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INTERVIEWS
Ben Barker
Karen Barker
Leah Chase
Norma Jean Darden
John Egerton
Jessica B. Harris
Ronni Lundy
Louis & Marlene Osteen
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Frank & Pardis Stitt

SFA Founding Members
Ann Abadie
Kaye Adams
Jim Auchmutey
Marilou Awiakta
Ben Barker
Karen Barker
Ella Brennan
Ann Brewer
Karen Cathey
Leah Chase
Al Clayton
Mary Ann Clayton
Shirley Corriher
Norma Jean Darden
Crescent Dragonwagon
Nathalie Dupree
John T. Edge
John Egerton
Lolis Eric Elie
John Folse
Terry Ford
Psyche Williams-Forson
Damon Lee Fowler
Vertamae Grosvenor
Jessica B. Harris
Cynthia Hizer
Portia James
Martha Johnston
Sally Belk King
Sarah Labensky
Edna Lewis
Rudy Lombard
Ronni Lundy
Louis Osteen
Marlene Osteen
Timothy W. Patridge
Paul Prudhomme
Joe Randall
Marie Rudisill
Dori Sanders
Richard Schweid
Ned Shank
Kathy Starr
Frank Stitt
Pardis Stitt
Marion Sullivan
Van Sykes
John Martin Taylor
Toni Tipton-Martin
Jeanne Voltz
Charles Reagan Wilson

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Interviews by SFA Members and Friends

Project sponsored by Jim 'N Nick's Bar-B-Q

John Egerton

I think of [the SFA] as much more than just the food. The food is very important and--and it's essential. You--you couldn't do what--what we were trying to do without food being a part of it. I mean if you said I want--I want to get a group of Southerners to do X, Y, or Z, you'd still have to have food to lubricate the wheels. And so this was an organization with food as its--really as its primary focus but we wanted these larger social cultural ingredients to be a part of the mix. And I think--I think practically everybody who came and who lent their names to this--this idea, whether they bought into it as a--a philosophical kind of thing…[or not, is that] you will be doing a lot more than just eating and drinking. You will be learning and teaching people about the--the larger dimensions and the power of--of this food to--to achieve some really remarkable things. And so I think it has evolved to more than I even dreamed it would.

– John Egerton

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John Egerton is the author of Southern Food: At Home, On the Road, In History. He has lived—and eaten—all over the South, and currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee. His articles on food and a variety of other subjects have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine, and many other publications.

Egerton is one of our region’s greatest chroniclers. His book Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.

Working in the broad field of Southern letters, Egerton has defined a modern understanding of the import of foodways. He is the founding cornerstone of the Southern Foodways Alliance and was the recipient of the Jack Daniel’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002

Listen to this 3-minute audio clip of John Egerton explaining what Southern food means to him. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

Subject: John Egerton, SFA Founding Member
Date: January 24, 2005
Location: Mr. Egerton’s Home-Nashville, TN
Interviewer: Angie Mosier, SFA Board Member

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Angie Mosier: So John, how did you come to be involved in the Southern Foodways Alliance?

John Egerton: Well, I came basically from the two earlier attempts to start an organization of Southern people, interested in foodways. One in the late [nineteen]'80s that was spearheaded by Edna Lewis, and the second--that--after that one sort of gave out, around I'm guessing about 1990 or '91 or a little bit later than that. We--we tried for several years to keep it afloat and made some headway, but then there just was not enough--we didn't have the resources to keep it going and so it kind of petered out. And then a second effort was started by a handful of people, some from around Atlanta but--but the--the key person was--I'm blocking on his name--Terry Ford, Terry Ford from West Tennessee from a small town, Ripley, Tennessee. He's a newspaper editor, and he is passionate about food, and he was really the driving force in the second effort.

The first one was called the Society for the Preservation and Survival of Southern Food, I think. That was Edna's group. And the second one was called the Southern--I forget--.

