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Abstract
Southern food in the last ten years has become more than a regional food—it functions as lucrative brand and social movement. This article describes this transition using the methodology of performance studies, reading Southern food cookbooks as performative texts in order to trace the way that Southernness circulates both within the South and outside it. It then argues that this “new turn” in Southern cooking might be at the same time a nostalgic turn toward the past: a turn that underplays African-Americans’ labor’s role in creating and sustaining Southern food culture. How these erasures of the past butt up against New Southern food’s visions of the future is explored.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers at Food, Culture, and Society for their helpful feedback. Julie Burelle, Heather Ramey, Nadeen Kharputly and Sonia Fernandez also provided valuable feedback on earlier versions of this article for which she is extremely grateful. The author’s deepest thanks go to the chefs and cookbook authors of the New Southern food movement for their time, patience, enthusiasm, and work to make the South a more delicious and inclusive place to live.
Notes
1. Sadly, a full analysis of discourses of multiculturalism in the New Southern Food Movement is outside the scope of this paper. See Kelting Citation2016. I characterize Southern utopianism, in the figure of the multi-ethnic, immigrant South, as both alive and well and as eminently compatible with white neo-liberalism that would tokenize or subsume immigrant subcultures in the South. Thus, I argue that the insistence on futurity that recurs throughout these books is in conversation with larger discourses of multiculturalism in America. Thus this growing interest in “fusion” or “ethnic” food as Southern food can be subject to the same critiques as “multiculturalism” and “diversity” as concepts more generally—that they too often become ends in themselves, hollow signifiers, rather than mobilized in struggles for parity or justice. To take one example of such a critique, see Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.
2. See for example: Salter, “Pulled Pork: Why We’re Pigging out on US Barbecue Food”.“Berlin’s BBQ Scene Just Ate Its Own Tail”. Goulding, “Explore the Year’s Hottest Food Trend: Southern Food Rises”; Klein, The Southern Food Renaissance; Rodell, “Southern Cooking: Animal Style”; “Lardcore,” The Splendid Table; Ozersky, “Lardcore: Southern Food with Hard-Core Attitude”; Moskin, “Southern Farmers Vanquish the Clichés”; Lee and Lee, “Southern Exposure”.
3. See for example: Balestier, “The Northern Reach of Southern Cuisine: Eating Well in the City of Many Tongues”; Mischner, “The Southern Invasion of NYC”.
4. Age, then, becomes a critical factor of the New Southern Food Movement. These chefs and authors—and, it seems, many readers and writers who consume these meals and this media—have come of age after the Civil Rights Movement. The lack of emphasis on discourses of history, redress and alliance in the New Southern Food Movement seems symptomatic of larger national discourses of avoiding history in favor of post-racialism in the post-Civil Rights Era. See on multiculturalism, and Ahmed’s critique in particular, above.
5. I will use a conversation with Ted Lee as an example: “That’s the thing about telling the truth in the South, is like, you know, not everyone had an ur-soulful Southern soulful upbringing even though they consider themselves very Southern. We were on Paula’s show, she read the cue card wrong, so what she’d understood is that we were born in the South and then raised in New York, and we missed the foods—you know, our story is so crazy because it was like a yo-yo, we were born in New York, raised in the South, then we went to college in the Northeast, then we came back to the South, it’s like, you can’t do that! So what she read off the thing was we were born in the South, then we went North and then ‘they so missed everything’ and we said, ‘well actually we were born in the North—’ and she was just so broken-hearted, and it was all happening on television. It’s just too complicated for that.”
6. For a good white-paper introduction, “A Changing Southern Demography” from A Way Forward: Building a Globally Competitive South (University of North Carolina Press, Citation2011). From the popular press, “Salsa with Your Grits” in Thompson, The New Mind of the South, pp. 17–40.
7. Rather than turning to the actual historical work done by historical single-author cookbooks, reprinted community cookbooks, or archival materials for example. The relationship between what I call the New Southern Food Movement and what might be called the “dominant Southern culture industry” is, while fascinating, outside the scope of this paper. It does seem that much of the distance between the most visible mass-culture iterations of Southern food (Paula Deen, Cracker Barrel restaurants) and the New Southern Food Movement is intentional. Briefly, from the New York Times: “Many chefs who look at Southern food through this lens see Ms. Deen as neither an embarrassment nor an influence—in fact, they barely see her at all. ‘I don’t see her smoking ducks and hams, studying the preservation techniques that the ancestors used and that made Southern cooking what it is,’ said Todd Richards, the chef at the Shed in Glenwood, in Atlanta. ‘I don’t look to how she cooks. I look to the top 100 restaurants in the world.’” in Moskin, “Paula Deen’s Words Ripple Among Southern Chefs.”
