By Jim Beaugez
The 2025 Summer Chef Series at Catfish Row Museum, an annual tasting and storytelling series featuring live cooking demonstrations and engaging conversations with noted chefs, will open Sat., June 7, with a program that pairs historical research with practical cooking.
Historian Andrew P. Haley and chef Danielle Sypher-Haley will lead “Recipes, Roots and the Southern Table,” a live demonstration and discussion focused on the cultural significance of food, immigrant traditions, and the evolving role of community cookbooks in the American South.
“This is going to be a kind of dual presentation,” Haley said. “We’ll both talk about early inspirations — the things that made us interested in food and cooking.”
For Haley, those beginnings trace back to his mother’s kitchen in New Hampshire. In their Lebanese-American household, food was linked to identity, language and memory, passed on through dishes like tabboule, a cracked wheat and parsley salad, and kibbeh, a mixture of ground meat and bulgar wheat.
“She always had us helping out in the kitchen,” he said. “Food always mattered.”
That early influence carried through graduate school, where Haley’s interest in American restaurant culture became the basis for his book “Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880–1920,” a James Beard Award winner. More recently, he’s been working through a different kind of text: community cookbooks from Mississippi.
“They’ve been studied before, but not in a comprehensive way,” Haley said. “What I’ve found is that they’re not just collections of recipes — they’re cultural documents. They reflect how women shaped their communities through food and how national trends found their way into local kitchens.”
Sypher-Haley’s story begins in Pittsburgh, but her family’s work as educators took her far from home. She spent her formative years in Iran and Saudi Arabia, absorbing the flavors of street stalls and home kitchens in the Middle East. But like Andrew, her path to cooking wasn’t direct.
“I always wanted to be a chef,” she said. “And my parents always didn’t want me to be one.”
So, she struck a deal with her reluctant parents. She would earn a traditional four-year degree first, then pursue culinary school. The day she graduated from Tufts University, she picked up the phone and held them to it. She enrolled in the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts and never looked back.
Over the next two decades, Sypher-Haley worked in restaurants and kitchens along the east coast. Today, she channels those experiences into a distinctive cooking style rooted in the foodways of American immigrants, adapting global flavors with local ingredients and classical training.
“I specialize in a kind of Americanized version of Middle Eastern, Italian, Chinese, and Mexican food,” she said. “It’s not traditional, but it’s what immigrants cook here. It’s what I learned in the restaurants, and it’s what I make at home.”
Home cooking has always been central for the Haleys. They met as undergrads, bonded over their love of food, and built a life around shared meals, even in the lean years of graduate school and entry-level jobs.
“We’d go out to eat at ethnic restaurants and then come home and try to recreate what we tasted,” Sypher-Haley said. “I love learning to cook new things.”
Paneer Pasanda and homemade naan are recent additions to her growing personal cookbook, a document that now stands at 828 pages and counting.
For the Catfish Row event, Sypher-Haley will demonstrate how to make pita bread and hummus, two staples of Middle Eastern cooking that have found homes on tables across the American South, while Haley will prepare tabboule and kibbeh.
The presentation won’t be a lecture, but instead a conversation about the ways food travels, evolves, and stays rooted in memory.
“Andrew is going to talk about growing up Lebanese in New Hampshire, and I’m going to fit myself in around his story,” Sypher-Haley said. “Food was always important to his mother, and it’s always been the joy of my life.”
The Summer Chef Series will continue with a lineup as diverse and compelling as the region itself. On June 21, author Kathy Starr will present “The Soul of Southern Cooking,” followed by Malcolm White and LeAnne Gault on July 12. Chef Enrika Williams brings her signature style for “Bohemian Bites and Southern Roots” on July 26, while Chef Taylor Bowen-Ricketts closes out the season with “Southern Fresh: Tradition with a Twist” on Aug. 9.
