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.

The Gift of Southern Cooking

review by Krista Reese

The Gift of Southern Cooking: Recipes and Revelations from Two Great Southern Cooks by Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock (Knopf, $29.95)

One photograph covers the contrasts: He is big, overwhelming his small chair, wearing the faded jeans and button-down-shirt uniform of every Southern white boy under 40—which he has just turned, despite his dimpled demeanor. She is slender, elegant, African-American, her upswept white hair and deep lines proud evidence of a long life. Between them, a table holds fried chicken and pie; lush summer greenery serves as backdrop.

They may be out-of-the-ordinary roommates, but Scott Peacock and Edna Lewis have melded a life together from their work and passion for authentic Southern food -- "the real deal, not cutting corners," as Peacock says. They literally speak with one voice – Peacock’s -- in their new cookbook, The Gift of Southern Cooking (Knopf), set for publication in April.

Six years in the writing, the book grew from their friendship. Peacock was a 25-year-old rising star working at the Georgia governor’s mansion when they first met. He would go on to turn Horseradish Grill and Watershed (where he still cooks) into Atlanta dining destinations. At 78, Lewis is a legend, first breaking ground in a Manhattan restaurant, Café Nicholson, which informed New York in 1948 that Southern food could be serious. She would later write three cookbooks, including The Taste of Country Cooking, and became Grande Dame of Les Dames d’Escoffier in 1999. Together, she and Peacock founded the Society for the Revival and Preservation of Southern Food, which was a precursor to the SFA.

Though the two share a background rich in traditional Southern ties to its agriculture and rural past, they also found they had as many stark differences as that photo suggests. Lewis‚ upbringing in Freetown, Virginia, often included blancmange and brandied peaches; Peacock’s finery might include canned asparagus and Miracle Whip. His family’s Hartford, Alabama, table, however, included a variety and wealth of field peas, fish and seafood she considered foreign. She’d come of age in an era that simply didn’t include convenience foods, allowing him to learn her method of “slowly coaxing the essence of flavors from a vegetable or stewing hen,” he writes. Their frequent “cooking retreats” would expend bushels of potatoes and bags of flour in pursuit of the best methods.

The result includes recipes that are as simple as candied bacon and complex as Lewis’ signature Turtle Soup with Dumplings. (The two suggest serving some of the richer soups in demitasse or antique teacups, which they both collect.)

For Peacock, their collaboration began when he met “Ms. Lewis,” as he continues to call her. Despite their differences in age and experience, “she treated me from the very beginning as a colleague,” he says, speaking from the Decatur, Georgia, house they share. “She’s taught me so much about how to lead a life of dignity. I’ve grown so much as a person and a cook by just being around her. It’s like living with a great piece of art. Witnessing greatness makes you a better person.”

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.

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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