BOOK REVIEW A revolution sown in fields and stewed in kitchens
In “The Potlikker Papers,” Southern foodways sage John T. Edge writes that some of the most significant civil rights struggles of the 20th century emerged at the South’s farms and restaurants. Later, he argues, those fields and kitchens were the scenes of a cultural renaissance that influenced the nation.
Edge finds a symbol for food’s transformative effect on Southern history in potlikker, the broth left in a pot where greens are boiled. Once dished out to enslaved people as a discardable leftover, the nutritious liquid is among the indigenous ingredients at the New South’s most inventive eateries.
Edge, who writes for Garden & Gun and the Oxford American, is a winner of the James Beard Foundation’s M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award and has been director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, based at the University of Mississippi, since it was founded in 1999. He talked to Chapter 16 by phone about his work.
My mother’s vegetable soup, served in a teacup with cornbread crumbled into it till it was a delicious gruel of green beans and tomatoes and broth and cornbread. I was probably 6. It reminds me of how Southern food is really at its best as a vegetable-driven cuisine, not some kind of ... craziness that’s all about deep-fried this and deep-fried that. Southern food is at its core a farm-driven vegetable cuisine.
I wrote “The Potlikker Papers” to figure out my own obsession with Southern food culture, to see whether I could realize the truths that I think are embedded in our food, whether I could make arguments about racism and its imprint on the South, class difference and its imprint on the South, gender inequity and its imprint on the South.
Whether I could identify the kind of arc toward justice and inclusiveness that I believe is a part of the Southern story.
I think it’s incumbent upon Southerners to hold both those ideas in their head at once: a profound love for this place and the people who claim it, and a critical anger for the errors in leadership many of our people have made.
The complement of those two impulses, of love and criticism in equal measure, makes for a full and honest relationship with your place. I don’t mean for the book to be a kind of jeremiad against the region. I don’t mean for the book to be in any way punitive. But I do mean for the book to ask Southerners to look hard at our past and to reckon with the past and reckon with the ways that our past still affects our present and will affect, and might even limit, our future. I really admire a younger writer at work today named Gustavo Arellano. Gustavo grew up in Orange County, California, in a Mexican-American family and has earned perspective, by way of travel and a good ear for people, on the American South. Gustavo sees linkages between working-class Mexican-American culture and working-class white Southern and black Southern cultures. He writes a column for Gravy, the publication of the Southern Foodways Alliance, called “Good Ol’ Chico,” which is his play off “good ol’ boy.” He opened my eyes to ways both cultures are subject to and suffer from stereotype. And the ways both cultures celebrate and embrace food as one of their primary cultural outputs, the way that Mexican-Americans and Southerners define themselves through the music they make, the food they cook, the religions they worship.
A question is beginning to form in my mind, although I don’t know if this will be the subject of my next book: Is my fascination with immigrant culture in the South, and the promise I see in immigrant culture in the South, is that a diversion from the reality that schools are re-segregating in the South based on color and income? That life is in some ways re-segregating based on income and color? Am I so focused on the promise on the horizon that I’m denying the ways that old divisions are gaining new strengths?
That troubles me, and so I’m interested in writing about that, about the changing South, which is forever the subject that those of us who choose to write about the South write about. It is forever the morphing South that holds interest.
To read the full version of this interview — and more local book coverage — please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.