The Potlickker Papers

by John T. Edge

"The one food book you must read this year."
--Southern Living

One of Christopher Kimball's Six Favorite Books About Food

A people's history that reveals how Southerners shaped American culinary identity and how race relations impacted Southern food culture over six revolutionary decades

Like great provincial dishes around the world, potlikker is a salvage food. During the antebellum era, slave owners ate the greens from the pot and set aside the leftover potlikker broth for the enslaved, unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient rich. After slavery, potlikker sustained the working poor, both black and white. In the South of today, potlikker has taken on new meanings as chefs have reclaimed it. Potlikker is a quintessential Southern dish, and The Potlikker Papers is a people's history of the modern South, told through its food. Beginning with the pivotal role cooks and waiters played in the civil rights movement, noted authority John T. Edge narrates the South's fitful journey from a hive of racism to a hotbed of American immigration. He shows why working-class Southern food has become a vital driver of contemporary American cuisine.

Food access was a battleground issue during the 1950s and 1960s. Ownership of culinary traditions has remained a central contention on the long march toward equality. The Potlikker Papers tracks pivotal moments in Southern history, from the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s to the rise of fast and convenience foods modeled on rural staples. Edge narrates the gentrification that gained traction in the restaurants of the 1980s and the artisanal renaissance that began to reconnect farmers and cooks in the 1990s. He reports as a newer South came into focus in the 2000s and 2010s, enriched by the arrival of immigrants from Mexico to Vietnam and many points in between. Along the way, Edge profiles extraordinary figures in Southern food, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Colonel Sanders, Mahalia Jackson, Edna Lewis, Paul Prudhomme, Craig Claiborne, and Sean Brock.

Over the last three generations, wrenching changes have transformed the South. The Potlikker Papers tells the story of that dynamism--and reveals how Southern food has become a shared culinary language for the nation.

Genres: Food, History, Nonfiction, Cooking, Cookbooks, Audiobook, American History

Unknown Binding

First published May 16, 2017

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

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yesterday, the individual who occupies the American presidency referred to the nations of Africa, Central America and Haiti as "shitholes." A few things related to The Potlikker Papers came to mind as I considered the stupidity of the racist who now is responsible for leading this nation. He obviously has no idea of history. Slaves from Africa built this country and American cuisine would be unthinkable without their essential contributions to its heritage.

I lived in New Orleans during the most integral years of my life. If you're from south Louisiana, then you know that gumbo is the culinary Holy Grail. It's a dark stew that literally defines the region. Everyone claims to know where to get the best. My favorite is filled with shrimp, oysters and crab. But there are also great chicken and sausage versions. And I can still tase the version with chicken neck bones the chef at a restaurant I worked in used to make for the staff. The common ingredient in all gumbos is okra, a vegetable that's hard to describe to anyone who doesn't know what it is. It has small round seeds. It is not native to North America; it came from West Africa, where the word for okra was gumbo. When captured Africans were rounded up on the coasts to be shipped to a place they could not have conceived, many of them grasped at the gumbo plants, took out the seeds, and put them in their hair. When they reached their destinations, when they were the reason the South became the agricultural powerhouse of the U.S., they planted these seeds and gave birth to a new cuisine, a genuine American cuisine.

Other slaves brought the small beans and rice kernels that were the foundation of Carolina cuisine and their signature dish, hoppin John. The style of cooking large animals in the ground, covered with spices and simmered over the course of a day became what we now know as barbecue. I love telling good ole' white boys in the South that their favorite food would have never happened had it not been for the ancestors of the people they hate, deride and discriminate against.

I am so embarrassed by the so-called man in the White House. He degrades not only our nation, but because of the power of his office, our world as well. I find it fitting that he lives on fast food, that he takes pride in eating well-done steak slathered in ketchup. It helps explain his worldview. The less diverse one's cuisine is, the narrower one's mind likely is. John T. Edge's book is a testament to explaining this thesis. Our Dear Leader makes its conclusion inescapable.

Original Review

It takes some doing to make sense out of the American South. John T. Edge’s The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South gets pretty close to it. Reading Edge is, for me, like viewing a Walker Evans photograph: both create simple, profound narratives that are deeper than what’s on the surface.



The cultural impact of Southern food is not as obvious as it is with music. Mississippi Delta Blues gave birth to rock and roll. Jazz, Folk, Bluegrass, Country, Soul and Western swing—all children of the South—added the other essential ingredients. Ironically, although the South has long been identified with slavery and prejudice, fairly or not, its musical progeny was a vital expression of freedom and resistance in totalitarian and authoritarian societies of the 20th century. I find it interesting that Southerners like Louis Jordan and Hank Williams sang about food. Implicitly, I think they imply connections freedom of expression and a satisfied stomach.

Like great provincial dishes around the world, potlikker is salvage food. During the antebellum era, slaveholders ate the greens from the pot, setting aside the potlikker for enslaved cooks and their families, unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient rich. After slavery, potlikker sustained the working poor, black and white. “I lived on what I did not eat,” Richard Wright wrote. “Perhaps the sunshine, the fresh air, and the pot liquor from greens kept me going.”

The potlikker of Edge’s narrative is more than a story about a nourishing broth. It’s a culinary heritage of a diverse, ever-changing region that has mostly been underappreciated. But Edge reveals a deeper, metaphorical, cultural potlikker. It’s about who we, as Americans, are.

Edge begins on familiar ground, but not one normally associated with food—the Civil Rights movement. When Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Montgomery bus boycotts and mass meetings at the Holt Street Baptist Church, how many thought about the vital roles women like Georgia Gilmore and many others played when they worked the kitchens of white families and, when they were off the clock, would cook and serve the meals nourishing the front lines of the movement? Or that the freedom to eat where one pleased was integral to civil rights?

The symbolism of the long unbroken table was important to Southerners. Many had been schooled from infancy in Last Supper imagery. Sharing a meal signaled social equality. And no eating space promised more democracy than a lunch counter, where diners stooped to take their seats and eat with people of other sexes and, eventually, other races. The problem was, for much of the South’s history, neither the people who owned lunch counters nor the people who patronized them were at their best.

