A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections from the American South

by John T. Edge

There is a calmness to this book, and it comes from an assured knowledge rising out of the kind of scholarship that sets aside popular mythology in favor of the ways things actually are and have been. No U.S. region suffers more from popular mythology, some of it benign, much of it mocking and cruel, than the South. Author-editor John T. Edge encourages the reader of A Gracious Plenty to taste the South for what it is and has been. The book has the backing of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. In his introduction, Center director Charles Reagan Wilson points to the Southern Thanksgiving of his father-in-law, a native Mississippian who happens to be Lebanese. Both deep-fried turkey and kibbe are served, with stuffed grape and cabbage leaves as well as oyster dressing and sweet potato casserole. The heritage, he writes, is strictly Southern. The recipes are drawn from community cookbooks--"those clunky, spiral-bound, gravy-spattered volumes." While they get little respect, these volumes are an important part of the Southern kitchen and food tradition. The earliest ones date back to the Civil War and then as now were published to raise funds for a cause. Apparently, by the close of the 19th century, more than 2,000 community cookbooks were in print. Edge rightly points out that recipes gathered into a community cookbook are never authored by one, but by many. In effect, he encourages the reader to pull a seat up to the Southern table. Many of the voices heard in A Gracious Plenty come from material gathered by writers and journalists between 1935 and 1942 working for the Federal Writers Project.The recipes are divided into sections that include appetizers, beverages, breads, salads and dressings, sides and vegetables, soups and stews, meats, poultry, fish and seafood, sauces, preserves, jellies and pickles, desserts, and a final section on menus. These are home recipes, church-basement recipes, proud recipes. They taste like reality made up of pain and hospitality and careless laughter. A Gracious Plenty is a wonderful book and an important addition to anyone's cookbook library. --Schuyler Ingle

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

John T. Edge writes and hosts the Emmy Award–winning television show TrueSouth on the SEC Network, ESPN, Disney, and Hulu. Edge also writes a restaurant column for Garden & Gun. His 2017 book, The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, was named one of the best books of the year by NPR and Publishers Weekly. Edge serves the University of Mississippi as a teacher, writer-in-residence, and director of the Mississippi Lab. And he serves the University of Georgia as a mentor in their low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife, the artist Blair Hobbs.

Reviews

[Minneapolani · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a dense, culinary history text. Sure, there are recipes, but I gleaned a lot more from the stories attached to them than the recipes themselves. It's nice to see someone chronicling real Southern food, which is typically a way of cooking taught orally, not through books. Getting these stories on paper is a way to preserve the true cooking of the South and give people a real look into not-always-pretty history of Southern food.

[Jackie · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent source for the old southern recipes.

[Marty Elrod · Rating 5 out of 5]

My all time favorite cookbook.