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.

Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue

Edited by Lolis Eric Elie
U.N.C. Press, 296 pp.; $17.95 paperback

Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue, edited by Lolis Eric Elie, is the second volume in a series on the best of Southern food writing collected by the Southern Foodways Alliance. It is the first book to take a serious look at barbecue from a myriad of viewpoints, and the most complete barbecue anthology ever assembled. Even the most devoted barbecue fans will find many new and surprising insights in this collection of forty-three newspaper columns, magazine pieces, poems, and essays. Included are such diverse topics as the history of pigs in America; the Caribbean origins of barbecue; the role of black chefs in the history of Texas barbecue pits; and the best time of the month to make South Carolina barbecue hash.

In addition to pieces that celebrate barbecue’s place in the pantheon of American food, Cornbread Nation 2 also includes a host of selections on other Southern culinary traditions and foodways. Pat Conroy explores the natural pairing of funerals and food in “Love, Death, and Macaroni.” Calvin Trillin documents his yearning for Louisiana boudin in “Missing Links.” Molly O’Neill charts the rise of the Mississippi-made Viking range to trophy stove status in “The Viking Invasion.” And John Martin Taylor ponders the widespread (if less-than-universal) appeal of boiled peanuts in the South.

Lolis Eric Elie notes that, “Like cornbread, barbecue is a food that unifies the vast expanse of the American South, an ever larger portion of the American mainstream,” and offers Cornbread Nation 2 as “A State of the Culinary Union. A Snapshot. A reporting on how it is now.” Featuring contributions from many leading lights — as well as emerging voices—of Southern foodways, Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue is a book to be read, studied, and, most of all, savored.

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Lolis Eric Elie is a longtime columnist and food writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and author of Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country. A founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, Elie discovered many barbecue variations while traveling as road manager with the Wynton Marsalis Band from 1991-93.

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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