Indeed, when he was assassinated, King made the right to nourishing food central to the Poor People’s Campaign. Civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer “believed that black Southerners would not achieve full citizenship until they claimed their sovereignty over their diet.” But Hamer’s vision stalled and actually went in different direction with the proliferation of fast food, which had its roots in the South.



McDonald’s gets the credit for changing the diets and roadsides of suburban America, but it was “the Pig Stand chain, founded in 1920s Dallas [that] popularized drive-in service across the nation. Its model may have served as an inspiration for McDonald’s, which included barbecue pork and beef sandwiches on early menus.” Fast food offered a mirage of social mobility, “Southerners with lower incomes were ideal fast-food customers. A burger, a sleeve of fries, and a shake promised a sugar rush, a full stomach, and temporary middle-class status.” The first titan of fast food, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and its numerous imitators spread the gospel of deep-fried, pressure cooked chicken around the country and the world, exporting a Southern experience in standardized packages. But fast food came with a price: obesity, cultural homogenization, and the proliferation of factory farms.



But it came with a backlash. Authenticity mattered to some. Proliferation of processed fried chicken led to a yearning for its original form. “Skillet fried, not pressure fried, became the chicken grail.” In the 1970s, hippies and other counter culture types congregated in Tennessee and in the mountains of north Georgia created communities focused on a simpler existence of organic, sustainable diets and products. Although they didn’t have a broad cultural reach, their influence grew steadily and infiltrated affluent communities and big business in later years.

The most critical event, however, in the changing perception of the South was political: the election of former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter as president in 1976. His ascendancy changed how the nation viewed the South, it became cool. It’s largest metropolis, Atlanta, still shrouded in Gone With the Wind Hollywood nostalgia, experienced a rebirth, thanks in large part to its airport, built in the 1970s and now the busiest in the world. Southern food also became ascendant, it had a “vernacular cuisine,” one that expressed its culture as distinctively as its spoken southern drawl, complete with regional variations. One of the most important saints of the this movement was Edna Lewis, who elevated “soul food” and restored memories of the African origins of Southern cuisine, contributions of slaves and their descendants, which included chefs at top restaurants in the South.



Other influences contributed. Cooking shows on small public television stations showed people how to make authentic new Southern dishes—actually old ones that found social acceptability. They were featured in cookbooks that imparted the wisdom of great chefs to lay audiences. Established local restaurants found new audiences. Writers like Calvin Trillin celebrated their diversity and authenticity, attracting diners from around the nation and the world. Red beans and rice from New Orleans, Carolina shrimp and grits, regional barbecue from the Carolinas to Memphis to Texas, and local hamburger variations like Oklahoma onion burgers and Mississippi slug burgers started to get their due.



At the same time, Craig Claiborne, the food editor of the New York Times, a native of the Mississippi Delta, became the nation’s culinary kingmaker. He traveled the world, dining at and writing about the best of European and Asian restaurants. Having left the South as a young gay man, he lost touch with his home region. But as he began traveling through the South again in the 1970s, he realized the food he shunned from the region he was escaping was as sophisticated as what he experienced around the world, it just didn’t have the reputation. He summoned chefs to his New York home, cooked with them, learned their secrets and became the champion of chefs like Paul Prudhomme from Louisiana and Sema Wilkes, who had toiled in Savannah, Georgia kitchens since the 1940s.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, chef-driven restaurants began to proliferate in Southern cities, a trend that started in California. Its growth in the South had a different character. “Unlike the traditional cuisines of France, Japan, or the American South, rooted in home cooking and community events, California cuisine began in restaurants.” Southern chefs polished off old recipes, reinvented them, and created new ones with familiar ingredients. Interestingly, in the two cities most identified with this trend, the catalysts that transformed their culinary renaissances were epic disasters: Hurricane Hugo in Charleston, South Carolina in 1989 and the man-made catastrophe that almost destroyed New Orleans, Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Their star chefs became media darlings.



Two features that defined the Charleston and New Orleans worlds could also be found in other Southern cities as they experienced corresponding trends. First, virtually all of them relied almost excelsively on locally sourced ingredients. Sean Brock, the chef-owner of Charleston’s Husk, became the leader of reviving grains like Carolina red rice, other raw ingredients, and techniques that had been lost due to the cultural neglect and food industrialization. He searched old cookbooks and histories to identify African origins that had crossed the Atlantic with the slave trade. Brock revived and updated recipes, learning techniques of cooking, fermentation, and food preservation that had been lost. His collaboration provided palettes for Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills, who rediscovered varieties of seeds and revived lost milling processes, for example, of authentic methods of producing grits from corn.

This food scene had economic consequences as well. The disasters that renewed Charleston’s and New Orleans’ culinary landscapes brought gentrification—middle and upper class tastes and economics to formerly downtrodden or poorer areas of cities. It raised real estate prices, renovated factory buildings into white collar businesses and residences, and put them out of reach of the working classes. Many of the restaurants that catered to the new residents tailed to a more elite clientele. But although “Gentrification is often dismissed as a negative cultural force,” Edge writes, “In a region that had long undervalued its people and its products, these developments had some positive effects. Southerners began to recognize that food, like music, was a cultural process, worthy of new appraisal.” There were up- and downsides. The jury is still out in determining the final verdict on gentrification’s impact.



It was also a question of style. As Edge asks, “Does honest food rely on great produce and livestock, born of heirloom seeds and breeds nurtured by farmers with a sense of agricultural possibilities and responsibilities to history? Or are the artisans who transform raw ingredients into kitchen and table goods the true heroes of the story? The answer, Americans began to discover, was a little of both.” While many chefs “served vernacular cuisine” others took shortcuts in trying to emulate them, creating, instead, a “veneer cuisine, rendered Southern by what chefs topped it with or placed it atop.” It was the culinary equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig. Like all good things, cuisine could produce fake knock-offs.



