitting at the bar overlooking the action.

A Few Unexpected Highlights

One of the nice things about an event like this is the people you meet along the way.

We struck up a conversation with Susan, a longtime docent at the High Museum, who told us about some of the museum’s other events and its newly reinstalled American art galleries. She had been involved with the museum for about 30 years, so she had plenty of stories and recommendations.

We also unexpectedly ran into Sybil, whom I know from CrossFit. Funny running into someone from the gym at a museum food event! Naturally, we compared notes on our favorite dishes. She and Rebecca were firmly on Team Brunswick Stew, while I was sticking with the scallops.

Before leaving, Rebecca wanted pictures with the chefs. She was a little hesitant to ask, but they were all gracious and happy to oblige. We managed to get photos with all four of them, which made for a nice souvenir of the evening.

We also came away with a copy of the reprinted cookbook, signed by the chefs. A pretty neat keepsake considering the history behind it.

Food, Art, and History

One of my favorite takeaways from the evening was something discussed during the panel: cookbooks are more than collections of recipes. They’re historical documents that tell us what people ate, what ingredients were available, and how families lived during a particular time.

The original cookbook even included an introduction by author Pat Conroy, who wrote about the connection between food and art and how purchasing the book helped support the future of the High Museum.

It’s pretty remarkable that a fundraising project started by museum volunteers in the 1980s could come full circle more than four decades later and inspire an event like this.

What started as an evening of listening to chefs discuss old recipes turned into a fun culinary experience, complete with delicious food, interesting conversations, a little history, and some new restaurants we now want to visit.

Most importantly, it was a wonderful evening spent with Rebecca. I’m glad she found this event and got us tickets. It’s not something I would necessarily have thought to attend on my own, but I’m really glad we did.

Happy 100th birthday to the High Museum of Art! Here’s to another century of bringing people together through art, culture, and, apparently, some really good food.