Book Review: “The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South”

With “The Potlikker Papers,” John T. Edge has written a masterpiece – a marvelously kaleidoscopic book about the South, Southern food, and everything in between:  cooks, collards, meals, and manners; barbecue, bourbon, cotton, and cornbread; pitmasters and politicians and restaurants and civil rights.  Shrimp and grits, sweet potatoes, and squirrel stew.
In his foreword, Edge recalls the elegiac words of John Egerton:  Southern food now unlocks the rusty gates of race and class, age and sex. . . .  A place at the table is like a ringside seat at the historical and ongoing drama of life in the region.  Edge writes in the same key but with a brighter tone and an upbeat, syncopated rhythm.  “Instead of a myth-veiled cultural monolith, I see the South as an album of snapshots,” Edge writes.  “I hear the region like it’s a jukebox of 45s.”  
“The Potlikker Papers” begins in the 1950s.  Its first chapters focus on white-only lunch counters, black preachers at kitchen tables, and the bake sales that helped fund the Montgomery bus boycott.  The chapters on the Sixties feature Fannie Lou Hamer and Dorothy Height, whose “Pig Bank” project supplied Yorkshire gilts to poor black families – a bright spot amid the bleak poverty that shocked Robert F. Kennedy when he visited the Delta.
In the Seventies, Edge suggests, an unlikely convergence of forces set the stage for a regional renaissance.  Calvin Trillin, a New Yorker who had not forgotten Kansas City, taught Americans to love and respect their hometowns’ native dishes.  With “A Taste of Country Cooking,” Edna Lewis called attention to the skills and traditions of the South’s black cooks.  Jimmy Carter emboldened white Southerners “who had grudgingly accepted their role as [a] national embarrassment”; “grits were suddenly courant.” Craig Claiborne, who had grown up in Sunflower and Indianola, wrote magisterially on food for the New York Times and announced that the great American regional cuisines were all Southern (“Cajun, Creole, Soul, Tex-Mex, and barbecue”).  “The Foxfire Book” sold a hundred thousand copies in a month.  
The Eighties bring “Southern Living” Magazine and Federal Express.  (California chef Thomas Keller has observed “that Federal Express had probably done more than any other business to change what Americans ate in fine dining restaurants . . . [Via] overnight deliveries, food traveled to America.”)  Bill Neal recognizes “that while fried chicken and barbecue appealed to outlanders, Southern cookery was a vegetable-driven cuisine built on corns and green and okra.”  In 1992, John Currence opens City Grocery.  The names become more familiar: Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse, Paula Deen, Mashama Bailey, and Tyson Foods.
The chapters of this book are short; Edge knows to make his point and then stop. The writing is sharp, quick-witted but never flip. The learning that Edge wears so lightly is immense.  Few writers could look back to a Jerry Clower comedy routine about hand-squashed biscuit dough, recorded in 1973, and make it rhyme with a 2011 routine by Houston rapper Pedro Herrera about women who sell tamales in Walmart parking lots.
“To apprehend how Southerners have fed themselves,” Edge concludes, “gains us a necessary glimpse of remarkable lives, a kitchen-eye view of the revolutions and evolutions that have shaped the region.  Those stories reveal a people’s history, embedded in the crops we grow, the dishes we cook, and the tables where we gather.”  This history of the South is fascinating and provocative.

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Allen Boyer, Book Editor for HottyToddy.com, is a native of Oxford. He lives and writes on Staten Island. His book “Rocky Boyer’s War,” a WWII history drawing on his father’s diary, was published last month by the Naval Institute Press.
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