The American Southern Food Institute?

The American Southern Food Institute, right. And a lot of the same people were involved in both efforts. I think Nathalie Dupree was involved in both; Terry Ford was; Edna Lewis was; there were differences of opinion and--and different ideas about what direction to go but there was and I think still is a--a kind of a core group of individuals who had Southern roots, who had a certain passion for the food—traditional food of this region--and I think who also saw beyond the food itself to the larger social and cultural issues that arise from involvement in Southern food. And all of this was a--was--all of these were attempts to keep alive some of the best things that we saw about Southern food. And I guess we'd all answer back, “What exactly is that?” We'd all answer that differently, but I think for me my answer is Southern food is--Southern food is--I'm straining to be profound here. Southern food is one of the few things that we have about us as Southerners that is to my view altogether positive. You can say it about our music, and you can say it about our literature, maybe. These are things the South is known for in a positive way. We've had a lot of great writers, and we've had a lot of great musicians.

Most everything else the South is known for is nudity, racism, poverty, violence. Now I know the church people and the family folks say I've left out those two important institutions. I don't mean to--to think of them in a lesser way but I'll just stick to my definition of Southern food is important because it is--it is one of the very few things about us that is positive--altogether positive and we can build on that to create a better life for everybody.

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[W]hen I ask other founders how they became involved in the Southern Foodways Alliance, several of them say, Well I got this call or letter from John Egerton…I do want to ask you if the majority of the folks that were involved in these other organizations ended up wanting to be a part of Southern Foodways Alliance, too?

Well I--I--that's a hard question for me to answer. Whether they wanted to--a good many of them did. Jeanne Voltz for example was--was closely involved in both of the previous efforts, and she was one of the founders of this one. Natalie was likewise; Terry Ford was; Edna's health had started to fail, and she was not as able to--to move about as freely as she had before. And by the time we cranked this up in 1999 she was not--not involved. She's one of our founders and her name is on the list, and she agreed to do that, but she was not at that point able to make--be a real presence.

And there--there were some people in--in both of the first two efforts who I think resisted the notion that (a) that they--they had failed--however you want to define failure. They didn't--they weren't willing to accept that and (b) they were--for whatever reasons--not really crazy about the idea of doing the one big thing differently that SFA did that the other two did not and that is to seek and--and find an institutional base from which to grow this organization. And I guess if I--if I had any major contribution to make to SFA, it was my realization that we had to have an institutional base, and I pushed for that. I--I saw that as--as essential and it needed to be upfront, and we all had to buy into that idea if we wanted it to go forward. And the ones who couldn't buy into it just didn't go on. But looking back now, from--from five years I would say I feel even more strongly now that it was necessary for us to do that and--and that the result has--has proved it was--it was the right way to go. All the numbers would tell you that SFA is--is thriving, where the previous two couldn't thrive because they just didn't have the resources.

Right. Did you go to the organization--organizational meeting in Birmingham in the summer of 1998? And if so what do you recall about it?

It was a great day. I did go; I was--I was very much involved in it, and we met at Southern Living--Southern Progress in the big boardroom. As I recall we had about 28--27 to 29 right in there of the 50 people present. Most of us had not met one another; I suppose I knew more of them personally than anybody else because I had worked really closely with John T. to put the list together of people to be invited to that, and we worked on that for a long time too--and we set a goal of 50 people and we tried to build up to that goal keeping in mind as--as we got people to agree that we needed for it to keep its--its shape and character as a representative body of Southerners. It needed to be representative in terms of gender and in terms of geography and in terms of race and economic class. And I would say we succeeded pretty well on at least three of those accounts--not so well maybe on the economic, but I think I learned from that--that if--if--if you have an ideal that--that you are trying to reach, you have to work really hard to stay the course to achieve that ideal. It's not sufficient to say "here's what we think and we think this is inclusive and all that--all that good stuff; therefore we just know the right people who will--who will show up for this." You just--you just can't do that because what you'll get will be maybe a bunch of replicas of yourself and that's--that's just not the right way to do it. You've got to have a real admixture cross section of people and in order to get it you have to work, you have to beg and plead and persuade and talk people into doing things. And if I were doing it over, I think I would--I would do it--do it the same way. I think I would just try to work a little bit harder to get them all there for that first meeting.

