$18.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-8078-5556-0

Published: Fall 2004

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Copyright (c) 2004 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Introduction
Lolis Eric Elie

I was born happily in New Orleans. I was only dragged into the South thirty-some years later unwittingly and uneasily by the Southern Foodways Alliance.

The difficulty was not a matter of geography. One of the advantages of living in New Orleans is that you can hop in a car or on a plane and in a matter of hours, you've traveled from the northern Caribbean to the southern United States, from sugarcane to cotton, from crawfish to catfish. Indeed, I had visited the South many times and even spent three years of my youth exiled in that region's capital, Atlanta. No, the difficulty was a matter of identity, or more precisely, a matter of navigating the long list of identities available in America to find that one that best correlated with my own personal set of idiosyncrasies.

I suppose in those pre-Southern days, I was something of a Creole. Neither of my parents would embrace the term, but that was no impediment to my appropriation of the birthright. The Africans and Europeans whose cultures combined to form Creole identity were often less than wild about their café au lait progeny. Thus the Creole credo has always been that the great, grand whole is infinitely superior to the sum of the little parental parts. So whenever there was a North-South debate about culture, sports, or politics, I lofted above the fray, confident that New Orleans was superior in all matters that mattered—food, music, architecture, and, of course, attitude. I was a New Orleans nationalist, utterly convinced that my city-state and certain other choice morsels of southern Louisiana territory should be considered in their own separate sphere. I believed that certain self-evident truths needed to be reexamined, namely this notion that the American Purchase of the Louisiana Territory was such a great deal. (While the Americans have profited handsomely from the transaction, try as I might, I have failed to see any advantage in it for my people.)

In 1998 I was invited to speak at the second annual Southern Foodways Alliance symposium. The topic of that year's event was creolization, and I couldn't wait. We were to talk and learn about the various clashes of cultures that have created the South. My mouth watered at the prospect of brand new heathens, freshly unwashed and poised to hear the good news of the Creole gospel. I was prepared to speak from the subject, "As to Escoffier's Silence in the Matter of Gumbo." (Though others may consider the matter long settled, I intended that talk to be a Declaration of Creole Independence from France in the guise of a paean to my nation's signature culinary perfection.)

I knew I was in trouble when I heard the first speaker, Jessica Harris, Ph.D. She proceeded to define, dissect, and describe my region and my people in a series of languages other than English, all of which are crucial to an understanding of Creole identity but none of which I speak. Imagine my amazement to learn that she's native to one of the New York provinces (Queens, I believe) and scarcely came into contact with Creole civilization until she was a full-grown adult. Then Ronni Lundy, a Kentuckian, described her homeland, in a talk that was in turns hilarious and touching. She made it clear that mine isn't the only distinct area joined by geography and fate to the American South. She also rendered it utterly impossible for me to toss around the word "hillbilly" with any confidence that the epithet will neither hit nor hurt anyone of consequence.

The Southern Foodways Symposium is held in the heart of Dixie, at Ole Miss, the rebel university that sought to insure that the twentieth century would never darken its door. That place captured the otherness of the South for me. Its history epitomized the South I had no wish to belong to. But much about it was familiar: Leah Chase finding a Catholic sanctuary in that Baptist town and attending mass Saturday afternoon; Kathleen Purvis inviting us to come by her room for a little Kentucky cognac so that we might be properly fortified for the ten-block walk to the place where the festivities awaited. That year, I was converted to John Egerton's vision of the South and the Southern Foodways Alliance's role in it.

His book, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, chronicles the prehistory of his ideal. He will detail this philosophy from the podium, but he articulates it best for you at Ajax Diner or Off Square Books after he has feasted well in the company of old friends and we have all drunk deeply from the Jack Daniels bottle. He will tell you that ours is a large table stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to Washington, D.C., from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mexican border. He will tell you that this coming together at our table and the breaking of our various breads is an act of defiance. It is a speaking now, mouth full and spirit nourished, against the days when certain feet, those deemed too dark or too dirty, were violently separated from this supper. He will tell you that this fried chicken, these sweet potato pies are related to regular food in much the same way as communion hosts are related to regular white bread.

And even if he doesn't say it that way, you will hear it that way.

If you are privileged to hear this, you will return to Oxford. You will return thinking you know something about grits, then rethink your knowledge at a Sunday brunch, after tasting the way Anson Mills and its miller, Glen Roberts, have restored this dish to its previous glory. You might return confident in the knowledge that South Carolinians can't make good biscuits, only to have Charleston chef Louis Osteen make last-minute changes to his menu so as to effectively rebut an anti-South Carolina biscuits remark he heard during a lecture. You might return to feel something of that fellowship you used to witness in those impatient moments after church when you were hungry and young and ready to go but your grandmother insisted on greeting everybody from the pastor on down as if "time for small talk and socializing" appeared as an item on the order of worship.

