Natalie Keng will bring her distinctive perspective on Southern food to Winston-Salem on Sept. 23 when she makes an appearance as part of Bookmarks Festival of Books.
Keng grew up in Smyrna, Ga., the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, and is the author of “Egg Rolls & Sweet Tea: Asian Inspired, Southern Style” ($32, Gibbs Smith).
“Egg Rolls & Sweet Tea” (Gibbs Smith) by Natalie Keng
Gibbs Smith Books
Keng also runs a company called Global Hearth, that organizes food-focused team-building and other events. She also has dubbed herself “the Sauce Maven” and “Chinese Southern Belle,” and has created a line of Asian-inspired bottled sauces.
Keng said she grew up “playing in muscadines, going to county fairs, fishing off the docks,” – a pretty typical Southern childhood – except she was Asian-American. Her parents had come to the United States on university scholarships. Her mother became a teacher, her father a university researcher – but they also became local business people, starting a restaurant, jewelry store and other businesses to provide a livelihood for family members and other Asian Americans.
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Mom’s Chinese Spaghetti from “Egg Rolls & Sweet Tea” (Gibbs Smith) by Natalie Keng
Deborah Whitlaw Llewellyn/Courtesy of Gibbs Smith Books
Keng eventually went off to Vassar College and later Harvard’s Kennedy School, where she studied public policy. She said she was working for a Fortune 100 company, helping it promote diversity, when she began to see a career path involving food. “At first, my job was hard, but when we went out to eat, everybody got along. So I saw how powerful food could be,” she said in a telephone interview.
Natalie Keng, author of “Egg Rolls & Sweet Tea” (Gibbs Smith)
Deborah Whitlaw Llewellyn/Courtesy of Gibbs Smith Books
That lesson stuck with her when she returned to Smyrna about 15 years ago to be closer to her parents.
Her food business, she said, started as a way to do something with her mother. “My mom had taught cooking classes back in the ’80s. I wanted something we could do together. That’s how I developed this platform that includes leadership development and team-building,” she said.
That platform now involves such things as helping a corporation develop leadership and improve employee retention class through Keng’s interactive food and cooking programs.
It’s what she calls “cooking up a better world.”
Oven-Baked Country Bacon & Collard Egg Rolls from “Egg Rolls & Sweet Tea” (Gibbs Smith) by Natalie Keng
Deborah Whitlaw Llewellyn/Courtesy of Gibbs Smith Books
She also has developed food and culture tours, including one focused on the many ethnic neighborhoods along the Buford Highway area of Atlanta.
She started developing her line of sauces about 10 years ago, when she realized she had a fridge full of bottled sauces “yet none captured the flavors of my childhood growing up in the Bible Belt – juicy peaches, honeysuckle nectar, Vidalia sweet onion, and my po-po’s tomato wedges marinated in sugar-vinegar brine,” she said on her website, globalhearth.com.
She now sells three sauces on her website, as well as at select Whole Foods Markets (though not currently the Winston-Salem store).
My Sweet Hottie is a chile peach dressing. Your Saucy Thing combines soy sauce, ginger and Vidalia onion. Wild Wild East is a teriyaki or Asian barbecue sauce with pineapple.
She said she insisted on making her sauces from fresh ingredients with no MSG or high-fructose corn syrup. “I didn’t want to make anything I wouldn’t eat myself,” she said.
The cookbook, she said, reflects her distinct childhood – an Asian American growing up in the South. “I was inspired by my growing up in Georgia – not just the food, but navigating the cultural mashup,” she said. “I call it a coffee table book because it’s really about a love letter to Georgia.”
Broccoli and Rice Casserole from “Egg Rolls & Sweet Tea” (Gibbs Smith) by Natalie Keng
Though the book has its share of Southern classics, much of it is a kind of fusion where Asian meets Southern cuisine. For example, Keng’s broccoli and rice casserole – a favorite of American comfort food – is topped with crunchy wonton strips. She makes egg rolls with collard greens and bacon. Her mother’s spaghetti includes hoisin sauce, ginger and sesame oil – and no tomatoes.
She puts pulled pork in Chinese bao (steamed buns). She eats pigs in a blanket with wasabi mustard.
The only potato recipe in the book is a Korean-style potato salad – but there are rice recipes galore – rice pudding, kimchi fried rice, even congee (a Chinese rice porridge) that incorporates frozen fish sticks.
Keng said that just as her cookbook and food business bridges different cuisines, food in general builds all kinds of bridges.
“It bridges divides. When you have positive experiences together, you turn strangers into friends. It’s a gateway to friendship, and it motivates you to give back. When you share something joyful together, you can focus on commonalities and respect differences, and it’s something that is quite magical.”
If You Go to Bookmarks
Natalie Keng, the author of “Egg Rolls & Sweet Tea,” will give a program at Bookmarks Festival of Books from 10:30 to 11:15 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 23 at Reynolds Place, in the first floor of the Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts, 251 N. Spruce St.
Keng will appear along with father-and-son Ed and Ryan Mitchell, the authors of “Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque.”
The Mitchells are pitmasters in Wilson, N.C., who have a national following for their Eastern-style North Carolina barbecue.
To read more about the Mitchells and their book, visit https://tinyurl.com/f355wy6m.
For more information about Bookmarks, visit bookmarksnc.org.
Ryan Mitchell, left with his father, Ed Mitchell.
Photo by Baxter Miller, courtesy of Ecco/HarperCollins
Ryan Mitchell attends to a pig on the smoker while his father, Ed Mitchell, looks on.
Photo by Baxter Miller, courtesy of Ecco/HarperCollins