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What was your vision for Southern Foodways Alliance when it began? I think you already answered some of it, but would you like to add to that?

Yeah, well I think of it as much more than just the food. The food is very important and--and it's essential. You--you couldn't do what--what we were trying to do without food being a part of it. I mean if you said I want--I want to get a group of Southerners to do X, Y, or Z, you'd still have to have food to lubricate the wheels. And so this was an organization with food as its--really as its primary focus but we wanted these larger social cultural ingredients to be a part of the mix. And I think--I think practically everybody who came and who lent their names to this--this idea, whether they bought into it as a--a philosophical kind of thing, I--maybe--maybe that's expecting more than was actually the case, but--but certainly as it has evolved people have learned that when you go to SFA on a field trip or the--the symposium in the fall in Oxford, you will be doing a lot more than just eating and drinking. You will be learning and teaching people about the--the larger dimensions and the power of--of this food to--to achieve some really remarkable things. And so I think it has evolved to more than I even dreamed it would.

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[F]rom that [first] symposium [in 1998], are there any moments that stick out in your mind or any conversations that--that really stick out in your mind as particularly notable?

I remember going to the catfish on Friday…I remember standing in that backyard smelling the catfish and we had just--had just begun to eat hushpuppies. The air was just perfumed with--with the smell of all this activity going on. The weather was great; something good to sip on; very congenial company and I remember getting in a conversation with a woman who I learned subsequently in--during the conversation was from California and I said why--how did you happen to get over here? She said well I'm from Mississippi. And she learned about it somehow, maybe on the Internet, maybe on the University website--I have no idea; but she said it sounded like something I really wanted to do. She was a psychiatrist in California. She said it sounded like something I really wanted to do. And I said well it's a long way to come just for--for supper. And she said yeah; but it's so Southern and you know being Southern is kind of like being a Catholic. It's almost impossible to--to get away from it. You can't outgrow it or give it up or renounce it. It's just part of you. And there were lots of people there like that.

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Okay, the Southern Foodways Alliance focuses upon food as culture. What does that mean to you both intellectually and personally?

Well, personally it means to me that this is--this is how--this is my favorite way to socialize. This is my favorite way to maintain close relationships with people I love. Some people play golf, some people play Bridge, some people will go on trips together, some people get married and have families [Laughs]; you know I--I enjoy all that but this is--this is sort of like my avocation. It's more than a hobby; it's--it's a--it's restorative to me of energy and enthusiasm to--not only to do this mess with foods personally but to be around people who have a similar feeling for it. So that's the--that's the personal side. I think in a more--in a more impersonal definitive kind of way, Southern Food is--is--it works really well as a sort of lubricant for so many useful activities in--in society. You can build a conversation around food; you can build a trip around food; you can certainly build a great meal around food, and people love to talk about it and--and this opens up a way for us to become more--our--our--our own individual selves and self-conscious selves and our relationships to other people. I love the idea that people come to the feast bringing their own riches and--for us all to bring--to put those together and make--make a real banquet out of it. That's--that's really lovely.

Do you have ideas for the future of the organization--projects you'd like to see happen or topics that you'd like to see?