In putting together this anthology, I have sought to evoke the warm fellowship that glows in the South of the Southern Foodways Symposium. This volume shares with other anthologies the goal of bestness, the hope that we have combed the pages of potential inclusions and found those that exemplify the highest standards of literature and scholarship. But I am also hoping that the selection of these pieces is a step toward the crafting of a Southern geography so precise and nuanced as to be beyond the capabilities of any cartographer. So this anthology is about the South of tradition, in which funerals and food naturally go together, as in Pat Conroy's "Love, Death, and Macaroni." It is the South of John Martin Taylor's boiled peanuts, a region that extends up to Harlem but doesn't include Jim Auchmutey's Atlanta. It is a place where the celebrated chefs are not always men in toques, but old Southern cooking women as in Sara Roahen's "What Abby Fisher Knows." It is the South of women like Ruth Fertel, who parleyed her technique and talent beyond the kitchen and into broader culinary economy (Randy Fertel's "Power of Memory and Presence"). It is about a place with traditions so old and otherworldly as to be scarcely recognizable to many of us (Susan Allport, "Women Who Eat Dirt"). It's also about a new South, leading the nation, as exemplified in Molly O'Neill's "Viking Invasion."

Barbecue occupies a place in this anthology much like the one it occupies in the pantheon of American food—large and cherished. We take our subtitle, "The United States of Barbecue," from Jake Adam York, the poet whose work "To the Unconverted" appears here and whose poems often serve as invocations at SFA events. Like cornbread, barbecue is a food that unifies the vast expanse of the American South, an ever larger portion of the American mainstream. Though the various versions of barbecue differ from each other as much as cows differ from sheep, or as much as tomatoes differ from mustard seeds, the common themes of wood and smoke, meat and sauce, family and fellowship, transcend regional rivalries and recipe differences.

Other foods cover the geographic expanse of this nation, just as barbecue does. You can find fried chicken, hamburgers, hot dogs, and pizza from coast to coast. But none of these foods enjoy the great regional variation that barbecue does. None of them exemplify the competing themes of American unity and diversity as barbecue does. You don't hear heated arguments about the fundamental differences between the hamburgers in Albuquerque and those in Altoona. Hamburgers just ain't that deep. As John Shelton Reed reminds us in "Barbecue Sociology: The Meat of the Matter," "Southern barbecue is the closest thing we have in the U.S. to Europe's wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes."

As the United States has weaned itself from the European culinary orbit in recent decades, the trained and celebrated chefs at the fancy restaurants have looked increasingly to the South for domestic inspiration. So barbecue and barbecue techniques show up on menus in places where real Southern food has long been alien. And as traditional slow-cooked barbecue becomes more difficult to find even in its homeland, folks in barbecue country have come to a greater appreciation of the preciousness of this food.

While books purporting to be about barbecue are popping up on bookstore shelves with increasing regularity, few of them approach the subject with any appreciation of the seriousness of barbecue history and sociology. While these books start off from the assumption that barbecue is a saleable subject, they often fail to recognize the extent to which any serious study of barbecue must of necessity contain within it a wide range of insights about American history and culture. So this anthology contains information that, while not necessarily new, is often overlooked.

If there were any doubts about the formative role barbecue has played in American history, they are laid to rest in Mary V. Thompson's essay linking the nation's first president with its preeminent food. Barbacoa, the slow-smoked cow's head delicacy of southern Texas, provides us with some of our earliest evidence of an American barbecue tradition. In her essay, "The Land of Barbacoa," Bárbara Renaud González gives us an update on the dish, informing us of the role such beef still plays in the memory of little girls. Just as the themes of race and religion have been pivotal in the formation of American identity, so have they been pivotal in the formation of barbecue culture. Even a casual student of barbecue knows that there are racial implications in any discussion of this food's origins and techniques, but in "Texas Barbecue in Black and White," Robb Walsh brings into question some of the assumptions cherished even by barbecue experts. And for those who thought that all adherents to the religion of barbecue were Christian, Marcie Cohen Ferris destroys that tenet in her essay about the Southern Jewish perspective on the subject.

With "In Xanadu Did Barbecue," a revision of the author's Vassar College senior thesis, Ripley Golovin Hathaway charts the growth of barbecue's popularity in the American mainstream. But in an 1896 essay in Harpers' Weekly ("The Georgia Barbecue") that her research unearthed, we see that barbecue has been a topic of interest to the readers of national magazines for more than a century. And Rufus Jarmon, in his 1954 Saturday Evening Post essay, "Dixie's Most Disputed Dish," demonstrates that this food was the subject of intense argument long before Max Brantley's ribs hit the fan in the pages of the Arkansas Gazette.

This book is but the second in what we, the members of the Southern Foodways Alliance, fully expect will be a long series of annual anthologies. Things change. By the time we get to volume 10 or 20, our people and our place will be different, changed by the loss of the older generations and the influx of new foreign forces from places like Cambodia and Ethiopia and New Jersey. There's no way to predict the impact of bagel bakeries and sushi bars on our traditional diet. So we present this volume to you as a State of the Southern Culinary Union. A snapshot. A reporting on how it is now. We offer it to you with the full knowledge that, even as you are reading this, our region will be remaking itself into something we hope and pray will be a more perfect union, a better reflection of our best selves.