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Best of Food (2014 Collection)

  //  winter 2014

Nourishment and nostalgia, Native ingredients and global influences. Southern Cultures‘s debut “best of” collection gets straight to the heart of the matter: food.

For those of us who’ve debated mayonnaise brand, hushpuppy condiment, or barbecue styleincluding, in some quarters, whether the latter is a non or a verb (bless your heart)we present here a collection equal to our passions.

Culled from our best food writing, 2008–2014, this special volume serves up tomatoes, turtles, molasses, Mother Corn and the Dixie Pig, bourbon, gravy, cakes, jam, jellies, pickles, and chocolate pie. Dig in!

Table of Contents
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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.” Native food is in the news. Every day. All over the country, except in the South, foodies, farmers, chefs, environmentalists, and food writers are excited about »
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“A recourse that could be depended upon”

Picking Blackberries and Getting By after the Civil War

by Bruce E. Baker
Picking Blackberries and Getting By after the Civil War “Nineteenth-century newspaper accounts tell of snake attacks. Hornets, as my brother could tell you, can be a problem, and bears are not unheard of.” One day last year, at the end of July, I walked down to Runnymede, alongside the River Thames, and picked a mess »
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“The Deepest Reality of Life”: Southern Sociology, the WPA, and Food in the New South

by Marcie Cohen Ferris
“‘I know your damned photographer’s soul writhes, but to hell with it. Do you think I give a damn about a photographer’s soul with Hitler at our doorstep?'” A vast network of reform spread across the South in the first decades of the twentieth century as an army of progressive southerners, white and black, struggled »
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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.” Molasses has been one of the three Ms of the diet of southern common folks, along with meat (salt pork) and meal (corn meal). It has served as a baking ingredient, condiment, and cold remedy, and it was central to special-occasion »
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“She Ought to Have Taken Those Cakes”: Southern Women and Rural Food Supplies

by Rebecca Sharpless
“In April 1930, five hundred potential customers showed up at the opening of Staunton’s curb market, and, in 1936, the market’s most successful vendor, Nettie Shull, made more than $2,000 by selling potato chips, fried apple pies, potato salad, and dressed poultry.” Buying local food is all the rage today. Serious students of food tout »
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“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.” It’s not every woman who renders her own lard, or cries over Kentucky Wonder beans. April McGreger, however, dwells in vital, dynamic realms of southern food, »
Photo Essay

An Eye for Mullet

Brown's Island Mullet Camp, 1938

by David S. Cecelski
In the autumn of 1938 a photographer named Charles A. Farrell visited a seasonal mullet fishing camp at Brown’s Island, in Onslow County, North Carolina. What he discovered there captured his imagination: a remote hamlet of fishermen’s shanties far from civilization and two legendary clans of fishermen in relentless pursuit of one of the Atlantic’s »

Theodore Peed’s Turtle Party

by Bernard L. Herman
“There’s only one piece of white meat in him, and that’s his neck. The rest of the meat is dark meat. If you fry it, it’s still like a white piece of meat, like a chicken breast. The rest of it looks like a chicken leg.” Two events mark the fall social season on the »

Every Ounce a Man’s Whiskey?

Bourbon in the White Masculine South

by Seán S. McKeithan
“It is about the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking in general and in particular of knocking it back neat . . . The joy of Bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of C2H5OH on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in »
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Chocolate Pie

by Michael Chitwood
both sweet and bitter, like that afternoon The woman who made ithadn’t been to churchin years, except for thereat the crimped dough edgesand beaten-egg cumulusof the browned meringue,and beneath it, the pudding,both sweet and bitter,like that afternoon,so long ago,just the two of us,talking a little, eating.
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