…I don't think we'll ever run out of themes to build topics around. I'd love to see a--a--a symposium on food and music, one on food and humor. I'd love to see one on seafood as a foodstuff; one on low-country, which I've always thought was kind of a charming area; there's--there's the Piedmont. I mean there's just lots of things you can do for themes, so I don't--I don't ever worry about that. But the larger question as I take it is what else can SFA do and I tend to have a more--my interests go beyond the food itself to--to the issues, the larger issues we've talked about like race for example and I think some of the--the next challenges that I had for us are things like addressing the issue of social class and its relationship to--to food in the South and how more often than not the food accelerates the divisions across economic climates. It just prices a lot of people out of participation, and I think that's an issue we need to talk about. Another one [is] how does this society, not just the South, but America, get people back to the simple straightforward ways in which they used to feed themselves and their children? Without really even noticing enough we have drifted so far from self-preservation and--and fallen into the hands of sort of a corporate mentality that--that wants to provide all the food we eat processed and pre-prepared and for the sake of convenience we are paying a huge price for it--it's too expensive; it is far more risky to our nutritional well-being than any of the stuff that are Southern staples and have been hammered down through the years for being too fat, too greasy, too sweet, too you know rich. We're dying from too over-carb(ed) and over-processed. And people are--are growing up to be adults without knowing how to boil water and it's just going to kill us. And so I would really love to see SFA address this big problem and be a part of the solution to the problem rather than as we are--the South has always been considered the problem itself. We--we could be a part of the solution.

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So can you tell us your place of birth and the date of your birth?

I was born in Atlanta at Crawford W. Long Hospital on June 14th 1935; next June 14th I'll be 70 years old.

And please tell us about the food of your childhood. Who prepared it; what were some typical meals? And describe the ceremony of some of those meals.

My mother was a great cook, and her mother was a great cook and there was--there was one black woman who sometimes cooked at my grandmother's house who was a great cook and those three women, they inculcated me with--with whatever it is that--that makes me care so much about the food. They--they were great cooks; I--I loved to eat their food and I--I aspired to--to learn to make it myself. And I would say they're the main--they're the main people. My mother--my mother had a pretty heavy load to carry. She had five children; she lost her first child at age eight to disease and by the time I came along as the fourth surviving--the fourth living child, the last one in this batch, and we had moved to a little town in Kentucky--Cadiz, Kentucky--which was her family home place, she had most of the--the burden of--of family raising on her shoulders because my father was a traveling salesman and he was--he was gone more than he was at home. So I just remember mainly growing up with--with my mother as the head of the household, and she put dinner on the table every night and you had to be there. There were no excuses unless you had a--an excused absence to be at somebody else’s house. If you--you know if you were on the premises you were at the table. And I liked almost everything she fixed, but the rule was you ate everything she fixed even if you didn’t like it. And I have--I have bootlegged many a piece of calves’ liver literally out in my shoe to get away from that. But most of the stuff I just loved and I--I still love today. And it was--it was basically a very simple and very recognizable…mashed potatoes, green beans, all kinds of vegetables, fried chicken, some kind of beef, pork in all its many forms. My grandfather used to kill hogs and had a wonderful smoke house with a sawdust floor and all of that you know is part of my sensory recollection. Eating it, smelling it, hearing it sizzling in the skillet, and of course tasting it; you just--you just--it was there.

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And when did you first cultivate an interest in food? And what or who was the catalyst?

It would have been my mom. And, you know, I can think of lots of dishes that she would make that--that I associate with certain situations or circumstances. And this will--this will probably puzzle you; when I was sick she fixed milk toast and I don't know if you've ever had milk toast. Most people think that's a horrible dish, but I bet you if you sat me down to a steaming bowl of milk toast right now I would--I would start salivating. She'd use pieces of toast put in warm milk and seasoned with a lot of salt and pepper and butter--that's it. And it's just something about it and it would make you want to get sick. And I liked it; I really liked it a lot. And she made fabulous desserts; she had a real sweet tooth all her life. She--she was always [making] something sweet. [Dog Barking] So she was my inspiration really.

How did you get your first job working or writing or dealing with food?