8. It seems to me that recent cookbooks by African-American chefs and authors have not received the reception within the Southern Food Community, or the international popular press (cf. Brock’s New Yorker and Vogue profiles), nor the attention from major publishing houses (Clarkson Potter, Ten Speed, Workman), nor the external awards (IACP, Beard Foundation) of most of the chefs I discuss in this chapter. I am very excited to read Alice Randall and Caroline Randall Williams’ (Citation2015) Soul Food Love, as well as Nicole Taylor’s (Citation2015) Up South Cookbook – neither of which were in print when I submitted the manuscript for this article. I also considered Bryant Terry’s Soul Vegan Kitchen or Afro-Vegan and Eric Lolie’s Treme cookbook. I have decided to exclude Bryant Terry, as the focus of his work seems to be promoting veganism for those familiar with African diasporic cooking and African diasporic cooking for vegans. As he is not explicitly engaging ideologically with the concept of the South and its history and future, I see this work as separate from the New Southern Food Movement. I have decided to omit the Treme cookbook both because I give no other examples from New Orleans (being historically and culinarily distinct), and more importantly because the book is based on a show rather than authorial expertise. Overall, these two books lie outside the parameters of the New Southern Food Movement as I see it, which has a utopian pluralistic investment in multiculturalism but few strong black voices in print. I hope it is clear that I am pointing to this very problem within my article, not recreating it. Let’s use blurbs as a metric of how these books are positioned within cultural networks. Heritage has a blurb from (noted Alabama chef and cookbook author) Frank Stitt and (Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance) John T. Edge. Lee Brothers’ Southern Cookbook (Alabama/Atlanta chef and cookbook author) Scott Peacock, Frank Stitt, John T. Edge. Soul Vegan Kitchen: Alice Waters and (Bay Area blogger and cookbook author) Heidi Swanson. Soul Vegan Kitchen has situated itself in the Bay Area, rather than the US South.
9. Which raises the inevitable question, “what is Southern?” Here I take John Shelton Reed as my docent by looking mainly to those cookbooks that call themselves Southern in the title or prefatory material. “Given all these different Souths, obviously, we can’t just draw a line on a map and call it the South’s border. As Southerners are fond of saying: it depends. But, what the hell, if I had to do it, my candidate would be the line [in Figure 24] that shows where ‘Southern’ entries begin to be found in serious numbers in urban telephone directories (the one at 35 percent).” In Reed, My Tears Spoiled My Aim: And Other Reflections on Southern Culture, p. 27.
10. Take, for example, the headquarters locations of businesses selected as representative of American agribusiness in the documentary Food, Inc: Monsanto: Creve Coeur, MO; Tyson Foods: Springdale, AR; Smithfield Foods: Smithfield, VA.
11. The eight lowest-income states, according to the 2012 US census, are almost all Southern (formerly Confederate) states. It is no accident that a map of the United States by income affords yet another way to map the geographic borders of the US South; on such a map, the Deep South falls first into sharp relief. From lowest to highest median household income: Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, New Mexico, Alabama. Data Integration Division, US Census Bureau, “Income.” See again My Tears Spoiled My Aim, in which John Shelton Reed points to the divide between the South’s historical and ongoing poverty and Southern discourses of luxury living: “almost any problem of poor people, or of poor states, can still be used to map the South … the persistence of the cultural South doesn’t require that Southerners stay poor and rural. Indeed, poor folks can’t afford some of its trappings: bass boats and four-wheel-drive vehicles, for instance” (12, 26). I argue that one might profitably substitute “30 dollar a pound country ham” for “four wheel drive vehicles.”
12. Thompson, The New Mind of the South.
13. Johnson, Sweet Tea: Gay Black Men of the South, 1.
14. Ansari, Dangerously Delicious. Ansari is, as both a comedian and Indian-American (Indian-South-Carolinian) awarded a certain ambivalent intimacy with and distance from Southern culture that enables this critique. See above for the importance of the history of American immigration to the cultural vision of the New South to which the New Southern Food Movement gestures.
15. Katzenberg vs. McClung (1964).
16. Williams-forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power. See also Witt, Black Hunger: Soul Food and America.
17. Johnson, Sweet Tea, 1.
18. Acheson, A New Turn in the South: Southern Flavors Reinvented for Your Kitchen. I should note that Acheson is winking at V.S. Naipul’s 1989 A Turn in the South, in which the use of the word “turn” describes the travel writer’s final journey as a gentle rounding through America’s Southern states. Acheson’s “new turn,” on the other hand, is a utopian and ideological one—a reinvention of Southern food. Both Naipul and Acheson’s “turns” share a connotation that one is unable or unwilling to look back at what lies behind this turn, that the past is in some fundamental sense, to use Naipul’s term, “unmentionable.”
