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Saturday, February 11, 2012

CULTURE

Food Bytes: Rising Star Chef Hugh Acheson

Chef Hugh Acheson has a lot of pots on his proverbial stove. Between running two restaurants in Athens, GA—fine dining establishment Five & Ten and more casual spot The National, both featuring modern updates on traditional regional cuisine—and a wine store called Gosford Wine, he's working towards opening a third, Empire State South, this summer in Atlanta. The four-time James Beard Foundation Award nominee for Best Chef in the Southeast was chosen by culinary luminary Mario Batali as one of the 100 best contemporary chefs in COCO: 10 World-Leading Press Masters choose 100 Contemporary Chefs (Phaidon Press, 2009). Acheson's own title, A New Turn in the South: The Cuisine of Hugh Acheson (Clarkson Potter), is due out in the fall of 2011, and he also blogs regularly at Hugh Cooks Food, a recipe-filled food blog.

Yet between the honors and openings, the writing and running of businesses (not to mention the cooking), the 38-year-old still finds time to stalk eBay’s for hard-to-find cookbooks he uses as inspiration and research for dishes and recipes old and new. “Generally, I just troll for happy surprises,” he says of his searches. “But there are definitely times when I am looking for something specific, like the Charleston Receipts.”

Charleston Receipts Junior League 1950 Tricenten (buy it now price, $5.99) “I love cookbooks with historical significance. Charleston Receipts is America’s oldest Junior League cookbook in print. This one is the 1970 printing of the 1950 Tricentennial edition.”

 

“I brake for old texts and both regional and out-of-print European titles,” says Acheson. He found this Prudence Penny Regional Cookbook, originally published in 1940, on eBay.
 


Counted among his favorite recent eBay purchases are issues of Gentry, a men’s lifestyle magazine that was first published in the 1951: “My wife, Mary, was the one who turned me on to Gentry, after reading about William Segal, the subject of a spring 2012 retrospective at the Georgia Museum of Art here in Athens,” says Acheson.  “Segal founded the textile industry magazine American Fabrics in 1946 and Gentry a few years later. In the 1950s and even today, there was no comparable publication. I love the use of textiles, the bits of fabric they glued into the magazine. I’ve shared it with the designers of Empire State South. Right now I have Issues 1-10, which are probably the more difficult to find, but I would love to collect them all.”

**Images of Acheson and his eBay collections provided by Acheson.**

Acheson adorns the shelves and the odd nook of his newly renovated house with his eBay wins, which include specialty kitchen gear like:

Roll over items for details
Royal Worcester Porcelain Egg Coddlers
(buy it now price, $52)
Food Bytes: Rising Star Chef Hugh Acheson

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