Hmm, I've actually never had one. I never would have written about food at all had it not been--I was--started freelancing. I had various jobs in PR and magazine journalism from the time I got out of college in about 1959 or '60 until I started freelancing in the early '70s. So I worked for 10 or 12 years--PR magazines, and--and I started freelancing, writing magazine pieces and I was--by that time also writing a book occasionally. I think I did my first book in '69 or '70 and somewhere along in that process I'd sort of eke out a living doing that…I got a fellowship out of the blue from the Lyndhurst Foundation in Chattanooga, which at that time gave three-year fellowships to a handful of people every year who were doing work that they thought was creative or promising or what not…I did have some ideas of things I wanted to pursue, and one of them was this kernel of an idea about food. And like most ideas I have about writing anything of any size, they tend to sort of first arrive in your conscious mind as a question you can't answer. In my case the question that I--that I wanted an answer to I couldn't find and it was if people who write cookbooks generally don't know much about history, and they don't put much history in the cookbooks--they just put recipes in cookbooks. People who write history don't value food, and they very seldom put much in--in their books of history about the food. And I was sitting there toiling with the idea that somewhere between those two--those two things, there was a huge area of material that nobody was really paying attention to because food interested me as an eater and a cook, and food interested me on a social cultural level as this thing that brought people together--as this thing that gets immortalized in brotherhood dinners and church suppers and all day singing and dinner on the ground and all those kinds of--of great cultural experiences that we have. And the South was especially right with all that. Festivals all over the South, you'd just go from one state to the next and there's some kind of a festival that's--that's food related just everywhere. And I thought this is rich; there's just all kinds of stuff here and nobody has ever done this and this is my chance….

…So I wrote Southern Food it came out in [nineteen] '87 and that's really where--that's how I got into food and--and how I've stayed in food really. That book is still in print in paperback and it--it--it did better for me than anything I ever wrote and it got me a reputation among the food people of out of all proportion to my actual knowledge of the subject. I'm--I'm not an expert o any of this--on--on the food history or the cooking, but I had enough professional experience that I could take the subject and grow with it and learn with it, and it became a journey for me as kind of a journey of discovery, and those are the kinds of books I like to write--that you don't know it when you start--exactly what it is but--but you--you kind of see the shape of it and you're headed to something that you think you can attain. And if you truly knew how--how little you knew and how unqualified you were to do that you would be totally intimidated and you'd never do it.

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How have you seen Southern food evolve over the course of your lifetime?

It's evolved from the home to the--to the public places of eating, from homes to restaurants and carry-out places. It's evolved from--it's evolved from survival diet for the poor and a super rich diet for the rich to a forgotten diet for both of those extremes, an abandoned diet--I don't want to say forgotten but--but abandoned. People have walked away from this food for all kinds of different motives; some out of shame, some out of fear, some out of boredom, and they have left behind the most tasty and utilitarian regional food in America. It's so much more diverse and rich and useful than the common fare of other regions; that may be a totally unfair comment for me to make but I--when I think of New England or the Southwest or the West Coast or the Midwest, I don't think of the great vast array of meats and vegetables and hot breads and drinks and salads and--that I think of as being a natural part of what we grew up with. This is the only--this is the mother-load right here in this region and we've--we've never fully appreciated nor embraced that--that fact. And--and now it's almost gotten away from us entirely and I think if we go back and rediscover it we'll find it not only is good for us but it will rescue a lot of those people who have abandoned it.

Much talk about Southern food is talk of continuity, of--and of tradition; in this age is such talk merely romantic or is it accurate?

I--I tend to believe it. It's--it is about continuity and tradition and to the extent that we decide that those things--that we don't need either one of those, then we drift farther away from it and what we put in place of it is--is not going to carry us far enough. It's--it's an entertainment; it's--it's a temporary kind of--of indulgence but this is the--stick to the ribs kind of food that--that you need for the long-haul. Now maybe people are going to come up technologically with ways to package food that will--that will--people will be able to survive on but it's not going to be fun to eat, and I'm--I'm just not looking forward to that. I'm going to be resisting that effort I think.