19. The transformation of poverty foods into gourmet dishes is, as I say, a much larger national trend. The proliferation of pork belly and organ meat on gourmet menus might show a wider interest not only in sustainability, but in a kind of “cross-class culinary tourism.” (For example: pig head for two with boudin noir sauce, Craigie on Main, Cambridge, MA). So too does a resurgence of interest in junk or snack food point demonstrate how potent the lowbrow can be within elite culinary circles (Broccoli and Cheetos, Park Avenue Autumn, New York). While these appropriations of the lower class within fine dining restaurants can account for some of the work done by the New Southern Food Movement, I argue that South’s historical and ongoing status as the nation’s poorest region—perhaps even a region defined by class—gives the repackaging of poverty foods into luxury or elite foods in the New Southern Food Movement a unique charge.
20. Acheson, A New Turn in the South, 163, 223.
21. Knipple and Knipple, The World in a Skillet: A Food Lover’s Tour of the New American South.
22. Ferris, Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South.
23. Bilger, “True Grits.”
24. “Fresh Prince: Charleston Chef Sean Brock Reinvents Southern Cooking.”
25. It bears clear repeating: labor that has been historically performed by African Americans and women. The demographics of many Southern food industries (chicken processing, for example) confirms that this labor is still unsafe and undervalued, performed by people of color, many of whom are undocumented workers.
26. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 2.
27. Silber, Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1901, 3.
28. Ibid.
29. Here again John Shelton Reed’s concept of the so-called S-score, charting the self-definition of Southern businesses as “Southern” in Yellow Page listings, is instructive. Indeed, a follow-up study to Reed’s so-called S-score shows that Southern-named businesses in the phone books have remained relatively stable since 1970, concluding that “Our data, therefore, do not reveal a decline of regional identity per se, as much as a decline of identification with the Old South.” In Cooper and Gibbs Knotts, “Declining Dixie: Regional Identification in the Modern American South.” A brief statistical analysis of publishing data shows that an analysis of cookbooks not only supports but exceeds Cooper and Knotts’ conclusions on the strength of the “New Southern” brand: it appears that regional affiliation of cookbooks is in fact on the rise! To wit, 1950 to 1960, 0.8% of American cookbooks used the word “Southern” in the title. 1970–1980: 1%. 1980–1990: 1.5%. 1990–2000: 2%. 2000–2010: 3%. 2010–2015: 7.5%. Thanks to super-librarian Steve Runge for helping to recreate Reed’s experiment with Wordcat data (using LOC subject headings cooking, American with and without Southern in the title).
30. Acheson, A New Turn in the South, 13.
31. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, 3.
32. Ibid.
33. McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South, 208–209.
34. Lee, Smoke and Pickles: Recipes and Stories from a New Southern Kitchen, vii.
35. Foose, A Southerly Course: Recipes and Stories from Close to Home, 9.
36. Indeed, the resourceful use of food to create surrogative communities in the face of loss is perhaps the hallmark of Great Migration foodways. See Poe, “The Origins of Soul Food in Black Urban Identity: Chicago, 1915–1947.” To take two primary examples, Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church’s cookbook first describes cook Beatrice Talley serving unrisen yeast dough as communion wafers in Macon, North Carolina, then allowing this dough to rise into “fluffy and delicious” rolls served at fellowship dinners in New York. In Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine, the Darden sisters use their own family as a case study to show the way in which food creates continuity despite trauma, upheaval, and geographic movement. See Abyssinian Baptist Church, Food for the Soul: Recipes and Stories from the Congregation of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church and Darden and Darden, Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences of a Family. That these examples have been relatively overlooked by the culinary establishment, whereas the cookbooks of the New Southern Food Movement are published with major presses, win awards, and feature professional photographers and food stylists should not imply that the social and cultural work done by cooking and eating in the Great Migration is any less valuable. Rather, it is the tacit model for the performative work done by the cookbook authors of the New Southern Food Movement that I examine.
