Southern Cuisine and the Future of Food History

The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region, by Marcie Cohen Ferris. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xiv, 477 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine, by David S. Shields. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2015. xvi, 401 pp. $30.00 US (cloth). SOUTHERN FOOD IS HOT The Southern Cuisine--thanks to luminaries like Edna Lewis, Vivian Howard, Bill Neal, and Sean Brock--has captured the attention not only of Southern magazines like Southern Living and Garden and Gun but also the New York Times and PBS. The Southern Foodways Alliance fall symposia attract more than 400 participants, and tickets sell out weeks in advance. Southern-food lovers in Brooklyn, New York, have hundreds of restaurants from which to choose, and hipsters form out-the-door lines for humble fried-chicken sandwiches. There's a certain poignancy in this celebratory attention. Food is one of the few features of the US South that can be celebrated across class and racial lines. Cotton? Not so much. The Confederate flag? Nope. Bacon and greens? YES! In contrast to so much about the Southern Past, Southern food represents a heritage genuinely valued by whites and blacks (and Latinos and Asians and Africans) and rich and poor. The new attention from foodie elites has made Southern cuisine that much more valuable as a touchstone. In the last few years the scholarship on Southern food has begun to catch up. New books by Marcie Cohen Ferris and David S. Shields join the narrower or more idiosyncratic excellence of Sam Bowers Hilliard's Flog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840-1860 (Carbondale, 1972), Joe Gray Taylor's Eating, Drinking and Visiting in the South: An Informal History (Baton Rouge, 1982), John Egerton's Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History (New York, 1987), Elizabeth Engelhardt's A Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food (Athens, 2011), Jessica B. Harris's High on the Hog: A Culinary journey from Africa to America (New York, 2011), Frederick Douglass Opie's Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America (New York, 2008), and Jill Angela Cooley's To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South (Athens, 2015). Readers of this journal may or may not be fans of Southern fried chicken, shrimp, or grits and may therefore find a plunge into the history of Southern food to be either tantalizing or gross. They are likely to also find it--at least as it is presented in these two books--to be somewhat disorienting. The task Ferris sets out for herself in The Edible South is actually less encompassing than the title suggests--it's not an encyclopedia of Southern cuisine nor quite the story of the creation of the South as a region. Still, Ferris's examination of what she calls the cultural conversation about Southern food across time is extraordinarily ambitious, travelling from the Atlantic Lowcountry to the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi Delta and covering the last five centuries. Divided into three chronological sections--the South up to Reconstruction (1870s), the New South (1880s-1940s), and the South since the Civil Rights movements of the 1950s--the book includes chapters on colonial explorers, Northern-born governesses, slave narratives, the Civil War, home economics, reform schools under Jim Crow, the New Deal, the marketing of Dixie in the early twentieth century, the restaurants of the Civil Rights era, the hunger tour of Senator Robert Kennedy in the 1960s, the Southern food counterculture, and the new Southern cuisine. The Edible South is a heavily laden table: a nineteen-course meal worthy of the planters and chefs she profiles. As such, there are some remarkably delightful dishes along the way. We learn of South Carolina's Lowcountry planter Eliza Lucas Pinckney's 1742 confession: I love the vegitable world extremely (25). …

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