It was 1838, and the young Englishman Philip Henry Gosse couldn’t sleep. He’d arrived in Alabama two months before, and was working as a schoolteacher for 21 young boys. An amateur naturalist, Gosse catalogued every living thing he saw: hawk moths and humble bees, turkey buzzards and crayfish, woodpeckers and whippoorwills. He also described all the things he ate. He wrote home about the watermelons that tasted like pink snow; hominy so good he could have it with every meal; figs that ripened mysteriously into a powdery blue skin. His favorite culinary discovery was a square dough dish, a little difficult to describe. “You see,” he wrote, “they are square thin cakes, like pancakes, divided on both sides into square cells by intersecting ridges.” The cells formed small pockets to capture sugar or jam. He advised eating “woofles” with butter.
Gosse’s Letters from Alabama was published two decades later, making him one of the first sojourners in the South to write about the region’s food. Rapturous accounts of southern cuisine have been made over and over again since then by strangers from all sorts of strange lands, and their outsider reports have appeared alongside resident voices from below the Mason-Dixon line. The latest of these homespun testimonials is The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South from John T. Edge, who was born in Clinton, Georgia, and lives now in Oxford, Mississippi. Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, Edge grew up lunching at Mary Mac’s tearoom in Atlanta; he cured his undergraduate hangovers at a greasy spoon in Athens run by a member of the Ku Klux Klan Ladies Auxiliary.
When Edge made it to graduate school, he wrote his thesis on the forgotten potlikker and cornpone debate. In 1931, an editor of the Atlanta Constitution instigated a regional crisis when he wrote that Louisiana Governor Huey Long had dunked his cornbread into potlikker, the water left over from boiled collard greens. That editor, Julian Harris, had won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Klan, but not even he was prepared for what came next: Six hundred letters poured into the newsroom arguing over whether it was better to crumble or dunk into potlikker. Centuries after Christians had stopped arguing about intinction, Southerners had their own sacramental crisis over cornbread and collards.
Edge is an ecumenist when it comes to such culinary crises, and that’s what makes him so wonderful a surveyor of the last 50 years of Southern history. The Potlikker Papers goes looking for the story of the South in its kitchens, fields, gardens, and groceries. Edge profiles the black cooks and maids who helped end Jim Crow, orders at the drive-thrus that dot America’s highways, follows the Delta mafia that controlled the restaurant pages of The New York Times, and lands in the Nuevo Sud of today. Decade by decade, Edge shows that we aren’t just what we eat; we are where that food was grown, how it was cooked, who cooked it, and who all gets to eat it with us.