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.

Scholars Ponder the Meaning of Grits

By Marialisa Calta
Wall Street Journal
November 28, 2000

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Oxford, MS -- Cornbread, at least as far as Southerners are concerned, has history. It has cachet. And like a slab of country ham in a skillet of redeye gravy, cornbread is awash in subtext. So are grits, biscuits, fried chicken, greens and barbecue, to mention just a few of the foods that came under scrutiny at the third annual Southern Foodways Symposium held here at the University of Mississippi recently.

It was subtext—specifically, the relationship of Southern food to Southern culture—that was on the table when 90 historians, scholars, writers, food producers, chefs, anthropologists, geographers and enthusiastic eaters gathered to deconstruct dinner. Southern dinner. “My ulterior motive was to use food as an entrée—pun intended—to larger issues: said John T. Edge, the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, which sponsors the symposium and is, in turn, sponsored by the university’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. “Those are big issues, and my intent is to use food as a way to explore them.”

It is a strategy that seems to be working. Is soul food a white construct? (Before the 1960s, “we just called it dinner,” said Jessica B. Harris, a college professor who has written extensively on the food of the African diaspora.) Just how much did Africans contribute to southern cooking? Did white hillbillies learn from poor blacks?

“I heard more open discussion about race in one weekend than I eve did growing up here,” said Jimmy Kennedy, a Mississippi-born chef and Ole Miss graduate now cooking in Vermont.

“I like this organization because we talk about everything,” said Leah Chase, of Dooky Chase’s restaurant in New Orleans. Ms. Chase, a founding member of the alliance and a recipient of the group’s Lifetime Achievement Award, added: “We talk about race, we talk about culture. We are not afraid to talk.”

Nobody seemed afraid to eat either. A whole lot of catfish, gumbo and barbecue was devoured, and a fair amount of bourbon imbibed. The conference resembled Sunday dinner with a large and fractious Southern family at which nobody can agree on much except that Aunt Hazel’s biscuits can’t be beat.

Not that anyone at the conference actually agreed on biscuits, except to concur that Northerners—those poor souls cursed with hard flour and a lack of appreciation for lard—can’t really make decent ones. Louis Osteen, a chef from Charleston, S.C., took such umbrage at geographer Richard Pillsbury’s assertion that good biscuits were not to be found in Charleston that he decided to bake up scores of biscuits, which he proudly served, with sorghum butter, to the gathered crowd.

The biscuit brouhaha was mild, however, compared to last year’s hostilities, which were sparked by one lecturer’s assertion that British cooking was the backbone of Southern cuisine—fighting words to those championing the contributions of Africans. Debate at the 1999 conference go so heated that one person in attendance was quoted as saying, “I though somebody was going to pull out a pistol.” This year, a more civilized tone reigned, and –despite a verbal wrangle over the contribution of African-American women to the cooking of poor Southern whites—reminiscence was the order of the day, so much so that the formidable Dr. Harris opined, in her best academic manner, that “this organization is fine-tuning the discursive personal anecdote as a rhetorical trope.”

Indeed, the discursive personal anecdote was everywhere. Around the long tables set out under a tent on the university campus, in the hallways, even in the ladies’ room, conferencegoers waxed nostalgic about creasy greens, pulley bones, barbecue, gumbo, pimento cheese. But many of these foods inspired mini-controversies: Is vinegar-based barbecue sauce superior to tomato-based? Must gumbo contain okra? Is Hellmann’s a suitable substitute for the more traditional Miracle Whip in pimento cheese? There was an ongoing, three-day skirmish over whether salting water in which one plans to cook black-eyed peas will make to peas tough. “We are going to resolve this issue with a cook-off, probably at my house, said Natalie Dupree, a cookbook author and TV food personality from Social Circle, Ga.

There was shock expressed that some of those in attendance—bona fide Southerners among them—admitted to putting sugar in their cornbread. “If Gad had meant for there to be sugar in cornbread, He would have called it cake,” said cookbook author Ronni Lundy.

Into this maelstrom trotted Peter McKee, a lawyer and barbecue enthusiast from Seattle. Born and raised in California (“northern California,” he noted) and educated in the Northeast,

Mr. McKee admitted to utter ignorance of Southern food. “I didn’t know there were issues!” cried the bespectacled 48-year-old as he begun a presentation entitled “It’s the Cue: The Life-Altering Impact of Southern Food on One Unsuspecting Yankee.”
Mr. McKee, who first encountered “cue” (Barbecue) at the Fresh Air Barbecue restaurant outside Jackson, Ga., while serving as a VISTA volunteer in the 1970s, has for nearly 20 years hosted the “Jackson Fresh-Air Barbecue Cook-Off and Feed,” an informal contest for his friends and neighbors, in his suburban backyard. His slide show depicted white people huddled around Weber grills.

Winning recipes at the Northern/Southern event have included barbecued hot dogs. Needless to say, he puts sugar in his cornbread. But anyone expecting a conflagration over Mr. McKee’s unschooled discourse was disappointed. The crowd seemed delighted with his naïve enthusiasm (along with his banjo-playing and song about Moon Pies and pork rinds, which he composed himself.) Even Dr. Harris approved. “There’s room for everyone at the table,” she said.

“Barbecue inspires passion,” said Lolis Eric Elie, a newspaper columnist from New Orleans and the author of “Smokestack Lightning,” a book on barbecue. “We’ve seen it here today.”

Yet Mr. Elie insists on a certain rigor in Southern cooking, and a respect for the history, ingredients and techniques of what he calls “the most vibrant regional cuisine in the country.” Quoting literary, culture and music critic Albert Murray (“If you’re going to sing the blues, you have to learn to mispronounce the words correctly”), Mr. Elie said Southern food must be taken seriously by anyone aspiring to be a “truly American cook.”

So it went, the layering of the serious and the amusing, the scholarly and the personal—a veritable casserole of facts, stories and opinion. Humorist Roy Blount Jr. offered poems inspired by the foods of his native south, poems that included couplets like “Next to Mama and Daddy and Gram/We all love the family ham” and rhymes like “True grits/More grits/Fish, grits and collards./Life is good where grits are swallered.” After which, the group polished off huge amount of shrimp and pecan-crusted lamb, cooked by Neal Langerman, a chef from Washington, D.C. Everyone agreed it was a delicious meal, even though it was not, strictly speaking, traditional.

After all, there’s subtext, and then there’s lunch.

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