Nuts about Nuts

Matt Lee ’92 is in the peanut business.

Southern-style boiled peanuts to be exact—made fresh from South Carolina’s home-grown raw peanuts and FedEx-ed to all fifty states and even overseas. This valuable service is provided by the Lee Bros. Boiled Peanuts Catalog, which has been serving the cause of expatriate Southerners for the last ten years.

To ensure that no boiled peanut craving goes unsatisfied, Matt and his brother Ted take turns manning the headquarters of their mail-order company in Charleston, S.C. They spend the rest of their time in New York, where they both work for the Dining and Wine sections of The New York Times.

Neither brother could have predicted that things would have turned out this well. “The last decade has been sort of not caring too much about a career path and having it turn out to be precisely what we were after all along,” Matt says, who graduated with a degree in the history of art and architecture (then called fine arts). Now the Lee brothers wander in and out of the best kitchens in Manhattan, observing chefs and divulging the secret behind creations such as, say, Tuscan duck l’orange. They have been published in Gourmet, Food and Wine, Travel and Leisure and GQ, and they have written not just about food but also about exploring their beloved South Carolina. “They’re good utility bladders,” says their editor at The Times, Sam Sifton ’88, who regularly has the brothers shadow top-flight chefs for a column called “The Chef.”

Needless to say, this career combination requires a certain resourcefulness. Even at Harvard, Matt was never put off by the occasional need to improvise. The man who would come to distinguish between olive oils the way other people distinguish between cars was completely unfazed by the Adams House dining hall. “I loved it,” he says. “You’re in such control of what you eat there because of the whole condiments/salad bar thing.”

“There were a number of flaming toasts,” he confesses, but he took his circumstances in stride.

He was a member of the Signet Society, which he valued for its well-endowed commercial kitchen. On weekends the kitchen would be unused and he would treat it “like a laboratory.” He was also among the pioneering group of students who converted the old Adams House squash courts into an art exhibit—the space is now officially known as the Adams Art Space. His grass-roots organization to increase visibility for the arts on campus was eventually expanded into the yearly campus-wide celebration known as Arts First.

But one of Matt’s most life-changing Harvard experiences was of a purely personal nature: nowhere in Boston could he find boiled peanuts. It was not until he had arrived in Cambridge that he realized the inherent difficulty of his dependency on boiled peanuts—its chief ingredient is the raw peanut, which grows abundantly in the South and along the equator. “It bothered me,” Matt says, “that you couldn’t get boiled peanuts in the North.”

He took up the cause when he graduated. Ted Lee, a year younger and then enrolled in a creative writing program, was also ready to start a business. Seemingly overnight, the first of many successful Lee brothers’ collaborations was born.

AND THUS IT BEGAN

In 1994, the first Lee Bros. Boiled Peanuts Catalog was stitched together by a Singer sewing machine. Among other items, it advertised five-pound sacks of freshly boiled peanuts straight from Charleston. The brothers began by boiling their own peanuts, then they contracted with a family of manufacturers on Johns Island. Their clientele comes from all across the fifty states as well as other parts of the world and consists mostly of nostalgic southern expatriates. “The dislocation is felt most acutely by western states,” Matt says. The military, meanwhile, accounts for much of their overseas business: “There’s a lot of longing for boiled peanuts felt over foreign posts.” Now in its tenth year, the original catalog has expanded to include numerous other Southern delicacies like cane syrup, benne wafers and scuppernong jelly. The Lee Bros. Cookbook, a compilation of the Lees’ own renditions of the classics of Southern cooking (“More tasty, less fatty,” is Matt’s description) is due out next year.

The brothers’ writing career took off from their peanut career. “The food mail-order business is pretty cut and dry,” Matt says. “We make it as exciting as we can, but it’s not the intellectual challenge that it might be.”

The Lees always write together, by a process remarkably similar to preparing a dish. One brother begins a piece, then passes the fragment to the other by e-mail. The other modifies, adds and sends it back. Sometimes one is writing in New York while the other is in South Carolina taking orders for peanuts. Even when they are in the same city—or even the same apartment—the brothers still do their collaboration via e-mail.

Their writing conveys excitement about how food happens. This interest takes them into the exclusive domains of chefs such as Marcus Samuelsson and Mario Batali. “You have to enjoy the process, the raw chemistry, the little petty drama of it,” says Matt. And, to a certain extent, you don’t even have to know exactly what’s being done: “It’s really important to come from an amateur’s point of view, to be amazed. You’re really defending the reader in a way.”

Observing chefs can be tricky. To the practiced chef, much of food preparation has become perfunctory—they hardly give a thought to the acts of whisking, marinating or garnishing. They cook instinctively, which is no help to the interested amateur. That’s where the freelance food writer comes in.

“It’s fascinating to meet chefs, but so often, they don’t have the tools to articulate what they’re doing,” says Matt. “We have to back them up.”

Sifton agrees. “They’re very good at explaining restaurant techniques to common folk like myself.” And the reason why two South Carolina peanut-boilers can double as New York’s interpreters of haute cuisine is simple. “Their range is bigger than simply the South,” says Sifton. “It would be a mistake to think of the Lee brothers as country-boy plow-hicks who just write about Southern food and Southern culture. In reality they’re sort of fancy-pants cosmopolitans.”

But even if The New York Times is a cosmopolitan sort of place, there’s no repressing the peanut urge. A Lee Bros. “I brake for boiled peanuts” bumper sticker sits on Sifton’s desk.

And just how good are the brothers’ peanuts? “About as good as boiled peanuts can get,” says Sifton.