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Title details for The Potlikker Papers by John T. Edge - Available

The Potlikker Papers

A Food History of the Modern South

by John T. Edge
John T. Edge
Audiobook
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A people's history of Southern food that reveals how the region came to be at the forefront of American culinary culture and how issues of race have shaped Southern cuisine over the last six decades
THE POTLIKKER PAPERS tells the story of food and politics in the South over the last half century. Beginning with the pivotal role of cooks in the Civil Rights movement, noted authority John T. Edge narrates the South's journey from racist backwater to a hotbed of American immigration. In so doing, he traces how the food of the poorest Southerners has become the signature trend of modern American haute cuisine. This is a people's history of the modern South told through the lens of food. 
Food was a battleground in the Civil Rights movement. Access to food and ownership of culinary tradition was a central part of the long march to racial equality. THE POTLIKKER PAPERS begins in 1955 as black cooks and maids fed and supported the Montgomery Bus Boycott and it concludes in 2015 as a Newer South came to be, enriched by the arrival of immigrants from Lebanon to Vietnam to all points in between. 
Along the way, THE POTLIKKER PAPERS tracks many different evolutions of Southern identity —first in the 1970s, from the back-to-the-land movement that began in the Tennessee hills to the rise of fast and convenience foods modeled on Southern staples. Edge narrates the gentrification that gained traction in North Carolina and Louisiana restaurants of the 1980s and the artisanal renaissance that reconnected farmers and cooks in the 1990s and in the 00s. He profiles some of the most extraordinary and fascinating figures in Southern food, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Colonel Sanders, Edna Lewis, Paul Prudhomme, Craig Claiborne, Sean Brock, and many others. 
Like many great provincial dishes around the world, potlikker is a salvage food. During the antebellum era, masters ate the greens from the pot and set aside the left-over potlikker broth for their slaves, unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient-rich. After slavery, potlikker sustained the working poor, black and white. In the rapidly gentrifying South of today, potlikker has taken on new meanings as chefs have reclaimed the dish. 
Over the last two generations, wrenching changes have transformed the South. THE POTLIKKER PAPERS tells the story of that change—and reveals how Southern food has become a shared culinary language for the nation.
Music Copyright © 2012, Lee Bains III

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 16, 2017

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781524736200
      • File size: 291843 KB
      • Duration: 10:08:00

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      John T. Edge, an accomplished food writer focusing on the South, narrates his audiobook in a discernible drawl. A native Georgian, he directs the Southern Foodways Alliance housed at the University of Mississippi. His voice, literal and figurative, informs every page of this work. The discerning listener will embrace Edge's folksy style as he moves through 60 years of contemporary history, especially race relations, with his topics ranging widely--from the hippies of the '70s to the farm-to-table movement of this century. He tells stories of famous people like Colonel Sanders and Paula Deen as well as the unsung black cooks who created the region's famed barbecue. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from February 27, 2017
      James Beard Award–winning writer and food historian Edge evokes potlikker—the rich, savory juices left after collard greens are boiled—in this excellent history Southern foodways and the people who’ve traveled them. In the South, Edge notes, food and eating intertwine inextricably with politics and social history, and he deftly traces these connections from the civil rights movement to today’s Southern eclectic cultural cuisine. He introduces major figures such as Georgia Gilmore, who fed farmhand cooking to African-Americans in her house restaurant in the 1960s; the great civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who started Freedom Farm in Mississippi to encourage African-Americans to stay home and farm the land rather than migrating to Northern cities; and Stephen Gaskin, the leader of a Tennessee commune, who in many ways anticipated the organic and farm-to-table movements of today. Edge takes us from lunch counters (the “streamlined predecessors of fast food”) to the rise of fast food and the attempts of various chains (Kentucky Fried Chicken, Hardee’s, Bojangles) to preserve the comfort foods that many Southerners associated with growing up, such as biscuits and fried chicken. In this excellent culinary history, Edge also profiles some of the South’s greatest cooks—Edna Lewis, Craig Claiborne, Paula Deen—who represent the sometimes tortured relationship between the South and its foodways.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 26, 2017
      Edge, who serves as director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, projects a relaxed yet erudite style in rendering the audio edition of his latest title, an exploration of his region’s complex—sometimes contradictory—history with food in the decades since World War II. His gentle drawl and generally leisurely pacing comes across like a conversational lecture, remaining teacherlike enough to convey the sense of someone expounding on an academic discipline. In delivering the many passages of the book tied to issues of race and ethnicity, Edge takes great pains to give divergent figures distinct voices without resorting to stock characterizations. This is no small feat, particularly given the baggage that surrounds the relationship between white and black southerners in the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. His depiction of the brave activism of civil rights pioneer Fannie Lou Hamer, who focused on agricultural justice for African-Americans in addition to her crusade for voting rights, evokes a stirring sense of time and place. A Penguin Press hardcover.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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