Food writers Matt and Ted Lee charmed a crowd at the James Beard House Tuesday with their butter bean paté and stories of assembling “TheLeeBros. Southern Cookbook” (W.W. Norton). The book, their first, won the James Beard Foundation’s award for best cookbook of the year; Gourmet magazine put it on their list of “10 cookbooks destined to become classics.”

Most of the recipes come from the authors’ experiences in the South, but New York also provided inspiration: The chocolate grits ice cream grew out of the memory of the chocolate grits soufflé served at Lutèce and the book’s instructions for serving mint juleps were inspired by a group of University of Virginia graduates who live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (To cut down on drink preparation time at their annual Kentucky Derby party, they would fill a pitcher with mint and simple syrup the day before.)

New York’s influence on the Lees looms even larger in the broader scheme of things: They lived on the Upper West Side until they were 11, when their family moved to a waterfront townhouse in downtown Charleston, S.C. And their food careers started in their postcollege apartment on the Lower East Side, when they decided to make boiled peanuts and sell them, along with other Southern delicacies, such as fig preserves and pickled peaches.

After sampling their wares, the New York-based editor of Travel + Leisure, Nancy Novograd, hired them to write about their travels.

The siblings, graduates of Harvard (Matt) and Amherst (Ted), have no formal culinary training. “We are curious novices,” Matt said.

They are experienced enough, however, to reinvent Southern recipes. They’ve added cayenne pepper to bourbon balls, turned banana cream pie into an ice cream, and replaced canned tangerines with fresh grapefruit in their ambrosia recipe.

The Lees usually share a byline, but didn’t for an article about liver health, which appears in the September issue of Men’s Vogue. “It didn’t seem right to be referring to ‘our liver,’ ” Matt said.

So Ted took on the assignment alone, submitting to a body scan that supposedly showed the age of his organs. His liver was found to be 65 years old. Ted took more stock in the opinion of his father, a liver specialist. “He said, ‘There’s almost no fat in your liver.'”

The event was part of the Beard on Books series organized by the James Beard Foundation to bring in new audiences. “We’re especially interested in reaching out to students in the area,” the president of the foundation, Susan Ungaro, said.

The readings and signings are free, and take place between noon and 1 p.m. on the second floor of Beard’s home, an 1844 townhouse on West 12th Street he updated with a greenhouse in the 1970s. On the calendar: Julia Child’s grand-nephew, writer Alex Prud’homme, reads from the book he wrote with Child, “My Life in France” (Knopf) on October 10; Molly O’Neill reads from “American Food Writing” (Library of America) on October 17; cooking teacher, chef, and author of more than 20 cookbooks, Jacques Pepin, reads from “Chez Jacques” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang) on November 7; Hervé This reads from “Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Food” (Columbia University Press) on November 27, and visual artist and cook Jake Tilson talks about his family’s food exploits in “A Tale of 12 Kitchens” (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) on December 5.

agordon@nysun.com