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.

Brown Sugar

review by Thomas Head

Brown Sugar:
Soul Food Desserts from Family and Friends
by Joyce White. HarperCollins Publishers, $24.95.

Dessert is an essential part of any Southern meal, and we should never let the carbohydrate counters take that away from us. Alabama native Joyce White, whose earlier book Soul Food explored home-style African American cooking, here takes on the world of pies, cakes, cookies, ice creams, and jams and jellies that provide a proper, sweet ending for a Southern dining experience.

Some of the recipes are collected from family and friends; many are recipes that White herself perfected after eating a delicious dish for which the cook could not--or would not--share the recipe. I'm eager to try her watermelon ice cream, for which she devised a method of intensifying the watermelon flavor with a syrup of pureed watermelon and sugar.

White's book is particularly welcome to those of us who no longer have mothers or grandmothers close at hand to answer questions about how to make the desserts we grew up with. Her discussion of caramelizing sugar is a valuable guide to the world of burnt-sugar candies and cake icings dear to the South. While all the recipes are rooted firmly in Southern tradition, many of them provide new twists on traditional favorites: peach coconut cake, Spicy Molasses Pecan Pie, a version of banana pudding with gingersnaps rather than the usual vanilla wafers. It's a mouth-watering collection of recipes that confirms the generosity and creativity of the soul of the South.

SFA Oral History Initiative

The SFA is working to preserve the history and foodways of the American South through its Oral History Initiative.

See our online overview of current documentary projects, including Tennessee Barbecue and the foodways of Greenwood, Mississippi.

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

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