“The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South”
Author: John T. Edge
Publisher: Penguin Press
New York
2017
Pages: 360
Price: $28.00 (Hardcover)
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John T. Edge is the acknowledged master of the history of Southern cooking. He was for many years the Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance and is the author of individual books on donuts, hamburgers, fried chicken and, less Southern, apple pie. He has published “The Truck Food Cookbook” and a book of recipes, “A Gracious Plenty. “
He has written ‘Southern Belly” a state-by-state tour of Southern restaurants, in which Alabama eateries are well represented, especially in Birmingham.
His latest, “The Potlikker Papers,” is a new and creative tour of Southern history of the last 70 years through the lens of cooks, restaurants, BBQ and grits.
In fact, it might well be argued that John T. Edge invented the field—Southern food—as a discipline to be studied, in much the same way as Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and associates created, so to speak, the field of Southern literature.
There may be people around the country who claim there is a California cuisine or a midwestern cuisine, but who cares?
“The Potlikker Papers,” especially in the first half, is inevitably about cooking and race, and irony abounds.
During slavery and afterwards the white family would take for themselves the beautifully cooked and flavored collard greens and leave the potlikker to the cook and her family.
In that potlikker, we now know, was most of the nutrition, simmered out of the greens over hours. With crumbled cornbread, it was a lifesaver.
Southern cooking was for a very long while, up until the ’50s and ’60s, black cooking, with many of the spices and ingredients, like okra, African in origin.
Southern food and Southern history, even into the Civil Rights Movement, are intertwined, and Edge uses food to shed new light on areas we thought we knew all about, like the Montgomery bus boycott in the 1950s.
In Montgomery, the kitchen of Georgia Gilmore served as a refuge for Dr. King and his advisors, where they could relax, eat favorite foods and plan. Gilmore also cooked day and night, selling her pies and fried chicken to raise money for the boycott.
The house restaurant, as Edge calls it, is still with us, as individual entrepreneurs serve a limited number of customers, by arrangement, in their homes. Different rules apply in different places and, Edge tells us, this is likely to be done today by Mexican immigrants.
History, like love, never runs smooth, and Edge points out some fascinating trends and reversals.
Fried chicken in the skillet is a treasure, is food for the gods. However, by the cheap bucketful, it is another story. Along the way, the chickens are raised in grotesque conditions, the farmers, poultry butchers, and even the retail clerks at the drive-through are paid starvation wages to create a product that generates obesity, high cholesterol and high blood pressure, a public health nightmare.
Soul food, chitterlings and hog jowls, for example, was all the rage for a while, north and south, then wasn’t.
Along the way, several white Southern chefs became the darlings of cooking shows, with some inherent contradictions.
Paula Deen was severely chastised for racist language but also for promoting recipes for okra and red rice, and techniques, as her own, giving no credit to black cooks of the past who had in fact perfected these recipes, a kind of cuisine plagiarism.
Many splendid chefs, notably Frank Stitt, declare that ingredients—fresh, local, organic, perhaps heirloom—are a major key.
Others declare the secret is in the skill, experience, muscle memory of the cook, and they can make any ingredients taste great.
Fine dining, expensive with white tablecloths, became all the rage with foodies flocking to the restaurants of New Orleans, Savannah and even Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Now, Edge tells us, the rage has subsided, and the experience in vogue right now is one notch down, coined “luxocratic,” really good food, red beans and rice, perhaps, more simply prepared, less expensive, on perhaps paper- or oilcloth-covered tables.
Edge’s last few chapters bring us to the present and into the South’s food future, with cuisine flavored by Vietnamese lemon grass, and influenced by the immigrant chefs from Mexico, Korea, India, everywhere.
But the once and future culinary delight for Edge is, as always, the BBQ.
Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.
