The Amateur Gourmet and a Southern Belly
Serious Eats contributing editor Adam "The Amateur Gourmet" Roberts interviews one of our favorite writers and food mavens, John T. Edge, over on Salon.com, in which he did a nice job picking up on the subtleties in Edge's new book, Southern Belly, the Ultimate Food Lover's Companion to the South.
Many of the figures you write about are cultured and sophisticated or go against the popular stereotype of what it is to be Southern. How do you define a Southerner?
First, thank you for recognizing that in the book. I believe that the South has been a benighted and tortured place for a long time -- it still is benighted and tortured, but I love it -- and one of the few things that blacks, whites, Jews, Christians, whomever can hold high and say we created this together is our music and food. It's not stratified by way of class and not divided by way of race or religion: It's something in which Southerners can take pride. I want to write about a South that's evolving. Because I recognize that South myself; I recognize a multifaceted, multihued South that isn't stuck in 1865, codified when the Civil War ended. The evolution of the South didn't cease in 1965 during the Civil Rights movement: The culture evolved.The South I see is a place on a map but it's also a system of beliefs, and when it comes to cooking it's a place that respects and honors simple cooking that's not simplistic. There's an honesty and a forthrightness to Southern food in this day of molecular cuisine, a lot of which I like, by the way. I had bacon cotton candy in South Carolina a few weeks ago.
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4 Comments:
This is a great interview with one of the best, most thoughtful writers about food and culture on the planet. Kudos, Adam Roberts and Salon.
Ed Levine at 2:38PM on 07/19/07
"One of the best, most thoughtful writers about food and culture on the planet?"
I'm compelled to ask who else you compared him to. Almost anyone who writes about food is also writing about culture, so it's a huge field. Heat by Buford was also a pretty good book about food and culture.
Lou at 4:12PM on 07/19/07
That's true, Lou, but very few writers link them as well as John T. Buford's book is very good and has its cultural aspects, but it didn't delve into issues of race and class the way John T. does. Maybe I feel a kinship with John T. because we share a similar world view separated by the Mason-Dixon line.
Ed Levine at 4:58PM on 07/19/07
I got to agree with Mr. Levine here. I read a great deal of academic and popular food writing in graduate school (for folklore, and no I don't know what kind of job you get with a folklore degree), and wrote a bit about food myself, and Mr. Edge is one of the few who can contribute to both methods of approaching food and the expressive cultures with which it is linked, often with the same voice, an extreme challenge to be sure.
Although I sometimes wish he was not ALWAYS the go-to-guy for Southern foodways comments and criticism, he consistently, through written and spoken word (I have even attended 2 of the Southern Foodways Alliance conferences), not to mention his leadership and direction of the SFA, demonstrates that he is most deserving of praise and I always look forward to reading his new work, even his revised work.
intheyearofthepig at 6:04PM on 07/19/07