Food & Foodways
The Food and Foodways of the South are topics we've explored in depth over the last several years, including a full issue dedicated to what the South eats and why, which we released in 2009. Links to the specific esays and features from the Special Food Issue are included below with the rest of our material from the last two decades on Southern Food and Foodways. We begin first with new material previously unavailable from our archives, which we've just recently posted.
Bourbon
poetry by R. T. Smith
". . . Earl was a steady liar who never in his life solved
a single crime, to hear my father tell it, an improvident
soul prone to nocturnal misdemeanors himself . . ."
Full Issue for Kindle, for Nook, or for Sony Reader
Southern Cultures, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2012
Every Ounce a Man's Whiskey?
Bourbon in the White Masculine South
by Seán S. McKeithan
"The hot bite of the Bourbon sensuously connects the body of the drinker to nation, region, and locale, enjoining his experience with those of imagined, historical bodies, soaking up space and place in the slow burn of what appears an endless southern summertime."
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$0.99 download for Kindle, for Nook, or for Sony Reader (available soon)
Southern Cultures, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2012
"A recourse that could be depended upon"
Picking Blackberries and Getting By after the Civil War
by Bruce E. Baker
"Nineteenth-century newspaper accounts tell of snake attacks, such as the one on an African American woman near Montgomery, Alabama, who was killed by a large rattlesnake while out picking berries with a companion. Hornets, as my brother could tell you, can be a problem, and bears are not unheard of."
Full Issue for Kindle ($7.96), for Nook ($7.96), or for Sony Reader ($9.45)
Southern Cultures, Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 2010
The Edible South
by Marcie Cohen Ferris
“Even as southern populations (and landscapes) have evolved, food and place remain indelibly linked in the southern imagination.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I
“Peace and a Smile to the Lips”: Favorite Southern Food Dishes
by some of our favorite southern food writers, with an introduction by Kathleen Purvis
“What you have in your hands isn’t just a list of memories and tastes. It’s an act of bravery akin to holding a lit stick of TNT.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I
Drum Head Stew: The Power and Poetry of Terroir
by Bernard L. Herman
“‘Oh Violet, keep the head on the fish, because I want my eyeballs.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I
Wormsloe’s Belly: Understanding the History of a Southern Plantation through Food
by Drew A. Swanson
“The plantation’s residents were such voracious drinkers that the remains of wine bottles were the most reliable way to date colonial discoveries during excavation of the old fort site.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I
Chance Meetings and Back Roads: Making Connections through Food
photographs by Amy C. Evans
“He was forced into retirement after Hurricane Katrina, but ‘The Professor,’ as he’s known, is still a walking encyclopedia of New Orleans cocktail history.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I
Canning Tomatoes, Growing “Better and More Perfect Women”: The Girls’ Tomato Club Movement
by Elizabeth Engelhardt
“‘If somebody were to tell you that a group of little country girls who never have been near a big city have built up a business so large and important that papers all over the country are telling about it, you would think it was a new kind of fairy tale.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I
Eat It to Save It: April McGreger in Conversation with Tradition
by Whitney E. Brown
“There is a deep, pulsing current of heritage and emotion when your hands are in the dirt, and that’s a feeling worth recapturing in the age of the iPhone.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I
Reading the Lupton African American Cookbook Collection
by John T. Edge
“‘My cooking is referred to as yo-yo cooking, because the recipes found in this book will make your drawers drop down to your knees and pop back up to your neck.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I
Food for Thought: Race, Region, Identity, and Foodways in the American South
by Beth A. Latshaw
“‘I’ve eaten it all my life, and I'm not dead yet.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I
Gravy
poetry by Michael McFee
“. . . where fat becomes faith, where juice conveys grace . . .”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I
Thanksgiving Ghosts: The Family Cookbook
by Mary Ann Sternberg
“‘Your cookbook,’ she related with obvious pride, ‘was published in 1897.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I
Red Gravy
by Elizabeth M. Williams
“All self-respecting Sicilians disdained red gravy.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 4, Winter 2009: Food I
Keeping Sin From Sacred Spaces: Southern Evangelicals and the Socio-Legal Control of Alcohol, 1865–1915
by Michael Lewis
“‘Alcohol undermines the health, enfeebles the will, makes the mind coarse and the tongue vulgar, brings discord to the family, deprives children of their rights, lowers the standard of morals, corrupts politics, fills prisons and asylums with human wrecks, mocks religion and ruins immortal souls.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 2, Summer 2009
Chitlin Function
by Jerry Leath Mills
“Although I had been around chitlins from time to time all through my childhood, I always considered the actual eating of them as a spectator sport. In the first place, they stank.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 2, Summer 2009
John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed, with William McKinney
Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue: The Definitive Guide to the People, Recipes, and Lore (review)
reviewed by Fred Sauceman
"The Reeds and McKinney have crafted a book that ranges from the roasted meats of Homer’s Iliad to yellow page ads in the restaurant sections of North Carolina telephone directories. Holy Smoke is a book not only of many flavors but also engaging scenes."
