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.

2007 Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award

Elizabeth Scott

In 1941, Mississippi natives Aaron and Elizabeth Scott called San Antonio, Texas, home. Aaron served in the U. S. Army. During their time in Texas, Elizabeth developed a taste for hot tamales. Rather than keep buying them, Aaron decided they should try making them at home, so he bought a tamale recipe from a local Mexican man. The first time they tried making tamales in their own kitchen, Elizabeth and her husband worked for sixteen hours through the night. They didn’t even have a dozen hot tamales when they were finished. When they moved back home to Mississippi in 1950, they had perfected their recipe and their craft enough to start a side business selling them on Nelson Street in downtown Greenville. Aaron Scott passed away in 1987. Elizabeth retired from the tamale business in 2001 at age seventy-eight. But six of their nine children--and even some grandchildren--are carrying on the family business. Today, Scott’s Hot Tamale stand can be found on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Greenville. The location has changed, but their corn shuck-wrapped beef brisket hot tamales remain the same.

Read more at TamaleTrail.com

Read an SFA oral history featuring Elizabeth Scott and Scott’s Hot Tamales here.

Join the SFA

Help the Southern Foodways Alliance celebrate, preserve, promote, and nurture the traditional and developing food culture of the American South.

Join us.

The Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award

Each fall, the SFA (with support from the Fertel Foundation) honors an unsung hero or heroine, a foodways tradition bearer of note, with the Ruth Fertel Keeper of the Flame Award.

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