With all these changes, however, there is a dark underside to the legacy of Southern food that eerily brings back hints of plantation culture that was thought to be part of history. As Christopher Leonard documented, the pressure to feed a growing population and satisfy its demand for chicken, pork and beef, factory farms have grown exponentially. In the process they have driven countless small family farms, the original backbone of American agriculture, out of business and created environmental and economic disasters. “The want for cheap field labor drove the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century spread of slavery from the rice fields of the Lowcountry to the cane fields of Louisiana and beyond. If small-scale agriculture was an American ideal, large-scale agriculture, which is to say plantation agriculture, was the original sin of the American South.” Edge calls factory farms “virtual gulags” where “The workers were brown, the foremen white, the sun unrelenting.” History is inescapable and repeats in the South.



But the new South, mostly concentrated in urban areas, has incorporated new cultures. Vietnamese refugees have become citizens. In Houston and New Orleans, their culinary traditions have melded perfectly with indigenous cuisines. Latin American immigrants, urban and rural, have created Spanish-speaking corridors in places like Atlanta, Charlotte, Baton Rouge and Gainesville. You can get Cajun-infused pho and redneck tacos without looking too hard. You can go to Fort Smith, Arkansas and shop in an exceptional Asian supermarket. Or you try the Mexican market in Memphis. Slowly the South is changing, but not as quickly as its evolving food heritage.

I’ll admit to having a love-hate relationship with the American South. I am a former Southerner who, as I semi-jokingly tell friends, escaped. Yet no matter where I go, it seems Southern political baggage always follows close behind. It has now elected the most reactionary president, Congress and numerous state legislatures since the beginning of the Civil War. That strain of Southern conservatism consists of slowly shrinking majorities who, as singer/songwriter Patterson Hood writes, “bash their heads against the future, ever South.”



“The rest of the country held fast to stereotypes of the South as the American other, a cultural and economic backwater. But when no one was looking, the South colonized the North. And the North adopted Southern political and cultural mores as if they were its own.” Changes in Southern culture are most obviously expressed in changes in cuisine, they portend “a future tense South still in the making…a place that will be as Mexican as West African, as Korean as Irish, and will lose none of its essential identity in the process.” I just hope that kind of identity will overtake the regressive political malignancy that has spread far beyond the Mason-Dixon line sooner rather than later. The history of the Southern food gives me a little hope.

[Frances Dowell · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.75 stars)

The Potlikker Papers is largely about the politics of food—who eats high on the hog, who eats low on the hog, who owns the hog and how that hog was raised. The first 180 pages alone are worth the price of admission, and I hope they spark a renewed interest in Civil Rights figures such as Fannie Lou Hamer (who I thought I knew something about, but I learned a whole lot more here) and Georgia Gilmore, a previously unsung hero of the movement.

Edge does a marvelous job of documenting the changes in Southern food culture from the 1950s into the 1980s and ‘90s. The chapter on fast food in particular really gets at how foodways evolved during this period. Fast food, frozen food and canned biscuits did a lot to change the way Southern women like my mother-in-law cooked. In fact, I know a whole lot of working women from that generation who hold no nostalgia for the hard labor of cultivating and preserving food. They spent their childhoods doing it, and as adults they were more than happy to feed their families beans from a can and cookies from a box. They’d grow a few tomatoes in the summer, but that’s as far as it went.

Edge also documents how economic growth transformed the South during the late 20th century and on into the 21st century. Once considered one big backwater, the South turned into an economic powerhouse in the 1980s and ‘90s. Atlanta, Charlotte, and North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park became some of the fastest-growing areas in the country. Even Birmingham, Alabama, became nice place to settle down and raise a family. Birmingham!

I’ve lived in the South most of my adult life (and some during my childhood as well), and it’s been interesting to see the overall effects of this revitalized economy. One thing is for sure--the resulting hybrid vigor has served to flatten out a lot of regional idiosyncrasies, which makes it tough if you’re a writer interested in local and regional foodways. What Edge chooses to focus on as he moves into the 21st century is artisanal food. And this, for me, is where the book stumbles—where it’s no longer a people’s history of food, but a foodie’s history of food. His focus in chapters such as “Artisanal Pantry” and “Restaurant Renaissance” is on growers and chefs who are breathing new life into traditional foods, folks who occupy the more esoteric corners of Southern foodways. So, for instance, the star of “Artisanal Pantry” is Glenn Roberts, who founded Anson Mills with the aim of making grits from heirloom corn. Roberts sounds like a fascinating man, and I’d like to give those grits a try sometime. Sam Edwards' slow-cured country ham also sounds delicious. But while these men and the others profiled in these chapter (all men, by the way, which is irritating) may be doing the Lord’s work, they’re preaching to a fairly small choir, and it concerns me that Edge doesn’t own that fact. Quite the opposite: at the end of “Artisanal Pantry,” Edge tries to convince us that in the 21st century

Southerners ditched brine-injected city ham for long-cured country ham. They rejected grocery store pap for stone-ground grits …. In the 2000s, as the region awakened to the economic and cultural promise of craft production, Southerners embraced artisan possibilities across a spectrum that connected agriculture and industry and pop culture and included moonshine, antebellum grits, three-year-old heirloom ham, cane sugar Coca-Cola, and twenty year old Pappy [moonshine].

Well, like I said, I’ve lived in the south for a long time, and it’s true that in the last ten years these things have been made available to me, especially if my husband and I trek to downtown Durham and eat in one of its finer restaurants. But of my husband’s thirty-odd Southern Baptist cousins, the grandchildren of millworkers, the children of truck drivers and teachers, a number of them the first in their families to graduate college and move into the middle class, I can guarantee you that not one has an interest in artisanal whiskey, and if they eat ham at all (they’re mostly a health-conscious bunch) it’s from a spiral ham bought at Harris Teeter or Honeybaked Ham at Christmas and/or Easter. I can’t claim to know their grit preferences, but they’re sensible people and unlikely to spend $6 to $10 on a pound of deracinated corn.

