Welcome to the SFA

Welcome to the Southern Foodways Alliance -- an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture with headquarters at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.

The Southern Foodways Alliance documents and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South. We set a common table where black and white, rich and poor -- all who gather-- may consider our history and our future in a spirit of reconciliation.

Preserving the legacy of Southern food;
Lively fare: Symposium debates, celebrates region's famed multicultural flavor

By Wendell Brock
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
November 3, 1999

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Oxford, Miss. – As the Jack Daniel's flowed and the ghosts of William Faulkner and Willie Morris danced under the magnolias, a spirited debate erupted on the heart of the Ole Miss campus over the weekend. New York culinary historian Jessica Harris had a bone to pick with Savannah cookbook writer Damon Lee Fowler.

But the argument at the Southern Foodways Symposium was not about race or sex or politics. It was about the origins of that holiest of Southern icons, fried chicken. "I thought somebody was going to pull out a pistol," said Linda Carman, a baking expert from Nashville.

If you thought Southern food was just food, you haven't been to this symposium, an event that, more than anything, proves how passionate --- how downright peculiar --- some people can be about catfish and collards. In a place where tempers once flared over matters of war and peace, the dialogue has shifted to the kitchen. But despite the occasional squawks and ruffled feathers, this gathering was an occasion of broad affection and graceful good humor, and the defining moment in a long effort to accord the region's culinary heritage the same treatment as its literary and musical idioms.

"Foodways are just as important as Faulkner in understanding the South," said Charles Reagan Wilson, director of the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture, which produces the symposium and the world-renowned Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference. "Faulkner speaks to some Southerners, but foodways speak to all Southerners."

And so, all weekend long, some 90 food aficionados from around the country - -- museum curators, chefs, cookbook writers and journalists from The Food Network and Food & Wine and Gourmet magazines --- ventured here to learn about Arkansas tamales, Georgia boiled peanuts, Kentucky shuckbeans and Creole file-making.

They came to hear New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie joke that he had changed the title of his talk on Creole cooking to "Escoffier's Resounding Silence on the Matter of Gumbo." Or to hear Mississippi home cook Kathy Starr tell how she found salvation and love in the bosom of her grandmother's kitchen after her parents abandoned her. They came to sit over a plate of barbecue with Atlanta's Nathalie Dupree, who, in her Chanel sunglasses and pearl choker, seemed the epitome of the strange new species known as the food celebrity. And they came to hear National Public Radio host Vertamae Grosvenor spout morsels of folk wisdom like this: "When the preacher comes, the chickens cry."

"I wanted to use food as a way of talking about what Mr. Faulkner called the great verities, like race and class and gender and all that stuff," says symposium director John T. Edge, a boyish-looking 36-year-old with a laugh like a hiccup. After getting his master's in Southern studies at Ole Miss, Edge persuaded the Center to put the symposium, and its newly formed Southern Foodways Alliance, under its umbrella. On Thursday, he'll be in Atlanta to sign his new book, "A Gracious Plenty: Recipes and Recollections From the American South" (Putnam, $ 30); a portion of its sales benefits the symposium.

But the Clinton, Ga., native says the event would not be happening had it not been for the work of people like Edna Lewis, John Egerton and others. Since at least 1992, Lewis, the venerable chef and writer who lives in Atlanta, has wanted to organize a society to preserve the vanishing traditions of the Southern farm and kitchen. For various reasons, the effort didn't get off the ground until last year's first Oxford symposium.

Now it seems there is no turning back.

This year's installment sold out two months in advance. Also, the American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts, which plans to open a $ 70 million museum in Napa, Calif., in 2001, sent a film crew to tape oral histories of everyone from Mississippi catfish farmer Ed Scott to Baton Rouge, La., file maker Lionel Key.

Edge, who works full-time at the center, says: "People who were not here might question whether it's a stretch. 'You spent the whole weekend talking about food? Does it really matter?' And yet if you'd been in attendance, you'd realize we are telling the story of a culture through its food, which is the shared creation of all these ethnic groups and nationalities. It's very much life and death stuff. It is sweat and blood and love."

Though Lewis could not journey to the conference to pick up a lifetime achievement award, her presence was palpable. "It was this vision of hers that really brought us to where we are," said Egerton, unveiling a portrait of Lewis that Edge will bring to Atlanta on Thursday. Lewis, the granddaughter of freed Virginia slaves and the grande dame of Southern cuisine, is scheduled to appear at Edge's book signing. Scott Peacock, her soul mate and chef at the Decatur restaurant Watershed, will cook.

For its part, Edge's book is a collection of recipes taken from the region's copious supply of community cookbooks, and annotated with the meal memories of the famous (bluesman B.B. King) and the not-so famous (Lawrence Craig, who runs a barbecue joint in Devall's Bluff, Ark.).

Says the author: "This book pays homage to those gravy-splattered spiral- bound cookbooks, but it does it in a way that hopefully gives some cultural context. I look upon those books as the voice of an unsung people. Nobody is paying attention to those churchwomen who came together, those firemen who cooked Brunswick stew every Sunday."

One admirer of Edge's work is Daphne L. Derven, curator of the Napa center, who came to Oxford oversee the videotaping of oral histories. "What I see John doing is attempting to both document and explore the language that connects us to people who lived and farmed and ate and laughed and listened to music and shared meals in different parts of the South and in different parts of America."

Indeed, there was much laughing, singing and sharing of meals at the symposium. But there were moments of crackling debate --- questions of who we are and where our cooking came from.

After Fowler, the Savannah writer and gadfly, made an academic argument that the bone of Southern cooking is English, Harris, an expert on the foods of the African diaspora, stood to say his evidence would never pass the muster of "the Academy."

And you could have almost heard a pin drop when Egerton --- who Edge calls ''the pope of Southern cooking" --- rose to say that Fowler was "digging an unnecessary hole for himself."

But symposium leaders say such debate is vital. "We are not providing a sentimental, nostalgic look at the old ways," Wilson said, "but trying to look with very clear eyes just as we would at Southern history and the origins of Jim Crow. Jim Crow had meanings in terms of food, so that's a part of the story that we want to unravel."

If some symposium attendees were marching to the beat of a different drumstick, no one --- especially Fowler --- questions that Southern food is a glorious blend of African, European and indigenous influences.

"We can argue about that forever," Edge said. "But when the chicken hits the plate, I'm happy!"

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