Download PDF by John T. Edge: The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South

A people’s background that finds how Southerners formed American culinary id and the way race family impacted Southern nutrition tradition over six progressive decades

Like nice provincial dishes all over the world, potlikker is a salvage nutrition. in the course of the antebellum period, slave proprietors ate the vegetables from the pot and put aside the leftover potlikker broth for the enslaved, unaware that the broth, now not the vegetables, used to be nutrient wealthy. After slavery, potlikker sustained the operating negative, either black and white. within the South of this day, potlikker has taken on new meanings as cooks have reclaimed it. Potlikker is a fundamental Southern dish, and The Potlikker Papers is a people’s heritage of the fashionable South, informed via its foodstuff. starting with the pivotal function chefs and waiters performed within the civil rights flow, famous authority John T. area narrates the South’s fitful trip from a hive of racism to a hotbed of yankee immigration. He indicates why working-class Southern meals has develop into an important driving force of up to date American cuisine.
 
foodstuff entry used to be a battleground factor through the Nineteen Fifties and Nineteen Sixties. possession of culinary traditions has remained a significant rivalry at the lengthy march towards equality. The Potlikker Papers tracks pivotal moments in Southern historical past, from the back-to-the-land circulate of the Nineteen Seventies to the increase of quick and comfort meals modeled on rural staples. side narrates the gentrification that won traction within the eating places of the Eighties and the artisanal renaissance that started to reconnect farmers and chefs within the Nineties. He studies as a more recent South got here into concentration within the 2000s and 2010s, enriched via the coming of immigrants from Mexico to Vietnam and lots of issues in among. alongside the best way, side profiles notable figures in Southern nutrients, together with Fannie Lou Hamer, Colonel Sanders, Mahalia Jackson, Edna Lewis, Paul Prudhomme, Craig Claiborne, and Sean Brock. 
 
during the last 3 generations, wrenching adjustments have remodeled the South. The Potlikker Papers tells the tale of that dynamism—and finds how Southern nutrition has turn into a shared culinary language for the nation.