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Summary
Summary
A people's history of Southern food that reveals how the region came to be at the forefront of American culinary culture and how issues of race have shaped Southern cuisine over the last six decades. THE POTLIKKER PAPERS tells the story of food and politics in the South over the last half century. Beginning with the pivotal role of cooks in the Civil Rights movement, noted authority John T. Edge narrates the South's journey from racist backwater to American immigration. He traces how the food of the poorest Southerners has become the signature trend of modern American haute cuisine.
Author Notes
John T. Edge is a contributing editor at Garden & Gun and a columnist for the Oxford American . In 2012, he won the James Beard Foundation's M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. He is director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi. Edge has written or edited more than a dozen books. He has served as culinary curator for the weekend edition of NPR's All Things Considered , and he has been a regular columnist at the New York Times . Edge lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his son, Jess, and his wife, Blair Hobbs.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Edge, who serves as director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, projects a relaxed yet erudite style in rendering the audio edition of his latest title, an exploration of his region's complex-sometimes contradictory-history with food in the decades since World War II. His gentle drawl and generally leisurely pacing comes across like a conversational lecture, remaining teacherlike enough to convey the sense of someone expounding on an academic discipline. In delivering the many passages of the book tied to issues of race and ethnicity, Edge takes great pains to give divergent figures distinct voices without resorting to stock characterizations. This is no small feat, particularly given the baggage that surrounds the relationship between white and black southerners in the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. His depiction of the brave activism of civil rights pioneer Fannie Lou Hamer, who focused on agricultural justice for African-Americans in addition to her crusade for voting rights, evokes a stirring sense of time and place. A Penguin Press hardcover. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, compellingly tells the story of the rise of Southern cooking. He attributes Southern cuisine's roots to the region's twin scourges of poverty and racism and credits the leading virtues of Southern cooking to the many African Americans whose shaping of traditions was for so many decades either ignored or outright suppressed. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks may have been the nascent civil-rights revolution's public faces, but Montgomery's Georgia Gilmore sustained the marchers on their way with her good food. Later, the back-to-the-soil movement made farming organic, sustainable, and popular. Kentucky Fried Chicken conquered the fast-food world, even though the Colonel himself expressed grave doubts about its industrial quality. Southern-born Craig Claiborne used his pulpit at the New York Times to foster the 1960s' foodie revolution. Thanks in part to celebrity television chefs, New Orleans became the country's fashionable foodie capital. Edge's research and command of prose make this a necessary history.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The foodways of the South have long been praised, but Southern culinary talent has often been assumed to be intrinsic rather than learned. There's something nice about believing Southerners have the sort of affiniJ."=ÜL' ty for deliciousness more commonly associated with the Italians or the French, but it's a much less generous compliment when you consider the history of recipes credited only to "Mammy," or the tradition of calling the food of New Orleans a mixture of Spanish and French while ignoring the fact that most of the people cooking it are black. Long one of the key voices in the discussion of Southern cuisine, Edge challenges the accepted narrative that traces immigrant traditions into a low trough of mediocrity lasting through World War II and lingering until James Beard, Julia Child and Craig Claiborne lit it up. The fire is stoked on the West Coast by Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck, but meanwhile the South is just there: provincial, traditional, doing what it's always done. Edge's book is an antidote to that misconception. Here we read of Fannie Lou Hamer, the voting rights activist who believed that African-Americans in the South should own farms and produce their own food, and Georgia Gilmore, whose home was the "executive dining room for the civil rights movement." On Page 87, Edge takes his first big turn, dropping us among the hippies at The Farm commune in Tennessee. Scrawled in my margin: "Whoa, this is a big story." When Edge quotes Raymond Sokolov's 1981 volume "Fading Feast" - "No one is seeding new beds of Olympia oysters or pressing for the legalization of moonshine" - the contrast with our current food scene is plain. Edge takes us all the way through, watching the momentum build until the South comes into its own: "The Southern artisan movement relied on moonshine. And on history. In the embrace of traditional goods and heirloom crops, America discovered that some Southerners had never given up on techniques and ingredients that dated to the early years of the Republic." And Edge looks forward to "a future-tense South still in the making, a place that will be as Mexican as West African, as Korean as Irish, and will lose none of its essential identity in the process." max watman is the author, most recently, of "Harvest: Field Notes From a Far-Flung Pursuit of Real Food."
