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.

Barbecue by the bootstraps: Book chronicles the rise of barbecue from mom-and-pop operations to fine dining, and all points in between

By Judy Walker
Times-Picayune
October 14, 2004 Thursday

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John T. Edge has been a busy guy. The Southern Foodways Alliance of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, led by Edge, has published a new book this fall in association with the University of North Carolina Press. "Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue" ($17.95), edited by Times-Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie, succeeds the highly popular "Cornbread Nation," edited by Edge.

The book is several things at once. Ultimately, it’s a snapshot of the Southern culinary scene.
It is the second Alliance compilation of writing about Southern food ("Cornbread Nation" was the first) and its theme is, as the subtitle suggests, barbecue. Elie is a founding Foodways Alliance member and author of "Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country."

About half the book is the best of Southern food writing, Elie said, and the other half is the further exploration of barbecue since he began "Smokestack Lightning" 10 years ago. He has seen the culture of barbecue change, he said, from one that centers on mom-and-pop stores to a phenomenon now embraced by white tablecloth chefs in unexpected outposts. His story about San Francisco barbecue was originally published in Gourmet.

New Orleans and Louisiana are well represented in the latest book. "We are blessed in New Orleans, not only with a lot of good food, but with a lot of good food writers," Elie said.

The book includes Randy Fertel’s touching essay on his famous mother, Ruth Fertel of Ruth’s Chris Steak House. Sara Roahen writes about the first African-American cookbook in "What Abby Fisher Knows." Julia ("Queen of the Turtle Derby") Reed’s "Rich and Famous" essay is about cakes named after famous people.

Other local writers represented in this edition include Pableaux Johnson (whose story about Uglesich’s restaurant was nominated for a James Beard award) and Times-Picayune restaurant critic Brett Anderson, whose "Creole Contretemps" is about Galatoire’s. New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin weighs in on Cajun food.

This was his first experience editing others’ work, Elie said, and he had to commission writers to fill in some of the barbecue gaps. He asked Jessica Harris, who lives in New York and New Orleans, to write about the "Caribbean Connection." One of the most important pieces in the book, he said, is "In Xanadu Did Barbecue," about the rise of modern barbecue culture, which was Vassar College student Ripley Golovin Hathaway’s senior thesis.

He discovered this piece while writing "Smokestack," and it’s the only essay he has found that explains the growth of barbecue beyond the South and the black diaspora, Elie said.

To the rest of the country, "it meant weiners and hot dogs," he said. "Hathaway looks at the political, economic and architectural forces that made barbecue a more national food."
Local writer Bethany Ewald Bultman’s "An Ode to the Pig: Assorted Thoughts on the World’s Most Controversial Food" is also an important piece, Elie said, "because we all have a sense of the pig being forbidden food, and she goes through the history of it. I became aware of her interest three years ago when she asked me where pigs come from.

"Some of the best writing comes out of that kind of curiosity."

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