The Potlikker Papers

Starred review from February 27, 2017
James Beard Award–winning writer and food historian Edge evokes potlikker—the rich, savory juices left after collard greens are boiled—in this excellent history Southern foodways and the people who’ve traveled them. In the South, Edge notes, food and eating intertwine inextricably with politics and social history, and he deftly traces these connections from the civil rights movement to today’s Southern eclectic cultural cuisine. He introduces major figures such as Georgia Gilmore, who fed farmhand cooking to African-Americans in her house restaurant in the 1960s; the great civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who started Freedom Farm in Mississippi to encourage African-Americans to stay home and farm the land rather than migrating to Northern cities; and Stephen Gaskin, the leader of a Tennessee commune, who in many ways anticipated the organic and farm-to-table movements of today. Edge takes us from lunch counters (the “streamlined predecessors of fast food”) to the rise of fast food and the attempts of various chains (Kentucky Fried Chicken, Hardee’s, Bojangles) to preserve the comfort foods that many Southerners associated with growing up, such as biscuits and fried chicken. In this excellent culinary history, Edge also profiles some of the South’s greatest cooks—Edna Lewis, Craig Claiborne, Paula Deen—who represent the sometimes tortured relationship between the South and its foodways.

Starred review from February 1, 2017
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.

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Starred review from March 15, 2017

Edge (director, Southern Foodways Alliance; A Gracious Plenty) writes that over the past two generations significant changes in agriculture and food cultures have transformed the American South. Included are stories of African American cooks and bakers in support of the Montgomery, AL, bus boycott; President Lyndon B. Johnson's beloved family cook and unofficial advisor, Zephyr Wright; activist Fannie Lou Hamer's call for farming cooperatives to feed the poor; and regional hippie movements that grew, consumed, and sold their own produce. The narrative also touches on chefs such as Edna Lewis and Natalie Dupree, the proliferation of fast-food franchises led by Harland Sanders, and the celebration of barbecue as a national folk food and its pit masters as folk heroes. The author's frequent indictment of racism and class exploitation in the South stems largely from an agricultural and economic base: "If small-scale agriculture was an American ideal, large-scale agriculture... was an original sin of the American south." Edge concludes by likening the farmers in the employ of 21st-century corporate interests as little more than serfs. VERDICT An engrossing blend of food science, regionalism, and ethnic studies. Highly recommended for Southern historians, agriculturalists, cuisine enthusiasts, professional chefs, and general readers.--John Carver Edwards, formerly with Univ. of Georgia Libs.

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