I’m not saying that that artisanal grits have no place in the discussion of Southern foodways. I personally love what Glenn Roberts is doing, I just reject the claim that what he’s doing is having a huge impact on how most Southerners eat. There’s something about this chapter and the next two that strike me as off the mark. If you really want to talk about growers, thinkers and cooks that have had a large regional (and national) impact, then why not discuss heavy hitters such as Barbara Kingsolver, a Kentucky native, novelist and Wendell Berry acolyte, whose book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, published in 2007, joined Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma in changing how many Americans, particularly middle class suburbanites, thought about food?

Or what about Chef Vivian Howard, star of the PBS show A Chef’s Life? Howard’s trajectory strikes me as very similar to a lot of my smalltown Southern friends’: she grew up wanting nothing more than to get the hell out of Dodge as soon as she could, and she did. Eventually she moved to New York City with the intention of becoming a writer and ended up a cook. When her parents offered to help her open a restaurant in Kinston, NC, she couldn’t refuse, and so home she came. A Chef’s Life documents her experience opening a restaurant, but also it also documents how Howard came to re-embrace her food heritage. The show has struck a chord with a lot of people I know who grew up in the South, grew beyond the South, and then ultimately returned to reclaim their Southern roots.

The last two chapters of The Potlikker Papers return to a people’s history of food and are well-worth reading. In particular, the final chapter, “Nuevo Sud,” gets at what’s exciting about Southern food right now—all these brand new southerners, recent immigrants from Mexico, India, Africa, and Asia, bringing their cultures’ foodways into the mix. Unlike Glenn Roberts and Sean Brock, these cooks really are changing the way working class and middle class Southerners eat, as well as changing our ideas of what it means to be Southern in the 21st century.

[Retired Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent read if you want to know more about food, the South, or both! Edge explores food in the South from the 1950's through the 2010's, and discusses various influences on cuisine. I've lived in Tennessee my entire life (55 years), and this book explores the background of foods, chefs, and restaurants in ways I've never known about. For example, how did Hurricane Katrina affect the food and restaurants in New Orleans? I was very interested to learn how the ancestors of slaves had an impact on Southern food and cooking. Now I want to read a similar history of food in the not-so-modern South!

[Chloe · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. I feel guilty for settling on a rough, ungenerous rating for this book, because I did like it for many of its qualities. Solid, thorough history; documented research interspersed with personal interviews; a discussion of race, socioeconomics, immigration, etc; and overall a complex undertaking of the relationship between history and Southern food. Super interesting stuff and a topic I didn't know too much about.

Unfortunately, this started out really well but developed into a slog for me to read about halfway through. I think I lost interest when I realized that the dry writing style of John T. Edge would continue on for another 150+ pages. This read exactly like I expected a historical nonfiction book to read, which isn't exactly a good thing: pretty dry, a few good observations here and there, a smattering of really good chapters, but so much descriptive reporting of events, delivered without an ostensible thematic roadmap (aside from rough chronology) and in a cold, somewhat distant tone. Especially in some of the middle sections, I had a hard time following where the author was taking me as a reader and even how certain chapters were grouped together, because they seemed pretty random topic-wise.

One final note: I wasn't sure how to feel whenever the author is (white, male, from GA, a prominent professor, author, and editor at Garden & Gun magazine) spoke at length on the racial issues of the South. There were a few points when he meandered pretty far from the connection to food to do a lot of recounting of racial events and tensions that have colored much of the South's history. I have mixed feelings about this: on one hand, I think that writing a food history of the South without devoting many chapters to slavery, race relations, and the role of the African American community would be a crime of the gravest nature. That would be pointblank wrong and John T. Edge avoids this for the most part. In fact, he dedicates a large number of pages to acknowledge the black chefs, pitmasters, farmers, activists, and pretty much every profession of the South and goes even further in acknowledging that they have gone unacknowledged. So props for that, especially since those are the chapters I found the most engaging.

What gives me pause, though, is my questions about whether Mr. Edge is taking liberties with these stories. As an affluent white male, are they really his to tell? Every now and then he mentions his own childhood in Georgia, his current life in Mississippi, and I can't help but wonder about his own place in all this. His book smacks a little too uncomfortably of white man still having the loudest voice in the room. I would have been less skeptical if he had taken a more personal tone throughout the book: less declaring history, more telling stories from a hyper-aware position as a white Southerner. I don't blame the author or accuse him of anything more serious than questionable topic choice. Nothing in his very respectful words could be construed as racism, but he's exposed himself in a way such that he has to walk an incredibly fine line of white guilt and white ignorance. By choosing to write this book, he put himself in a really difficult position, which he must have known from the beginning. I admire that he has put himself out there and attempted to write about sensitive and difficult subjects from as objective a place as possible, but in the end, it's still the white man who is doing the talking and I just wish that that wasn't the case. Take that as you will.

Don't let me deter you, though: if you have an inkling of interest in food and the South and the people who cooked it, then definitely give this book a go. I didn't care for the writing, hence my kinda low rating, but there was enough fascinating history here to like that made me glad I picked it up.

[Gina · Rating 2 out of 5]

It isn't that The Potlikker Papers is a bad book, but it also isn't a "Food History of the Modern South." It is a social, cultural, and political commentary onto which a few food trends and fads are loosely tied. That isn't a bad thing, necessarily. In truth, I found it well written with some interesting vignettes. However, I think the author could have greatly benefited from a class discussing differences in correlation and causation. Just because two trends occupy the same general time frame doesn't mean each is causally related. For example, was the increase in farms, growing your own food, and a resurgence of cheaper homemade products (like sorghum) truly a result of the cultural "hippie" trends of the 1960's-1970's or was it more caused by the dire economic recession and inflation of the same time period leading people to look for cheaper food sources? The answer to that is complicated and debatable, but this book seeks to put the two, and other food/social/political trends together in a direct causal relationship leading to several square peg, round hole scenarios. This is the kind of book that would make for great debate in a good book club or a college seminar, but I can't say that I enjoyed it.

