For much of the South’s history, southerners have borne chips on their shoulders about all manner of our cultural creations. Food is no exception.
We have long accepted the epithets. Singer Bette Midler once told a Charleston, S.C., audience that grits tasted like “buttered kitty litter.” We even joined the fray. “Southern cooking has been perverted by slatterns with a greasy skillet,” wrote Atlantan Ralph McGill in a 1940s dispatch. “Its good name has been sullied by indigestible ‘Southern fried chicken’ . . . with piano-wire sinews and dubious gooey gravy which encourages the chicken to skid off the plate; by various ‘fries’; by much bad Bar-B-Q and worse Brunswick stew; and by too much grease.”
This volume is not a corrective. A bowl of instant grits, cooked carelessly and slicked with margarine, goes a long way toward proving Midler’s point. And it is true that great traditional barbecue—pit cooked over hardwood by a cook of long tenure—is scarcer than ever. Instead, the entries that follow constitute an attempt to transcend the quips and stereotypes, to document and showcase southern foodstuffs and cookery, not to mention southern cooks and eaters, in all their diversity.
An appreciation of southern foodways has always depended upon more than an examination of the food on the table. With this volume as your guide, you will come to see food as a marker of class, gender, race, and ethnicity. You will come to understand how fund-raising cookbooks can be read as community histories. You will appreciate food events like barbecues and fish fries as sites for southern self-definition.
You will meet fabled cooks like Freetown, Va., native Edna Lewis, the woman who reintroduced the South to the idea of terroir, and Craig Claiborne of Sunflower, Miss., the man who reinvented the food pages of the New York Times. You will ponder the import of grocery store staples like Tabasco brand pepper sauce and the pride of Chattanooga, Tenn., the MoonPie. And you will comprehend the metaphorical power of southern provender, a phenomenon illustrated by A. J. Liebling in his biography of Louisiana politician Earl Long: “Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch.”
In the two decades since the original Encyclopedia of Southern Culture was published, America in general, and the South in particular, has awakened to the cultural import of regional foodways. Writers and researchers have applied rigor to the study of what we eat and why we eat it. Organizations such as the Southern Foodways Alliance—an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi—have begun documenting the lives of working-class fry cooks and pitmasters. Cooks have rediscovered the receipts of their forebears. And chefs have interpreted traditional recipes for white-tablecloth consumers and in, the process, become celebrities. Consider this volume the next step in that process, an attempt on the part of the contributors to knock those chips from our shoulders and deliver honest, unflinching portraits of southerners in the field, by the stove, and at table.