Documenting, studying, and celebrating the diverse food cultures of the changing American South.
Oral History Project Index
SFA Founders
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INTERVIEWS
Ann Abadie
Kaye Adams
Jim Auchmutey
Marilou Awiakta
Ben Barker
Karen Barker
Ella Brennan
Ann Brewer
Karen Cathey
Leah Chase
Al Clayton
Mary Ann Clayton
Shirley Corriher
Norma Jean Darden
Crescent Dragonwagon
Nathalie Dupree
John T. Edge
John Egerton
Lolis Eric Elie
Donna Florio
John Folse
Terry Ford
Psyche Williams-Forson
Damon Lee Fowler
Vertamae Grosvenor
Jessica B. Harris
Cynthia Hizer
Portia James
Martha Johnston
Sally Belk King
Sarah Labensky
Edna Lewis
Rudy Lombard
Ronni Lundy
Louis Osteen
Marlene Osteen
Timothy W. Patridge
Paul Prudhomme
Joe Randall
Marie Rudisill
Dori Sanders
Richard Schweid
Ned Shank
Kathy Starr
Frank Stitt
Pardis Stitt
Marion Sullivan
Van Sykes
John Martin Taylor
Toni Tipton-Martin
Jeanne Voltz
Charles Reagan Wilson
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Interviews by SFA Members and Friends.
Project sponsored by Jim 'N Nick's Bar-B-Q.
I train people in my restaurant—my bakers—to
uphold tradition and to try and do things the old-fashioned way, to learn
about the place that you’re cooking in. And I think it’s important
that people understand where it is that they’re coming from.
~Karen Barker
Along with her husband Ben, Karen Barker was co-proprietor of Magnolia Grill in Durham, North Carolina. Together, they chose towalk away from the restaurant business, shutting the doors of this beloved neighborhood restaurant in 2012.
Karen has been named the
best party chef in America by a number of different organizations. But
she isn’t wholly comfortable with the title. Karen prefers to be
called a baker.
Her repertoire, honed over two decades in the kitchen, includes pink grapefruit
soufflé tarts, key lime coconut pie, blackberry slump with sweet
potato dumplings, and bourbon peach cobbler with cornmeal cream biscuits.
She works in the American vernacular, resurrecting desserts that have
fallen out of favor, gently reinventing sweets that have, through the
years, become clichéd. Along with celebrating these dishes in her
restaurant, she offers them in her book, Sweet Stuff: Karen Barker’s
American Desserts.
Among her talents is a way with pie. She wields a rolling pin with authority.
Karen’s model is crafted from oak and recalls, in girth and weight,
the trunk from which it was hewn. She does not roll it across the dough
until she has a crust of sufficient circumference to fit a pie plate.
Karen beats that dough, cocking her body like a spring-loaded jackhammer
built to mete out punishment, slamming the pin down with such force that
the ball bearings within the pin chime and the table beneath the crust
shudders.
SUBJECT: Karen Barker, SFA Founder
DATE: January 19, 2007
LOCATION: Magnolia Grill – Durham, NC
INTERVIEWER: Dean McCord, SFA member
*TRANSCRIPT: To download a full transcript of this interview in PDF form, please click here.