37. Martha Hall Foose, Oral history interview, phone, July 18, 2013.
38. McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie, 7.
39. That is, looking outside a “lenticular” lens allows one to see not only histories of cross-racial praxis between whites and African Americans, and not only large long-standing ethnic communities like the Lebanese community in the Mississippi Delta, but the transfer of culinary knowledge that can occur through travel, close friendship, adoption, or marriage. As I argue here, these culinary alliances have lasting social consequences and meaningfully contribute to a more diverse and equitable South. Nonetheless, I stress that these acts of looking closely beyond a lenticular frame are never quite free of a nostalgic imaginary of rural, white Southern life. Compare the two recipes for wontons in Foose’s A Southerly Course. One, a soup with dumplings, is in honor of her son’s friendship with a Chinese American family who live in the grocery they run in Greenwood, MS. The other is a recipe for a crab Rangoon, replicating the “exotic fare” offered at the Chinese buffet in Greenwood so that the Fooses need not make the trip into town. The coexistence of the soup, a sensitive and creative melding of Southern and Chinese ingredients in honor of a resourceful Chinese American family and the Rangoon, a copy of a copy, a constructed fantasy of Americanized Chineseness created in 1950s San Francisco—this mingling of looking forward and backward is exactly the contradictory ethos of Southern cooking and culture more broadly.
40. Sheri Castle, Oral history interview, phone, November 13, 2013.
41. Hess and Weir, Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection.
42. Ibid., 102.
43. Ibid., 94.
44. Ibid., 57.
45. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, 51.
46. Hess and Weir, Carolina Rice Kitchen, 102.
47. Lee and Matt Lee, The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern: Knockout Dishes with Down-Home Flavor, 2009 (Kindle edition).
48. Ibid.
49. Hess and Weir, Carolina Rice Kitchen
50. Lee and Lee, The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern.
51. Ibid.
52. Both in Simple Fresh Southern (as I quote here) and in personal interviews, Ted Lee points to the Southern Foodways Alliance as the site of this “close-looking,” which he calls “the painstaking work of documenting the history and breadth of southern foodways.” I also laud the work done by the Southern Foodways Alliance. Yet I argue that cookbooks can do, and sometimes do, this same work. When cookbooks also “document the history and breadth of southern foodways,” authors are able to make visceral the gaps in a nostalgic, white characterization of Southern food in a format that is both popularly accessible and globally circulated.
53. Edward Lee, Interview with Edward Lee, personal communication, May 28, 2013.
54. Lee and Lee, The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-Be Southerners, 2006.
55. Perelman, “Sweet Potato Buttermilk Pie.”
56. Lewis, “What Is Southern?”
57. I am alluding again to Joseph Roach’s work in Cities of the Dead. While Roach writes about explicit performances of historical memory and blackness in the American South (New Orleans), I argue that performances of Southern culture through cookbook writing that erase blackness from Southern culture both engage in a similar work (surrogation) and have similar stakes for historiography of the American South.
58. Roach, Cities of the Dead, 36.
59. In the sense that a physical proximity to one’s meat (e.g. the PETA “Meet Your Meat” videos) and the actual act of killing an animal (e.g. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivores Dilemma) creates a more sustainable, ethical food culture.
60. Foose, A Southerly Course, 158.
61. Ibid, 172.
62. Cf. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image.
63. Ted Lee, in particular, seems to love the word “hip” and even uses “hipster” as a compliment, rather than a pejorative term to describe white, well-heeled urbanites. Here, the language of the New South unwittingly bears the traces of larger historical appropriations. First, it is impossible to decouple the use of “hip” from the linguistic appropriation of the term “hipster” from the black vernacular born from jazz culture. The historical shifts in the use of this term only ghost much larger trends of cultural appropriation from black musical communities into the white mainstream.
64. Lee and Lee, The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern, 56.
65. Ted Lee, Oral history interview, August 8, 2013.
66. Lee, Interview with Edward Lee.
67. Muhlke, “My Old Kentucky Ham.”
68. Lee, Interview with Edward Lee.
69. Acheson, A New Turn in the South: Southern Flavors Reinvented for Your Kitchen.
70. As an effective counter-example, I would offer the Knipples’ World in a Skillet, which begins with a historical preface historicizing multiculturalism in the south. The introduction, entitled “Keepers of the Flame,” features an interview with the Poarch Creek Tribal Historical Preservation officer and a recipe for Three Sisters Soup, the conjunction of which stresses both the history of Native American foodways in the South and the ongoing vitality of these traditions. Poppy Tooker explicitly addresses the African diaspora, offering a recipe for hoecakes, a foodway inextricable from the exigencies of slave life (a lack of cookware) and poverty more generally.
71. Warnes, “Edgeland Terroir,” 346.
72. Ibid., 347; Romine, The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction; John Egerton, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History.
73. Global Contexts, Local Literatures: The New Southern Studies.
74. Griffin and McFarland, “‘In My Heart, I’m an American’: Regional Attitudes and American Identity.”
75. Roach Cities of the Dead, 26.
76. Roach, Cities of the Dead.
77. Faulkner, Light in August.