The Potlikker Papers.

John T. Edge is the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute at the University of Mississippi that is dedicated to the study and exploration of southern American culinary traditions, a valuable resource that, among other things, works to keep knowledge of the region’s cuisine from dying out in our era of homogenization and processed food. That background gave me a high expectation for his book The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South, but it’s not the book I thought I was getting. It may deliver on the promise of its subtitle, but there’s so much emphasis here on the modern south that the prehistory of it, the hundred-plus years before the civil rights movement that inform so much of southern cuisine even today, gets lost in the shuffle.

Southern cuisine itself is more of a catch-all term than a specific style of cooking – there are multiple regional cuisines from the American south, including two, Creole and Cajun, distinct ones just within the state of Louisiana. White and black southerners bring their own traditions, although many foods associated with white or all southerners likely originated as African-American foods. The culinary appropriations, the origins of what we now consider traditional or classical southern cuisine, the subtitutions out of need that became standard … these are the stories I expected to read and want to hear as someone who likes to eat and cook many dishes that at least have some basis in the rich, vegetable-heavy dishes of the south.

That’s not this book, at least; Edge starts in the 1950s and spends nearly all of the book discussing the evolution of southern cuisine from the 1970s forward, bouncing around celebrity chefs (Emeril gets a lot of page time, as does the late Paul Prudhomme) and artisanal farmers (Glenn Roberts, founder of Anson Mills, is a well-deserved star of that part of the book), but talking less about history and more about modern figures. The best part of The Potlikker Papers by far is the first section, Freedom Struggles (1950s-1970s), which talks about southern food in the context of the civil rights movement – the Montgomery bus boycott, the lunch-counter sit-ins, the importance of individual black chefs like Georgia Gilmore, the way white politicians borrowed or fabricated narratives to suit their policy aims, and more. This is a complete story, probably enough to fill an entire volume – how food enabled African-Americans to fight for equal rights and establish economic independence in a white-dominated society that sought to subjugate them by every available method.

After that section, however, Edge’s narrative falls apart and the book devolves into a series of unconnected profiles and vignettes that were neither engaging nor particularly illustrative of anything about modern southern cooking. A chapter on barbecue, for example, that focuses primarily on North Carolina doesn’t tell me much about Q as a cuisine or the region itself (which has a complicated and recently damaging history with hog farming). The final chapter, on the rising influence of Latin American immigrants and chefs on southern cooking, feels tacked on and cursory. If southern cuisine is one big tradition, Edge doesn’t manage to unify it here, and if it’s merely the phylum for a host of individual orders and families, he doesn’t provide the connective thread beyond mere geography. I had high hopes for The Potlikker Papers, but after the first section on the civil rights era, it told me nothing I didn’t already know.

Next up: I’m about 2/3 through Arthur C. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise.