The deep delicious South

John T. Edge, America's bard of Southern food, talks about Kool-Aid pickles, eating with the KKK, and how okra might be the ultimate tool of integration.

By Adam Roberts

Read more: Racial Issues, South, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel

July 17, 2007 | With one hand on the wheel and one on his cellphone, John T. Edge is driving from Atlanta -- where 300 people turned out to hear him read the night before -- to an event in Columbia, S.C., where, he jokes, he expects an audience of eight. "But seriously," he says enthusiastically, "I think people really are waking up."

Edge is a man on a mission, a mission to preserve and celebrate two of America's greatest cultural gems: the food and the food lore of the South. "When I sit down at a table, I want to commune with cooks past and present," he writes in the introduction to his newly revised version of "Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover's Companion to the South." "I want to know their life stories. I want to understand their struggles."

For his efforts, Edge has been called "the Faulkner of Southern food," nominated for four James Beard awards and named a finalist for the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. In addition to his writing, Edge also directs the Southern Foodways Alliance, a society dedicated to preserving traditional Southern culinary culture. The Web site declares, "We set a common table where black and white, rich and poor -- all who gather -- may consider our history and our future in a spirit of reconciliation."

"Southern Belly" is the apotheosis of Edge's great passions for Southern food and Southern people. The book is filled with pictures, drawings, maps, stories, recipes and -- most important -- a carefully culled selection of Southern restaurants that serve what Edge calls "honest food." He is a spirited guide -- so spirited, in fact, that during the course of our phone conversation, he became so enraptured that he missed his exit.

But Edge will recover his route, surely, and perhaps along the way he'll do what he does best: uncover another unsung gastronomical treasure with a surprising, uniquely Southern story.

You write a lot about "honest food." How do you define it?

It's food that has a back story, that has a reason to be. It's food that doesn't come from a focus group. People who never used the word "concept" when opening the doors of their restaurant. It's food that is, for me, of a place, that means something to the people in the community, who patronize a restaurant or buy their ham from an artisan.

Do you feel like most people in the South are still eating honest food?

(Laughs) Well, look, a lot of fast food has come out of the South. Whether it's Burger King or Hardee's, for the past two generations -- or one generation, really -- Southerners have fallen hard for fast food. In the same way, a generation before, Southerners threw out their corn bread and reached for a loaf of Wonder Bread, because the store-bought food and the tissue-wrapped fast-food burger was exotic. Your ma didn't make it; somebody made it in a gleaming food factory, whether that factory was a bakery or a McDonald's. But the good news is that all across the country -- certainly not just the South -- people are reacquainting themselves with the importance of vernacular food.

But do you worry that the roots of Southern food have been lost in translation as corporations try to package it?

Absolutely. There's been a prostitution of Southern food by the likes of Cracker Barrel, and before them Po' Folks. They've commodified and prostituted it in a way that's salable in a very simplistic way to a mass audience, so that Southern food is all grease and grits. And it's not. I mean I love grease and grits, but it's not my daily diet. I truly believe that the culprit of much of the dietary problems of the South is not the traditional diet, but the siren song of KFC and McDonald's.

Many of the figures you write about are cultured and sophisticated or go against the popular stereotype of what it is to be Southern. How do you define a Southerner?

First, thank you for recognizing that in the book. I believe that the South has been a benighted and tortured place for a long time -- it still is benighted and tortured, but I love it -- and one of the few things that blacks, whites, Jews, Christians, whomever can hold high and say we created this together is our music and food. It's not stratified by way of class and not divided by way of race or religion: It's something in which Southerners can take pride. I want to write about a South that's evolving. Because I recognize that South myself; I recognize a multifaceted, multihued South that isn't stuck in 1865, codified when the Civil War ended. The evolution of the South didn't cease in 1965 during the Civil Rights movement: The culture evolved.

The South I see is a place on a map but it's also a system of beliefs, and when it comes to cooking it's a place that respects and honors simple cooking that's not simplistic. There's an honesty and a forthrightness to Southern food in this day of molecular cuisine, a lot of which I like, by the way. I had bacon cotton candy in South Carolina a few weeks ago.

Where did you have that?

It's a place called McCrady's. The chef is named Sean Brock. He's 28 and he's of the Ferran Adrià school, but he's a kid from the South. He's toying around with Southern food, but he respects what he's toying around with; he understands it at its core before he starts playing with it. He's great.

In "Southern Belly" you mention Kool-Aid pickles. I think you'd have to convince me that those taste good.

Here's the thing: I don't want to convince you that Kool-Aid pickles taste good. That's not the point. I wrote a piece for the [New York] Times maybe six weeks ago about Kool-Aid pickles and I tried to write in such a way that said, "Here I am, a 43-year-old white boy, looking at these kids in the Mississippi Delta who invented a new folk dish. They have invented a new folk food. And these kids love the taste of dill pickles doused in Kool-Aid. If I don't like it, what do they care?" I use my powers as a guide in this book, but I also throw in things that are curious and so far beyond my own experience that I don't want to pass judgment, I just want to put it out there.

What's your process? How do you find the places that you put in your book?

Some of it is the informal information network of Southern food obsessives. I keep tabs with folks in different places around the South and around the country. I also read other people's work. I have a good friend named Fred Sauceman who has written two books over the past two years on the foods of Appalachia, and his corner of Appalachia up in Tennessee. His books are far richer than my survey of 200-some odd places -- he can give you 200-some odd places in his neck of the woods.

It must be hard to whittle it down. How do you decide what to keep in?

In most places I try to find a story that is a larger Southern story, whether it's about race or gender or whatever the case may be. I added an entry in this edition about the Mayflower, a cafe in Jackson, Miss., that does a beautiful job with trout and red fish -- and I could write about that only, but it's also about the Greek experience in America, and especially in Jackson, Miss. I try to find a story that captures something I want to say about the South.

Next page: "If you write about Southern food without race, you're leaving out a good part of the story"