[Kayle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe it's because in 2017 it feels like understanding the South is key to understanding America, or because I grapple with the meaning of being black and woman and Southern and choosing to (mostly identify as the latter), or the fact that like jazz, I think Southern food is America's gift to the world, for all those reasons and more I thoroughly enjoyed this history (surprisingly fast-paced or maybe it just felt that way because it was highly engaging?) of Southern food as it is known and better how should know it. I could have read a whole book on each of the chapters, but loved the wn chores and individuals he introduces. Highly recommended.

[Teri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent historical look at southern food from the 1950s to 2010 and beyond. Edge begins in the age of Civil Rights, looking at the way food was used to help support the movement as Georgia Gilmore nourished the organizers, like Martin Luther King, Jr. and other advocates, as they planned marches, protests, lectures, etc. Lewis sold baskets of her famous fried chicken and sides and put her income back into the movement to keep the good work going. Edge also covers the restaurant sit-ins and how the restaurant industry changed in the South during the Jim Crow era as desegregation forced white owners to accommodate Black patrons.

Edge moves into the 70s and 80s, discussing southern food during the Carter years. This was the time of hippies and soul food, and cookbook authors like Edna Lewis advocated for a more farm-to-table diet rather than the heavy comfort food that came from the kitchens of her enslaved ancestors. In the 80s and 90s, new kings and queens of Southern food appeared in urban kitchens and TVs like Paul Prudhomme and Emeril Lagasse. Regionalized, upscale, and Southern fusion foods became the rage. Edge finishes up with a look at more modern trends in southern cuisine as artisan foods and barbeque pit masters dominate the southern culinary scene.

This is a fascinating and engaging book that covers a fair bit of modern southern culinary history.

[Richard Derus]

Don't miss the Don Noble's Bookmark two-part interview: part one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCvm5...
and
part two https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbN_1...

[Candice · Rating 1 out of 5]

While I was disappointed that the book was less about the history of Southern food--how it arrived; where it came from; who, when where it was developed; and the direction it was taking now--the rating is a reflection of how little I got out of the book. Mr. Edge's book is an ambitious attempt to meld large issues that could occupy volumes into a single work. The focus is specifically aimed towards the professional culinary industry in the South. As a result, many Southern foods are omitted.

The book is a socioeconomic study of the South, a series of essays that very loosely ties in food to issues still plaguing the South since the Civil War. The chapters meander about the Southern region like a drunk trying to find his way home. Unless you are a serious student following the culinary trends, you'll get lost with the author. It took me two-thirds of the book to realize most of his material probably came from institutional, professional sources associated with Southern Foodways Alliance. Yes, the world knows Lagasse and who doesn't know KFC, but that isn't the crux of the story. A regional map pinpointing specific cities mentioned with the person/business linked to it would have helped me from getting dizzy flipping pages back and forth and constantly referencing the index.

I would have enjoyed it more if he really discussed grits from both a historical and socioeconomic viewpoint. Working through college at a local Shoney's just off the interstate I still smile recalling the Yanks that came in, looking at the menu, and asking, "what's a grit?" I would have appreciated more exploration into the Asian, Middle Eastern, Caribbean, Mexican, and European (not just French) flavors infused with both yesterday's and today's Southern cuisine. He doesn't really delve into the distinctions of barbecue with its dry rubs and sauces that are rooted in regional perspectives. There is only cursory mention of game dishes such as rabbit or squirrel but not much about deer, opossum, dove, quail, duck, gallinule, turkey, catfish, sunfish, or mullet. I guess subsistence living doesn't translate well on a restaurant menu. As much as the book is into African slave food choices, it omits that raccoon is a delicacy hotly sought after by Southern blacks. So much so that many dishonest hunters sell skinned cats. As a result, the consumer now requires at least one paw left on the carcass for identification. I'd like to have known why goat, so ubiquitous in my South, is not mentioned at all or why it is not typically considered mainstream Southern food and is associated more with recent Muslim or Hispanic immigrants. Collards take the limelight with no utterance of greens from turnips, beets, or mustard greens, which anyone living in the South has had some exposure, welcomed or not. And beans...in Edge's world there is the Louisiana red beans and rice or black eye peas and rice (Hoppin' John), but in my world there are lima beans, speckled peas, zipper peas, butter beans, butter peas, etc.

I'm confused why The Farm in Tennessee is even mentioned except some waxing romantic notion about sorghum syrup, which anyone who has tried it would liken it to black-strap molasses fully understanding why the grain was regulated for livestock feed. We purchased goods from The Farm in its heyday and they were about as Southern as gâteau basque. They were hippy-wanna-bes living in a commune. Like most Southerners that live independent, somewhat insular lives, it was live and let live. We didn't bother them, they didn't bother us. However, they didn't change nor shape how anyone lived or ate to any great degree in the surrounding area. Edge's perspective of cause and effect should be corrected. It wasn't The Farm that had an effect on the South but the other way around. When I go home to visit, The Farm is an afterthought that is discussed as a memory and not as an active community still around today.

I felt towards the end that he was apologizing for being a Southern white male born after an era of great turmoil--feeling guilty after the fact, which in the South, can still smack of racism--as if his behavior today, specifically, continues to reflect the white plantation owner of yore. Maybe that is why he felt compelled to share the story about his son's purchase of a blue, instead of grey, cap. He constantly threads Civil War and Civil Rights eras throughout the book, yet avoids establishing the significant roles they had with what we eat today except to say that blacks deserve more than they are getting in recognition, funding, and other supports even now--more on that below. Yep, but we already knew that. I expected some revelation on how that was changing in context with Southern foods other than to say there were some food establishments now owned and operated by blacks. Yep, I knew that too.

