Cornbread Nation 4

A colorful celebration of Southern foods, Southern cooking, and the people and traditions behind them gathers the best of food writing from magazines, newspapers, books, and journals, with contributions by Rick Bragg, Molly O'Neill, Edna Lewis, Jim Ferguson, Amy Evans, Pat Conroy, Candice Dyer, and many others. Original.

How does Southern food look from the outside? The form is caught in constantly dueling stereotypes: It's so often imagined as either the touchingly down-home feast or the heartstopping health scourge of a nation. But as any Southern transplant will tell you once they've spent time in the region, Southerners share their lives in food, with a complex mix of stories of belonging and not belonging and of traditions that form identities of many kinds. Cornbread Nation 7, edited by Francis Lam, brings together the best Southern food writing from recent years, including well-known food writers such as Sara Roahen and Brett Anderson, a couple of classic writers such as Langston Hughes, and some newcomers. The collection, divided into five sections (“Come In and Stay Awhile,” “Provisions and Providers,” “Five Ways of Looking at Southern Food,” “The South, Stepping Out,” and “Southerners Going Home”), tells the stories both of Southerners as they move through the world and of those who ended up in the South. It explores from where and from whom food comes, and it looks at what food means to culture and how it relates to home.

A colorful celebration of Southern foods, Southern cooking and the people and traditions behind them gathers the best of food writing from magazines, newspapers, books and journals, with contributions by Molly O'Neill, Calvin Trillin, Michael Pollan, Kim Severson and others. Original.

Southern barbecue and barbecue traditions are the primary focus of Cornbread Nation 2, our second collection of the best of Southern food writing. "Barbecue is the closest thing we have in the United States to Europe's wines or cheeses; drive a hundred miles and the barbecue changes," writes John Shelton Reed. Indeed, no other dish is served a dozen different ways just between Memphis and Birmingham. In tribute to what Vince Staten calls "the slowest of the slow foods," contributors discuss the politics, sociology, and virtual religion of barbecue in the South, where communities are defined by what wood they burn, what sauce they make, and what they serve with barbecue. Jim Auchmutey links barbecue to the success of certain Southern politicians; Marcie Cohen Ferris looks at kosher brisket; and Robb Walsh investigates why black cooks have been omitted from the accepted histories of Texas barbecue, despite their seminal role in its development. Beyond the barbecue pit, John Martin Taylor sings the virtues of boiled peanuts, Calvin Trillin savors Cajun boudin, and Eddie Dean revisits his days driving an ice cream truck deep in the Appalachian Mountains. From barbecue to scuppernongs to popsicles, the forty-three newspaper columns, magazine pieces, poems, and essays collected here confirm that a bounty of good writing exists when it comes to good eating, Southern style.

Moonshine is corn whiskey, traditionally made in improvised stills throughout the Appalachian South. While quality varied from one producer to another, the whiskey had one thing in common: It was illegal because the distiller refused to pay taxes to the US government. Many moonshiners were descendants of Scots-Irish immigrants who had fought in the original Whiskey Rebellion in the early 1790s. They brought their knowledge of distilling with them to America along with a profound sense of independence and a refusal to submit to government authority. Today many Southern states have relaxed their laws and now allow the legal production of moonshine—provided that taxes are paid. Yet many modern moonshiners retain deep links to their bootlegging heritage. Moonshine Nation is the story of moonshine’s history and origins alongside profiles of modern moonshiners—and a collection of drink recipes from each.

This book explores how an eclectic selection of narratives and images of the American South have been developed and disseminated. The contributors emphasize how ideas of “the South” have real social, political, and economic ramifications, and that they register at various local, regional, national, and transnational scales.

A critical meditation of the iconic 24-7 roadside chain and its place in the southern imaginary Waffle House has long been touted as an icon of the American South. The restaurant’s consistent foregrounding as a resonant symbol of regional character proves relevant for understanding much about the people, events, and foodways shaping the sociopolitical contours of today’s Bible Belt. Whether approached as a comedic punchline on the Internet, television, and other popular media or elevated as a genuine touchstone of messy American modernity, Waffle House, its employees, and everyday clientele do much to transcend such one-dimensional characterizations, earning distinction in ways that regularly go unsung. Smothered and Covered: Waffle House and the Southern Imaginary is the first book to socioculturally assess the chain within the field of contemporary food studies. In this groundbreaking work, Ty Matejowsky argues that Waffle House’s often beleaguered public persona is informed by various complexities and contradictions. Critically unpacking the iconic eatery from a less reductive perspective offers readers a more realistic and nuanced portrait of Waffle House, shedding light on how it both reflects and influences a prevailing southern imaginary—an amorphous and sometimes conflicting collection of images, ideas, attitudes, practices, linguistic accents, histories, and fantasies that frames understandings about a vibrant if also paradoxical geographic region. Matejowsky discusses Waffle House’s roots in established southern foodways and traces the chain’s development from a lunch-counter restaurant that emerged across the South. He also considers Waffle House’s place in American and southern popular culture, highlighting its myriad depictions in music, television, film, fiction, stand-up comedy, and sports. Altogether, Matejowsky deftly and persuasively demonstrates how Waffle House serves as a microcosm of today’s South with all the accolades and criticisms this distinction entails.