The ‘Turkey and the Wolf’ Cookbook Is a Trippy Tour-de-Force

In 2017, when the magazine Bon [redacted] named Turkey and the Wolf the best new restaurant in the U.S., it seemed like a big deal. For one, it was just a sandwich shop. On top of that, it was started by a silly dude, Mason Hereford, who looks and behaves like he should be running a bowling alley, not one of the most famous restaurants in the country. Yet the hype proved to be real, and now, six years later, Turkey and the Wolf is still a singular institution that has inspired many copycats (and even one with Hereford's explicit blessing). In 2023, when there’s a lot of too much talk about what kinds of restaurants we’re supposed to care about (Noma is closing; that dumb movie The Menu inspired a bunch of think pieces; you get the gist), Turkey and the Wolf has never seemed more relevant. 

But Turkey and the Wolf isn’t a symbol for whatever class warfare we imagine is happening in the restaurant industry right now—it’s a restaurant where people can go eat insane-looking sandwiches and decadent sides served on funny plates from the 90s. And Hereford’s cookbook, Turkey and the Wolf: Flavor Trippin’ in New Orleans, which came out last year, is a stunning portal into what makes this restaurant so special. 

In the introduction, Hereford, who trained in fine dining restaurants before starting his own (he also owns Molly’s Rise and Shine), talks about growing up in rural Virginia, where convenience store junk food was one of the major food groups. Countless meals consisted of frozen burritos and Vienna Sausages; a favorite breakfast combo was Doritos, Snickers, and Mr. Pibb. (I related deeply to this part, having grown up with divorced parents who encouraged gas station breakfasts of Rice Krispies Treats and Mountain Dew before school.) Between those foods and the recipes of his grandmother, who cooked delicacies like duck fricassee and snapper with herbed lemon butter, Hereford truly had the poles of American dining ingrained in him. It’s no surprise, then, that he made a bologna sandwich that people mention with the same reverence as food from Alinea.

If you pick up Turkey and the Wolf, you can make that bologna sandwich, alongside other weird and wild dishes like Buffalo Waldorf salad, roasted sunchoke and white truffle “Dunkaroos,” “McCaviar” (literally caviar on hash browns), and a peanut butter bacon burger. Oh, and the sandwiches. I made the collard green melt last year, which took three hours and remains one of the best things I’ve ever cooked (and eaten); and I’ll be eating the tomato sandwich all summer, once the proper goods become available at my local farmers market.

This past weekend, my cookbook club made food from this book, and it was an amazing experience—there’s just something about Southern cuisine where it needs to be shared family-style; and Hereford’s sense of humor and whimsicality came through, somehow, in almost every dish. We listened to Allen Toussaint and Buckwheat Zydeco to put us in the mood. 

I started by making the white bean hummus with chile-crunch peas, which Hereford admits is based on recipes by Michael Solomonov (Philadelphia-based Israeli restaurateur and author of Zahav). It’s a fairly straightforward recipe… until you get to the Duke’s mayonnaise, which, you’ll learn, is one of the threads throughout a lot of the food in this book. It’s barely noticeable in the dish, but knowing it’s there brings a bit of charm. The chile-crunch peas—basically thawed frozen peas mixed with peanuts and chile crisp (we used Lao Gan Ma, one of the GOATs)—bring a spicy, vegetal vibe that distinguishes the dish from any other hummus I’ve made (and I’ve made a thousand of them). The collard greens dish is a cauldron of flavor, amazing in its simplicity; outside of chopping garlic, measuring spices, and tearing a bunch of collard greens, it’s an incredibly passive dish that, due to the large amount of vinegar, hot sauce, and Creole seasoning, turns out to be an absolute flavor bomb that won over every person at the table.

The “Okranomiyaki”—say that five times fast—is a cool fusion dish that sees roasted okra take on a ton of sweet-savory Japanese flavors. It’s probably the only Southern dish I know of that actually requires you to go to an international supermarket (unless you’re simply packing Kewpie mayo, bonito flakes, beni shoga (pickled ginger), and okonomi sauce in your pantry, in which case, hell yeah). Spoiler alert: it was worth the trip, especially if you’re an okonomiyaki freak like myself. We had the leftover fried chicken salad, which relies on sweet potato, Duke’s (obviously), mustard, pickles, fried chicken and a bunch of other stuff to make the backyard barbecue side dish sludge of our dreams. The apple fritters, which stayed crispy and packed with flavor for hours, were pretty incredible as well.

The “Mom’s Famous Burnt Tomatoes” was both the most simple and the most beloved dish of the meal. Basically, you dredge and fry tomatoes and then bake them to absolute hell; once they’re annihilated in the oven, you serve them hot as fuck. It’s just pure, oily, tomato-sweet goodness. Since the tomatoes were almost jammy at that point, we ate them on slices of French baguette, which isn’t in the book, but, you know… France, New Orleans—all that jazz (pun not intended). Ironically, the tomatoes were made by the most self-conscious cook in the group, someone who almost never cooks for herself. If one recipe can skyrocket an admittedly mediocre cook to become the star of the show, then you know you’re in good hands with anything else you make from the book.

TL;DR: Turkey and the Wolf is a playful, lighthearted book that makes fusion-y Southern cooking accessible to anybody. Not only is it a window into a truly important American dining institution, but it’s a library of absolutely kickass recipes that, when combined, will create one of the best family meals you’ve had in a long time. 

Pick up Turkey and the Wolf: Flavor Trippin’ in New Orleans on Amazon.

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