I finally found the book's mission in the last chapter only a few pages from the end where he states, "Racism and its burdens was my primary concern when I began thinking and writing about food." Unfortunately he never gets to the core discussion, skirting around all issues including Southern foods and cuisine. Yes, there is mention of the critical, influential roles Southern blacks and their enslaved African ancestors played in Southern cuisine, but it doesn't go deep enough into the subject for my tastes (no pun). There are also many inferences that all white Southerners descended from white plantation owners, that all rebels fought for slavery and only about slavery. I'm a white female Southerner, born here, live here, die here. I've met descendants of plantation owners; and, yes, Southern plantations still exist having reinvented themselves into hunting retreats. However, of all my over half-century existence, none of my friends or associates descended from slave owners. Not every white born in the south owned or had slaves; so the inference that we all were nurtured by Mammy's teat and ate only food prepared by slaves or blacks is a skewed view that he carries throughout the book. He could have subtitled the book, "white women can't cook" and sold more copies. He may feel an obligation towards the Southern black but he only nods at the poor, whites and only in the Appalachian area when it comes other potential sources of historical inspiration for Southern cuisine. I was totally flummoxed that when he mentions the peanut, it is Jimmy Carter not George Washington Carver that garners attention. Granted the issues are much, much more complex as demonstrated by the myriad of books, research, and political corrections made over several generations that this book can't nor should address.

If the Southern food did not lend itself to commercialization or, more accurately, did not lend itself to be reinvented by some aspiring chef where race lines crossed-good or bad, it didn't get mentioned: muscadine and watermelon wines, mayhaw jellies, fried green tomatoes, sauteed chanterelle, or dried crab apple pie, for example.

He claims that "big ag" is a Southern-made phenomenon without any references to substantiate the claim. Thanks to the Carolinas' pig farms and the Arkansas chicken houses leading the rest of America by the nose into industrialized farming, the farmer workers are no better than the slaves. Reflecting back it almost suggests (again) that it is the Southern attitude to enslave the disadvantaged. He doesn't mention the California contract workers' protests in the 1980s or the famous book, "Grapes of Wrath", which reflects a nation-wide, not Southern-wide, human rights/worker rights issue. There is no explanation as to why the South is the chicken hot-house for the country nor acknowledgement that there are even bigger hog factories in the Midwest that makes North Carolina's hog farms anemic.

Nor does he go further to discuss the ramifications of "big ag" on the food industry as a whole. His way of addressing it is to provide some cursory description of farm-to-table examples in a paragraph or sentence, rarely dedicating more than a few words to the movement that has gained momentum in the twenty-first century. There is not one word mentioned on the environmental impacts ala the Dust Bowl because it twarn't Southern. Yet, Georgia is encouraging farmers to practice dry cropping by providing incentives to minimize irrigation. The only environmental impacts mentioned have to do with hurricanes that man can do little about. I did appreciate some focus on how these acts of God changed culinary landscapes in New Orleans, Houston, and Charleston in their aftermaths. I had hoped the last two chapters would focus on how these topics like "big ag" or the slow food movement may affect the future of food in the South, but instead I got more rehash of Southern racism thanks to Jim Crow, post-civil war, attitudes; and, finally, a minor mention of how a new wave of immigrants are embracing and redefining the South, which may by the white Southerners' only hope of redemption (see back cover on comments about that one!). Other notable omissions about agriculture and how that relates to eating are pecans--making a comeback due to China's consumer demands, the juice oranges of Florida--it's influence on the consumer (OJ is not what you think it is), and American chestnuts--how it's almost all Chinese and will it survive for another generation to crack it's prickly hull for the sweet nut.

The excessive verbosity entrapped me like a hog ensnared in a mud bog. The book is riddled with descriptions that have nothing to do with the book's stated purpose of sharing food history. A little less of "That photograph also conjured a turn-of-the-previous-century scene, when writers flocked to the mountain South to catalog a vestigial past and locate a simpler present amid the hills and hollers of Appalachia", and more about what the hills and hollers proffered in the way of something to eat and how its socioeconomic status has influenced the food it offers.

[Alison Hardtmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Potlikker is the liquid left in the pot after boiling greens like collards or mustard. During slavery, the owners would dine on the greens, while the liquid in the pot was left for the slaves to consume. This potlikker is far more nutritious than the boiled greens and modern Southern chefs have reclaimed it. The Potlikker Papers is a social history of food in the American South and how the food the South is known for, from fried chicken to hopping John to gumbo to po' boys is a result of the African, Native American and European cultures that influenced what we eat now. John T. Edge is the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, and his passion for every aspect of Southern cuisine is evident in every page of this excellent book.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in food or who lives (or has lived) in the American South. For those who appreciate good food and live in one of the Southern states, it's required reading.

[Moonkiszt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unexpected book - one of those you pick up because you assume it is about one thing - food, and you find it is about something much bigger - continuing evolution of southern culture, food is the vehicle. One would think that might not have enough ooomph to drive an entire book, and the author won, here - there's more than enough. A fascinating read about the politics of food, food preparation (simple v haute cuisine), distribution (who gets what - feet v premium cuts), and styles (french v bbq). I'd never looked at foods beyond a very general national association. Well, folks, its more than that.

If you are interested in topics on the South, slavery and all its consequences, foods Cajun, BBQ, and of course, the title dish "potlikker" - this book will spark new thoughts. This white girl, raised by a long line of Southern grandmas whose paths were dust tracks via horses from all points southern colonies, including Louisiana, then wagons east to west Texas, then overloaded Hudson Super Six outfits (a la Joads/Grapes of Wrath vehicle) to the Imperial Valley in California's most southern points - this girl grew up with potlikker, usually with ham hocks. When questions of a historical nature were asked about this dish, and many like it their southern drawls still strong despite decades of west coast living - "well, feller, it's just an old family recipe from way back."

I recommend it. Have some BBQ standing by. You'll want it.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edge is the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an organization that is near and dear to my heart (I became a member after discovering their Gravy podcast, definitely well worth looking into if you like narratives and oral histories about food). Many years ago, I also read some of his other books (all about food of course), and enjoyed them as well.

This particular book is not only about food, but also the socio and political climates that encompassed the world and drove the foodways the way they were in the South. Food is very much tied up in its surrounds and in the celebrations and tribulations of the people creating it. So it should come as no surprise that since this book starts in the 50's, the Civil Rights movement, the sit-ins, and Martin Luther King Jr. feature predominately. Food helped fund the Civil Rights movement, and was an integral part in helping change the South. The 50's weren't the only setting for this book though; each section spanned several decades, reaching all the way to the 2010's and forward. Subjects such as Appalachian cooking, BBQ, Mexican influence, and famous chefs who turned what was once subsistence food into gourmet.

