The Edible South

July 15, 2014
Food serves as a useful lens for examining race, economics, gender and class in the South, from plantation days to the present.In this authoritative social history, Ferris (American Studies/Univ. of North Carolina; Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South, 2005) draws on a rich trove of material, including oral histories, journals, sketchbooks, letters and diaries, as well as cookbooks and published scholarship. In the 19th century, New England-born women, working in the South as governesses, described in detail new culinary experiences: breakfasts featuring several kinds of breads, succotash, hominy and ham; desserts of stewed cherries; peaches finely sliced and served with cream. In letters home, they became "ethnographers of a sort, documenting and critiquing southern society, manners, food, and institutions, including slavery." One governess, seeing slaves eating their owners' leftovers, admitted uncomfortably, "I haven't learned yet how to give my leavings with a good grace." After the Civil War, plantation owners, unable to farm without slaves, rented land to tenant farmers and sharecroppers, insisting, though, that they grow only cotton or tobacco, profitable cash crops. Forbidden to raise vegetables, the farmers and their families subsisted on a diet of cornmeal, salt pork, beans and molasses, which caused severe malnutrition. Federal relief programs, home economics classes in schools and the advent of industrial farming slowly revived agriculture. By the 1940s, fashioning itself as a tourist destination, the South looked back nostalgically to its "rich culinary heritage," luring visitors with the attractions of "southern hospitality, culinary artistry, authenticity, and antiquity." Food was also central to civil rights protests in the 1960s, with sit-ins often staged at restaurants and lunch counters. Ferris sees a true transformation today: Southern cooking, influenced by cosmopolitan chefs with strong ties to the region, revives the use of fresh, local produce from small-scale farms.In this colorful and well-researched history, the author shows persuasively how food has shaped and nourished Southern identity.

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August 1, 2014
No other regional American cooking has experienced such detailed analysis and documentation as has that of the South. Noted chef and writer Edna Lewis even contended that southern cooking is in fact the only established American cuisine. Ferris has exhaustively traced the origins of southern cooking as far back as Europeans' initial contact with the region's native population in the seventeenth century. She delves into the South's most significant foods, such as rice. Ferris performs a particularly important job by painstakingly explaining just how slave culture and subsequent Jim Crow laws and segregation made southern cooking unique. She records achievements of lesser-known and unrecognized contributors to civil rights struggles such as Georgia Gilmore, who organized bake sales to fund carpools during the Montgomery bus boycott, which immortalized Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Such bits of information supply humanity to what might otherwise seem dry scholarship. Includes a comprehensive bibliography of sources.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)