Choice Review
Edge's much praised chronicle of Dixie's cuisine has reaped its share of plaudits for surveying regional black-white history and for inserting soupçons of the unique entrees and desserts that buoyed the South's fame. Ladling on food preparation as a backstory, the opening segment spotlights the Birmingham bus boycott. Subsequent coverage of celebrity chefs and menu development is punctuated with details of home kitchen cookery, and the tone ranges from venerating to mundane. The reading tends to sap one's simple hit-and-run pleasure of fried chicken, biscuits, and collard greens with bourbon or sweet tea. As a sociological study, the narration omits the importance of Hispanic and Indian migrant pickers, Thanksgiving dinner with Grandma, drive-ins, clam bakes, church dinners on the ground, and school lunches, whatever the racial provenance of recipes and table ingredients. The bifurcation of purpose--telling the South's civil rights story and summarizing strands of comestibles that impact current tastes--weakens Edge's overall view of how and what Americans and tourists treasure about southeastern knife-and-fork culture. Summing Up: Recommended. With the caveats above. Lower-division undergraduates, general readers, and professionals. --Mary Ellen Snodgrass, Lenoir-Rhyne University
Kirkus Review
The director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi recounts the past 60 years of Southern food traditions, their effects on the South's culture, and vice versa.As Garden Gun contributing editor and Oxford American columnist Edge notes at the beginning, this book is a "sequel" of sorts to Nashville social historian John Egerton's Southern Food (1987). Mixing deep scholarship, charming anecdotes, and his own extensive culinary explorations, Edge provides a chronological account by decades, starting in the 1950s. Throughout, as he entertains, Edge advances a multipronged thesis: that both the proud and shameful cultures of the Southern states can be understood through the socio-economics of cooking and eating; that the future of the South looks bright as cooking and eating evolve; and that Southern food cultures directly affect the rest of the country. The author's scholarship is undoubtedly compelling, but what will stick with most readers are the vignettes about specific chefs, restaurants, food producers, food marketers, politicians, celebrities, and race-based relationships. One of the more memorable portraits focuses on Craig Claiborne, a Mississippian with an unusual character who became a bestselling cookbook author and an influential food journalist for the New York Times. Claiborne's journalism helped lead to national recognition for two extremely different chefs, Paul Prudhomme of Louisiana and Bill Neal of North Carolina. The flashy Prudhomme not only spread the popularity of Cajun cuisine, but also successfully promoted the use of locally grown, fresh produce in restaurants. In addition to teaching chefs that superb cooking requires research, the more restrained Neal also helped cement the now-widespread belief that making food for the public involves an artistic sensibility.Without question, this is a book for foodies, but it is also for readers who may be indifferent to the food they consume yet care deeply about regionalism, individual health, and race relations, among other themes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Edge (dir., Southern Foodways Alliance, Univ. of Mississippi) has written an expert account of Southern food. Listeners are presented with a concise and informative history lesson on how Southern cooks and their food have shaped the region. Tales of influential figures throughout history lead the story through significant changes in the South, with particular emphasis on the civil rights struggle. This book will give everyone new insight-even foodies who think they know it all already. Edge's narration in his soft Southern accent provides an authentic and pleasant touch. VERDICT Recommended for all food lovers and where there is regional interest in authors such as Michael Twitty. ["An engrossing blend of food science, regionalism, and ethnic studies": LJ 3/15/17 starred review of the Penguin hc.]-Donna Bachowski, Orange Cty. Lib. Syst., Orlando, FL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Author's Note | p. vii |
| Foreword (to) | p. ix |
| Potlikker: An Introduction | p. 1 |
| Freedom Struggles (1950s-1970s) | |
| 1 Kitchen Tables | p. 15 |
| 2 Restaurant Theaters | p. 31 |
| 3 Poor Power | p. 49 |
| 4 Black Power | p. 69 |
| Rise of the Folk (1970s & 1980s) | |
| 5 Landed Hippies | p. 87 |
| 6 Faster Food | p. 109 |
| 7 Carter Country | p. 129 |
| 8 Black Pastorals | p. 147 |
| Gentrification (1980s & 1990s) | |
| 9 Kingmaker and Kings | p. 163 |
| 10 Generation Grits | p. 183 |
| 11 Cooking School | p. 199 |
| New Respect (1990s-2010s) | |
| 12 Artisanal Pantry | p. 215 |
| 13 Restaurant Renaissance | p. 235 |
| 14 Pits and Pitmasters | p. 255 |
| Future Tenses (2010s Forward) | |
| 15 Political Reckonings | p. 275 |
| 16 Nuevo Sud | p. 293 |
| Shared Palates: An Afterword | p. 307 |
| Thanks | p. 311 |
| Notes | p. 315 |
| Deeper Reading: A Selective Bibliography | p. 347 |
| Index | p. 353 |