While this could be considered very much a history book, it is definitely not written in the textbook style. It's engaging, interesting, and caused me to break out the internet search page quite often to look up various people, restaurants, food, etc. that was mentioned. Which I consider to be an excellent thing for a book to do. I was genuinely interested in wanting to learn more, based on what the book gave me to explore. While the subject matter can be quite frank in its depiction (as it should be, several atrocities were part of the Civil Rights movement and forward), it was done so in an informative way, and not a gratuitous way.

I was also pleasantly surprised that many of the topics were companion to the aforementioned podcast, so I had some background already on some of the topics and was able to relate that knowledge. Deeply informative, I highly recommend this book for anyone that wants to learn about Southern history or who enjoys the food history genre.

Review by M. Reynard 2020

[Dale Cousins · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of a social history spiced with food than a book on food illustrated by social history, I enjoyed the commentary of how Southern food had evolved in multiple directions over time. Be it New Orleans or Charleston or BBQ or Creole or Low Country, the cooks of the South have adapted or "made do" as my grandma would say. It was interesting that everyone---Colonel Sanders to Craig Claiborne to Paula Deen to Bill Neal gets equal time. Interesting read with a fair amount of time devoted to history from the 1950's through 2000's that I remember.

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been in such a reading slump. But The Potlikker Papers was JUST what I needed. From the author’s Mississippi southern drawl, to each and every story and part of history, I loved every minute. Raised in Louisville and having lived all over the south (my husband and children were born in Virginia, we lived in Florida, have family in North and South Carolina), so many of these stories resonated. From Colonel Sanders to the many fast food fish chains (Moby Dick being my must visit while In town) to 610 Magnolia. It was a trip down memory lane. Listening to it this the week before Derby made it even more nostalgic

Don’t get me started on the food! Cornbread, Kentucky Ham, grits, greens, chicken livers smothered in heavily peppered white gravy, the pies, fried chicken, BBQ, sweet tea, bourbon! All of it. So so good.

Edge did not shy away from touching on the painful parts of southern culture and history that I struggle with to this day. But he reminded me of why I just can’t quit the south.

Taking a trip down memory lane through the food trends born of the south, was such a treat. Learning more about the chefs who created or brought new attention to these dishes and their amazing backstories made the book even better. I would love to share a mint Julip with almost all of them! Thank you John T Edge for a thoroughly enjoyable read.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being a North Carolina native with deep family roots in the southern US, this history of southern food and cooking was a book I thought I should read.

I've never been crazy about "dry" history books and avoided the subject as much as possible in college. Although I like to think I've matured a bit in the decades since then, this book did occasionally get a little history-heavy for me. I had to put it down from time to time and pick it up when I was in the mood for a chapter or two away from my usual reading diet of novels. Thanks to John T. Edge, I now have a better understanding of how the south's unique cuisine, which started as humble, filling meals utilizing animals and plants raised on the farm, now combines elements from Mexican, Asian, Indian, and other immigrants' food culture in unexpected and innovative ways.

I enjoyed especially reading about chefs, restaurants, and places that were familiar to me, including a couple of places I'd actually been (Crooks Corner, Fearrington House, and La Residence), and some I'd seen featured on television. I was disappointed that North Carolina Chef Vivian Howard wasn't mentioned, but I suspect the book was written just before she hit her stride at her restaurant Chef and the Farmer in Kinston and became well-known. In this book I did recognize a couple of chefs and places Howard had featured in her new PBS show Somewhere South.

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am hungry. The Potlikker Papers made me hungry. Also made me want to buy a bunch of cookbooks. Edge's anecdotal history of the south and food is fabulous. Some very interesting points and great connections. I discovered Southern Cooking when I was eighteen and living with my great uncle and aunt in East Texas. My maternal grandparents were from North central Texas with heavy southern roots. When they moved north, they left the food behind them. I rediscovered southern food when my wife was pregnant with our first daughter. Collard greens are great for morning sickness. We lived in West Philly and could get collards and other southern foods - cuts of meat. Began with Craig Claibonre's Southern Cooking and haven't stopped. The Potlikker Papers does a great job of linking the changes in the south through food.

[Mbgirl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ah yea—- food as metaphor.

Thank you, Mr Edge, for p.295 and onward, the discussion of other racial minorities in the South besides blacks. Thanks for the segue from white Matt and Ted Lee to Korean-Am Edward Lee! This book will titillate anyone who likes ethnogastronomy and how trends came to be— the why and how.

And always, the reminder that blacks continue to be marginalized and do not receive the proper credit or accolade as others get. Ty. Now that is real fusion cuisine!!!

Leah Chase of Dooky Chase made a funny comment about Chines😄.

And the MS Delta hot tamale made it in here!!!

Chingo Bling— now I know you exist!!

[MargaretDH · Rating 4 out of 5]

Using the lens of food, this book examines the south from the Civil Rights Movement until today. Edge takes cooks and chefs (usually) from an era, and using their story as a grounding, explores their era, environment and traditions. It’s an interesting book if you’re interested in food, especially if you like tracing the evolution of dishes and cuisines. Having a grounding in the history of the times and places he was discussing was helpful but certainly not necessary to enjoying this book.

Also, this is straight history. There are no recipes or anything of that sort.

[Carolyn Fitzpatrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A must read if you are interested in important chefs, restaurants, and food trends in the culinary history of the South. I actually preferred the first section, which covered the 1950s and 1960s. It talks about how home cooking fueled the Civil Rights Movement, while segregated restaurants were a major battlefield. We learn about what motivated the restaurant owners who refused to integrate until the law was changed, and what actions they took after. This first section of the book reads the most like a history book. The rest of the book reads more like a foodie magazine, but still contains excellent history. We hear about hippies that move from urban areas to farms in the South, the Black Panthers starting up restaurant chains, etc. Repeatedly white chefs became celebrities due to their tutelage in African American kitchens. I found the number of people featured to be a bit overwhelming, but for cooking students this book is probably an excellent primer.