Please describe a meal that you would characterize as totemically Southern.

I remember back in the '70s, for some reason that I--that I no longer remember or can explain, the United Nations which had never, the General Assembly which had never met outside of New York City, decided to have dinner in Nashville. Now that just seems ridiculous on the face of it, but it--it was true and there was some--there was some explanation for that--that I'm sure made sense; but I--I can't remember what it was. What I remember is for weeks and weeks leading up to it, the town was all gaga. The United Nations is coming and we've got to fix dinner for them and what are we going to have? And they were talking about French this and European that and it just--it was just a hopeless--there was no way we could pretend to be Italian or French or Brazilian or--or Asian and--and have food that would--I mean they would have laughed at us. So finally common sense prevailed and they called in a woman named Phila Hach, H-a-c-h, Hach--Phila Hach had a restaurant in Clarksville which is about 40 miles up the road from here, a kind of a--a classic Southern upscale nice place to go, sort of a homesteading almost but traditional Southern food, the kind you would of as like Sunday dinner, you know. And they called her in and she's sort of a no-nonsense kind of person anyway. And they asked her what--what she thought they ought to have. And she said well I--I'll just jot you down a menu and she just started writing out all these things and suddenly all the people began to realize that this was--this was really the right direction for them to go. So they hired her to supervise dinner at the Centennial Park outdoors for the Representatives for the United Nations General Assembly. And I think let's see--I think I can read you the [story]--if I could find a copy of Southern Food…Yeah, there it is. This is my kitchen copy--June 14, 1987 of this Southern Food.

[Reading]The first and only time the United Nations General Assembly met outside of New York was on June 7, 1976 on the grounds of the Parthenon in Nashville. The Delegates and guests, some 1,200 people, were served a Southern style lunch, and prepared by Phila Hach, noted hostess and caterer from Clarksville. Here is Mrs. Hach's menu: mint julep frappe, orange juice frappe--that's--for people who don't know, it just means nice and cold--baked Tennessee country ham, fried catfish and hushpuppies, Southern fried chicken, sliced breasts of--breast of turkey with dill sauce, hickory smoked beef tenderloin with horseradish, green beans cooked with ham hocks, sweet boiled corn on the cob with chive butter, sour cream potato salad, raw vegetable slaw with spring onions, sliced peeled sun-ripened tomatoes, iced watermelon, honeydew and cantaloupe, cottage cheese with homemade mayonnaise, deviled eggs, bread and butter pickles, beaten biscuits, corn-like bread, yeast rolls, fudge pie, black walnut pie, pecan pie, chest pie, iced tea with mint, sweet milk, and butter milk. [End of recitation]

Now there's some things left out that should have been in there like mashed potatoes, but serving mashed potatoes to 1,200 people would be a little rough. I'd have maybe thrown in some speckled butter beans or limas or something like that or maybe some greens, a pot of greens either turnips or collard greens would have been nice, but you get my drift. That's a long list; you and I could make up another list almost that long and we'd still talking about the same food, recognizable food in the South. And I just don't think you could go to any other region and do that. And so people would say well you guys can't claim fried chicken for gosh sakes. But we can; you know, if you go back to the very earliest American cookbooks, like the Virginia Housewife in 1820 there's a recipe for fried chicken, and that was the first cookbook that was ever published in this country that was not simply a reprint of an English cookbook. It was really an American cookbook--1820--1828 or something like that. And there are those dishes, you know; fried chicken--if you fried chicken like Mary Randolph fried it in that time and you--you just get it right--that's still the right way to fry chicken. So I just think this is--this is what--this is why this is such a valuable resource, and we ought to be able to you know recognize that and--and see it for the asset that it truly is. That's where we're headed, but we're going to have to work at it. It's not just going to happen without our--our making a real effort.

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