Welcome to Biscuits and Jam from Southern Living.

I'm Sid Evans, editor-in-chief of Southern Living magazine.

My guest today is an acclaimed chef from North Carolina, and thanks to her hit PBS program,

a chef's life, the first woman since Julia Child to win a Peabody Award for Culinary Broadcasting.

Over her career, she's found that the ways Southern food traditions are passed down are just as important as the food itself.

That's the way that so many of these, like, rural recipes are.

They're so simple and so mundane that, you know, people never even wrote them down.

There's so many things that are kind of cornerstones of rural culture that no one's ever

thought to really celebrate.

Five-time James Beard Award semi-finalist Vivian Howard

is the restaurateur behind Chef and the Farmer,

which opened in 2006 in the little town of Kingston, North Carolina,

and has remained one of the most influential

and celebrated restaurants in the South.

Another PBS show of Vivians is Somewhere South,

a culinary exploration of how Southeast Asian, Hispanic,

and other communities are redefining Southern food.

Here's a clip from the show's trailer.

What I found in the South is that food tells us where we came from, where we landed,

and what we did when we got there.

It's Southern Chinese American.

I grew to love the South and grew to claim it.

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