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A semi-academic history of the Southern food culture. Many Southern chefs are profiled by there are no examples of recipes of the food of the South. Overall, the work provides some interesting views and would be good for anyone interested in the background of regional cooking. This was a free review copy through Goodreads.com.

[Chuck Reece · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only an important history of Southern food but also one of the best histories of the last 75 years in this region.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like John T. Edge. He writes with an authentic Southern voice that makes me feel a kinship for him. He is garrulous and charming. He is a lover of Southern tradition, but not afraid to reject the parts of it associated with hatred and oppression. He is one of my people, and for once I can be proud of one of my people.

In writing about the food of the South, Edge has found a subject that lends itself to celebration of the poor and disenfranchised. Of course it is no secret that plantation cuisine is really Black cuisine, since it was cooked, served and cleaned up by Black people, with the only participation of the overlords being the eating. Edge also writes about barbeque, Appalachian food, New Orleans cuisine and the new styles of cooking practiced by Latino and Asian immigrants to the South. In nearly every case these are cooking styles that owe more to poverty than wealth. Edge also acknowledges the contribution of the South to the processed psuedo-foods that are making us obese and killing us -- KFC, Hardees and others of that ilk.

Although Edge mentions my home state of Kentucky more than a few times in this book, his focus is primarily on the deeper South, an area that was always seemed a bit foreign and primitive to me when I was growning up. They were better than Yankees, our distant cousins, but still perhaps not fully human, a region probably largely populated by people like Faulkner's Snopes family. Edge makes these people come alive. I want to invite them all to dinner and trade stories with them deep into the night after a giant meal meal of fried chicken, corn pone and blackeyed peas.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 3 out of 5]

The history and food culture of the American south established by the slaves and black men and women who did the cooking, to the trained culinary chefs who followed, to finally the recent immigrates who are reinterpreting local cuisine by add new flavors.


US Senator Fritz Hollings took tours of the south in the 1960s. In South Carolina ‘he pointed out that, within forty miles of where he stood, forty farmers had received more than $40,000 each in federal subsidies the previous year for leaving their land idle. "This doesn't affect the character of the farmer," Hollings said, laying on the
sarcasm. “He's still as red-blooded, capitalistic, free enterprising, and patriotic as ever before. But give the poor, little hungry child a forty-cent breakfast and you've destroyed his character. You've ruined his incentive. You've taught him bad habits. You have developed a drone society."’

[Jamie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I REALLY enjoyed this book - a survey of Southern food from slavery to immigration. I was completely sucked into the stories, seeing how each successive generation took foods of the past and reinterpreted them, and even by more modern stories where immigrants from nations across the globe are moving to the south, and putting their own spin and flavors onto more traditional southern food.

The author does grapple a bit with the debts we owe black slaves, especially those that served as cooks; how chefs of today must realize that their success is built on the backs of these reluctant food preparers who used traditions from home and prepared meals with local foods.

I learned so much.

[Dominika · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comprehensive contemporary history of the evolution of Southern food, this is dense with information but utterly fascinating. If you're a casual food academic, you may recognize some names (Sean Brock and Glenn Roberts, Emril Lagasi, etc.). But there are a lot of countercultural elements to the rise of the South, from hippie communes preaching farm-to-table while sipping peyote tea, to how the African American community banded together to fight against segregation, to the advent and history of Fast Food (Including Harlan Sanders) and how that affected the south, to food journalism and the reoccurring trend of Southern Food. It's an absolutely rich and fascinating history wrought with civil rights issues, the effect of gentrification, the battle of rural values vs. convenience, etc.

[Yaaresse]

DNF at 19%.

I liked the concept of this, both the social science and the culinary history aspect. Something about the writing bugs me enough that I don't want to finish it, and I can't quite put my finger on what it is yet. I find myself doing a lot of "wait...what?" during the parts where Edge writes about the change in race relations from Civil Rights era days. It's almost like he thinks racism is solved or something.

I wish I could find a good word to explain the way it seems to read. It's not exactly disingenuous. More like fallacious? Mansplaining? Whitesplaining? Willful amnesia?

[John Dockery · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is absurdly good. I’m a big fan of John T Edge as a writer and food historian. He so eloquently takes readers through the deep and traumatic history of southern food. From its earliest roots with enslaved peoples to emancipation to Jim Crow era to the civil rights movement to even the immigration boom of the south in the last 20 years. It is such a beautiful and yet gut wrenching story of how the suffering of generations shaped and created a food tradition that in a lot of ways defines America. HIGHLY recommend.

[William Burruss · Rating 4 out of 5]

When someone looks at me I’m 100% white, but when I eat I am Soul Black, a mix of grits and cous-sous, Indian and American Indian. My enjoyment of food takes me to seafood and barbecue shacks, and to five star restaurants. What I like about this book is that I am living the New South’s Experience and that it shows me how people of all ethnic backgrounds have assisted in this gastronomic love affair.

[Audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

You should LISTEN to this book...John T. narrates, and his occasional laughs and saucy language made for a commute that dictated every food choice morning and evening for two weeks (pun intended because this man makes you hungry with every word). Even after 10 years in the South studying Southern history (and food), I learned so much. History, food lore, and good people...John T. Edge tells great stories and adds to my argument that the South has it all.

[Sean Owen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm probably not the target audience here. As a 20+ year vegan there's not a lot of Southern Cuisine I can eat. I still found "The Potlikker Papers" to be an interesting read. John T. Edge has used food as a way to tell a history of the South through the 20th and into the 21st century. He chronicles ups and downs and catalogues when things have gone in and out of fashion. He understands the complicated interplay between "high" and "low" culture and how race, class and gender interplay in all aspects of life, including cooking.

It's fitting that Edge quotes Patterson Hood and the Drive By Truckers. "The Potlikker Papers" tracks a simlilar course to their body of work, exploring the good of Southern culture without shying away from highlighting the bad as well.