Asheville Chef Ashleigh Shanti Explores Her Identity in New Cookbook

In her first cookbook, Our South Black Food Through My Lens, chef Ashleigh Shanti takes readers on a road trip through the cultural and culinary landscapes that shaped her. The stories, recipes and lushly colored photos by Johnny Autry travel through five regions that map her life from birth through her current home in Asheville. Imagine classic cornbread, kilt lettuce, spiced shrimp and field pea perloo, Charleston toast, chicken thighs and stewed plums, peach shortcake, collard and sweet potato chowder, candied short ribs with skillet red cabbage, and black-eye pea hominy fritters.

Shanti started the book after she left Benne on Eagle — the restaurant that brought national recognition to her Affralachian cooking and a James Beard finalist nomination for Rising Star Chef — in November 2020 and completed it before she opened Good Hot Fish in January 2024.

“After Benne, it seemed like a good time for me to get quiet and write,” she says. “I thought about my story and why I cook the way I do. A big part of that is these very specific microregions in the South that formulated who I am as a chef. It always gets under my skin that people identify Southern food as this one thing.”

After a deeply personal introduction, Shanti turns her lens to Backcountry, Lowcountry, Midlands, Lowlands, and Homeland. “I worked on each region separately — the first four shaped me as a chef and were easy for me to travel to, visit with family and hear their stories. Homeland is where I am now.”

To write the proposal — which essentially was shaped into the book’s introduction — she moved back into her childhood home where her parents still live. “I felt like it needed to happen there, in the place in Virginia where I grew up, with the kitchen where I baked my first cornbread.”

The cabbage and mushroom pancake recipe was inspired by a savory pancake her mother used to make. “It’s a Black Southern thing,” Shanti says. “You throw in whatever you had from the night before, maybe fried cabbage or vegetables. It’s super eggy. You do it in a cast iron skillet to get that crisp.” At Good Hot Fish, it becomes a sweet potato pancake; in the cookbook, it’s green and red cabbage, shitake mushrooms, flour, cornmeal, eggs, buttermilk, and in a twist, white miso paste.

Cornmeal fried catfish is a recipe she says she features as a plate special at the restaurant when the mood strikes her. Hush puppies – like the Good Hot Fish sandwich – are always on the menu, and a recipe for fish camp hush puppies is in the Backcountry section. U-Haul shrimp cocktail is an interpretation of a dish made by her wife Meaghan when they were in the long-distance dating era of their courtship.

“I am a Black, queer, woman chef who found my identity through cooking. It was important to me to express the foodways of places that were meaningful to me and preserve those recipes.”

Shanti will be at King BBQ in Charleston on October 27 as part of the book tour for Our South.