Southern Cultures, Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009
Mother Corn and the Dixie Pig: Native Food in the Native South
by Rayna Green
"They all know, out there in Indian Country, that the loss of traditional diet and the cultural skills needed to maintain it has killed more Indians than Andy Jackson."
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 4, Winter 2008: First Peoples
Molasses-Colored Glasses
: WPA and Sundry Sources on Molasses and Southern Foodways
by Frederick Douglass Opie
“Poor white and black southerners ate molasses in some form with almost every meal.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2008
Your Dekalb Farmers Market:
Food and Ethnicity in Atlanta
by Tore C. Olsson
“While the culinary atmosphere of 1977 Atlanta may have remained 'traditional,' the city itself was hardlly reminiscent of the romantic world Margaret Mitchell depicted in Gone with the Wind. ”
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 4, Winter 2007: Global South
Bill Smith: Taking the Heat—and Dishing It Out—in a Nuevo New South Kitchen
an interview by Lisa Eveleigh
“The Mexican guys said, 'let me do it, let me do it!' And they were peerless. ”
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 4, Winter 2007: Global South
There's a Word for It—: The Origins of "Barbecue"
by John Shelton Reed
"For all that southerners have made barbecue our own, the fact remains that this symbol of the South, like kudzu, is an import."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 4, Winter 2007: Global South
Wilber W. Caldwell
Searching for the Dixie Barbecue: Journeys into the Southern Psyche (review)
reviewed by John Shelton Reed
"Those photographs. . . there are ninety-some. . . would make a good coffee-table book in their own right."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 2007: Photography I
The Devil Is In
poetry by Tanya Olson
"The devil was in the grocery store yesterday. . ."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2007
Hunting Down Alabama Old-Time Manure Tea
by Karen Yochim
"Owing to the soaring prices of pharmaceuticals, I thought it was wise to track down a woman who is known for brewing an old-time, all-purpose Alabama cure-all: cow-manure tea."
Southern Cultures, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2007
Marcie Cohen Ferris
Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South (review)
reviewed by Dale Volberg Reed
"Take Jewish studies and southern studies, add study of southern foodways, throw in oral history, and you getMatzoh Ball Gumbo, the book Marcie Ferris was born to write."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006
Jim Crow's Drug War: Race, Coca Cola, and the Southern Origins of Drug Prohibition
by Michael M. Cohen
"When Coca-Cola was introduced, cocaine was championed by doctors and psychologists, including Sigmund Freud, as a medical marvel."
Southern Cultures, Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006
Guest Quarters at the Continuing Care Retirement Community
poetry by Ruth Moose
“Someone, sometime
must have made biscuits…”
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 2005
Queuing up for Q in London’s East End
by John Shelton Reed
“He remembers seeing a man from the Church of Christ cooking a steer with some apparatus involving chicken wire, an oil-rig pipe, and a hole in the ground. He also remembers playing cowboys and Indians with a young Billy Clinton.”
Southern Cultures, Voume 11, Number 3, Fall 2005
Remembering Harry Golden: Food, Race, and Laughter
by Tom Hanchett
“‘I have a positive cure for this mental aberration called anti-Semitism. I believe that if we gave each anti-Semite an onion roll with lox and cream cheese, some chopped chicken liver with a nice radish, and a good piece of brisket of beef with a few potato pancakes, he’d soon give up all this nonsense.’”
Southern Cultures, Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 2005
Feeding the Jewish Soul in the Delta Diaspora
by Marcie Cohen Ferris
“Throughout the nation food strongly defines ethnic and regional identity. But in the South, and especially in the Delta, a region scarred by war, slavery, and the aftermath of reconstruction and segregation, food is especially important.”
Southern Cultures, Volume 10, Number 3, Fall 2005
The Fruits of Memory
by Amy E. Weldon
"The orchard was still hot, still rustling and green, still haunted by the terror of snake bodies writhing to life under your feet."
Southern Cultures, Volume 9, Number 2, Summer 2003
The South's Thirsty Muse
by Brian Carpenter
"There are few revelations beyond what one might himself discover at the bottom of a shot glass, julep cup, or snub-nosed bottle."
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2000
Soul Food
by John Shelton Reed
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1998
Store Lunch
by Jerry Leath Mills
Southern Cultures, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 1998: Politics
Pass the Grits
by John Shelton Reed
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1995: Humor
"How 'bout a hand for the Hog": The Enduring Nature of the Swine as a Cultural Symbol in the South
by S. Jonathan Bass
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 3, Spring 1995
"A Poor Dinner It Was": 1860 and the Politics of Barbecue
by John Steele Henderson
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 3, Spring 1995
The Fish Factory: Work and Meaning for Black and White Fishermen of the American Menhaden Industry
by Barbara J. Garrity-Blake
reviewed by Michael Luster
Southern Cultures, Volume 2, Double Issue
For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Unauthorized History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It
by Mark Pendergrast
reviewed by Annette C. Wright
Southern Cultures, Volume 1, Number 2, Winter 1995